The Economist May 21st 2022 19
BriefingThe food crisisI
n 2001 olena nazarenko’sfather start
ed farming in Lukashivka, a small village
about 100km north of Kyiv, with three cows
and a horse called Rosa (”Dew” in Ukrai
nian). In 2020 Mrs Nazarenko and her hus
band Andriy inherited the 400hectare
(1,000acre) farm, now named Rosa after
that founding horse. Early this year they
took out a substantial loan to cover fertilis
er for the coming springwheat crop.
On March 9th, well before they had
planted any, Russian troops occupied the
village and the couple fled. On March 31st,
when the invaders had turned tail, they re
turned. It was a harsh homecoming. The
main farm building was shelled out. Three
tractors had been vandalised and their die
sel drained. Of their 117 cows, 42 were dead
and the rest were roaming fields littered
with debris, mines, mortar shells, unex
ploded cluster bombs and burntout
trucks. Fifty tonnes of wheat, sunflower
seed and rye had been destroyed, costing
them tens of thousands of dollars. “We
have no money left,” says Mrs Nazarenko.
“We have nothing to pay salaries and are
struggling to pay interest on the loan.”Lukashivka and the villages around it
have seen thousands of tonnes of grain de
stroyed or left to rot; much the same is true
throughout the country’s war zones. Rus
sian forces have targeted grain elevators
and fertiliser plants, leaving the infrastruc
ture in pieces. The share of last year’s grain
harvest still in the country—about 25m
tonnes of grain, a lot of it maize (corn)—is
stuck there, because Odessa’s ports,
through which 98% of the grain exports
normally pass, are blockaded. Getting the
grain to alternative ports in Romania, Bul
garia and the Baltics is hard. “Before the
war Ukraine exported about 5m tonnes of
grain a month,” says Mykola Solskiy, the
minister for agriculture. “Last month we
managed to get 1.1m tonnes out.”
Vikas Kumar Singh, a farmer in Dharau
li, a village in Uttar Pradesh about 700km
southeast of Delhi, has no unexploded
ordnance to worry about. But his March,
too, was troubled. “It got too hot too early,”
he explains, picking up a handful of re
cently harvested wheat from a pile in his
shed with a dejected look on his face. “See,
the grains are thinner than they’re supposed to be.” After being battered by severe
winds and hail in February, the Chandauli
district in which Dharauli sits suffered in
tense and unseasonable heat, shrivelling
the ears of wheat when they should have
been burgeoning. The same happened
across most of the country. “Things are
much worse in Maharashtra,” says Awadh
Bihari Singh, who farms nearby.
Mr Vikas Singh reckons that his yield is
down by about a quarter compared with
last year’s. The district as a whole has har
vested around a fifth less wheat than in a
normal year, reckons Mr Awadh Singh. Be
fore the heatwave, when a bumper harvest
had seemed on the cards, the government
had looked forward to the rupee being
strengthened by grain exports. When ex
pectations of the harvest’s size tumbled it
flipflopped. Accelerating exports encour
aged by high prices abroad raised worries
of a shortage at home.
On May 13th, the Indian government
imposed an export ban on wheat, though it
says it will make exceptions for specific
countries in need; on May 15th a 500,000
tonne deal with Egypt was reported. There
are currently 26 countries implementing
severe restrictions on food exports. In
most cases they are outright bans. The va
rious measures cover 15% of the calories
traded worldwide.
It takes a world to feed a world, and the
way the world does it is through trade. By
some estimates fourfifths of the global
population live in countries which are net
importers of food. More than 20% of theD HARAULI, KYIV, LUKASHIVKA, RUGBY AND WASHINGTON, DC
War, extreme weather and export controls are driving tens of millions of people
into potentially deadly hungerAfter the pestilence, after the war...