Russian President Vladimir
Putin is “weaponizing” global food supplies by deliberately
targeting farming infrastructure in Ukraine, Western officials have said.
Western officials have voiced
fears that the Kremlin is embarking on a “deliberate policy” of
dismantling the infrastructure that is needed to produce food and preventing
cereals from being exported out of Ukraine, which is known as the
“breadbasket” of Europe.
The UN estimates that 1.7
billion people in over 100 countries are being impacted by the current surge in
food, energy, and commodity prices.
One Western official told the
Telegraph that Russia is exacerbating a pre-existing bad situation
and has created a “major threat to global food security through a
deliberate policy of weaponization of global food supply.”
Around 80% of
Ukraine’s wheat used to ship from Odesa until Russia made it its mission to
besiege the city on the Black Sea, blockading ports and brutally targeting
civilians.
The squeeze on wheat has
caused global prices to soar and is causing many in the Middle East and Africa
to starve.
In Sri Lanka, there have also
been weeks of violent protests over the cost of living. The UK’s banking chief
Andrew Bailey warned on Monday of “apocalyptic” food price rises, voicing
concerns about a potentially catastrophic impact on the developing world.
Ukraine’s next biggest export
is corn, barley, sunflower oil and rapeseed oil and Britons have reported the
cost of cooking oils and dairy rising dramatically — a crisis much more acute
in non-western nations where food is their main expense.
Matthew Hollingworth, the
World Food Programme’s emergency coordinator, told the BBC that silos
are filled with grain that should have left the country weeks ago.
He says he was in South Sudan
a few weeks ago where they saw the price of sorghum, the staple grain, rise by
45%.
Hollingworth added:
“That’s not what’s exported from here2, but that’s the trickle-down
effect.” He called on a global food alliance, saying 400 million people
around the world eat bread that comes from wheat grown in Ukraine.
Ukraine has been forced to now
export by train or via its small Danube River ports, in place of its
once-operational large ports.
David Beasley, who heads the
UN’s World Food Programme pleaded to Putin, saying: “If you have any heart
at all, please open these ports
