The world is in for a whooping food crisis. The ex-parte decision of Russia to exit the United Nations-brokered Black Sea Initiative that ensured supply of grains from Ukraine to across the continents of Asia and Africa is perplexing. The grain basket of the world, Ukraine, is mired in a crisis of its own as it is under aggression from the Kremlin, and this new rupture of treatise will put it in a tight corner. But the prime victims will be states who were banking on cheaper food products, especially grains from Kyiv, through the Russian sea ports. The deal since July last year, run by a Joint Coordination Centre staffed with representatives from Russia, Ukraine, the United Nations, and Turkiye, has enabled safe export of more than 30 million tonnes of grain and other foodstuffs, including fertilisers, from Ukraine.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ SOS is worth considering. He rightly fears millions of people facing hunger will ‘pay the price’ of Russia’s decision to exit the grain deal. The news has already led to fissures, and it is reported that prices have spiraled by 35 percent. Perhaps, Kyiv’s trigger-happiness to fire drones on Russia’s bridge connecting its mainland to the annexed Crimea peninsula, has cost it dearly. Moscow for long had been uneasy with the concession that it had granted to Kyiv, under international mediation, which it saw as undermining the pressure it was supposed to create by keeping some of the Ukrainian territories under its tutelage. The grain deal to a great extent had made the conflict a bilateral affair, as it stopped short of a complete rupture in international trade.
Russia must return to the grain deal, in an earnest effort to facilitate unimpeded access to global markets of food and fertilisers. This is inevitably linked with food security, price stability and supply chain. President Vladimir Putin will be better advised to put politics behind, and treat the international agreement it entered with the world body under Turkiye’s aegis as a focal point of its goodwill.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 19th, 2023.
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