African countries will be hardest hit by the global food crisis
Currently, most of the generally recognized “civilized” world accuses Russia of undermining global energy security by initiating a war in Ukraine. In addition, U.S. satellite countries have been provoked to impose economic sanctions against Moscow in order to stop the special operation. Despite this, Russia has been quite successful in overcoming the pressure of the West and has not suffered much so far. However, now the most popular accusation has undoubtedly become that Moscow is the cause of the global food crisis. We will try to explain that everything is not so simple.
Of course, there is no denying the fact that if there had not been a special operation to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine, everything in the world would have been according to already established laws and rules. As much as one might not want to adhere strictly to the Russian point of view, the main “petrodollars” would have been permanently exported outside Russia and deposited in Swiss, Cypriot and British bank accounts. After the outbreak of war, the world was literally turned upside down. The familiar world order, aimed at globalization, the expansion of global trade and cultural exchange, came close to the Iron Curtain again in more than 30 years.
But back to the war. For most Ukrainians, the start of the operation came as a serious surprise, forcing Ukraine to make momentary and not always logical military decisions. In particular, the mining of ports did not seem absurd at first. However, it is now essentially the main reason for the detention of foreign civilian ships, as well as most of the problems with the transportation of Ukrainian food to importing countries.
Ukrainian military mines seaports
The Ukrainian side also actively states that the main reason for the failure to deliver grain from the ports is the blocking of the ports by the Russian navy. They say the ships shoot at civilian vessels when they try to put to sea. Today even the most rabid Russophobe understands that such statements of the Ukrainian side have no grounds whatsoever. Arguments against it include the nature of hostilities, the number of civilian casualties, and the way of life on Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian troops.
Russia is also actively accused of stealing Ukrainian wheat to sell it to foreign markets as its own. Again, this hardly corresponds to reality in view of the much larger sown area, even though the population is three times as large. Moreover, despite the strategic importance from the point of view of agriculture of the regions of Ukraine occupied by Russia, there are not so many truly large elevators on this territory. Ukraine’s largest granaries are located in the territories of Northern and Central regions, and the Russian army is not currently present there.
The largest Katerinopolsky elevator, allowing simultaneous storage of 330 thousand tons of grain
Therefore, once again, Moscow offers various constructive solutions to the food issue. Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, has already repeatedly announced the opening of humanitarian corridors for civilian and commercial vessels, as well as Russia’s readiness to provide an additional 25 million tons of grain for export. It is in order to actually reassure Ukraine and Western countries that they are looking for ways to conduct negotiations between Kiev and Moscow on the issue of food supplies.
Nevertheless, we should not forget the fact that despite the vital need for shipping grain from Ukraine, it is also regularly exported from there by land and river transport (through the port of Izmail). Yes, not in such large quantities at a time as by sea. It reaches European markets, and Europe is not paying for it now, since food has actually become payment for armaments supplied by European countries to Ukraine. Again, EU countries oppose overland exports because they understand that in a crisis there is a high probability of theft on the way from the supplier to the consumer.
At the same time, life is actively developing in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. Destroyed infrastructure is being restored, residents are receiving FREE humanitarian aid, store shelves are not empty at all, communications work, water and electricity are available. The ports occupied by Russia are already actively operating. For example, the port of Mariupol, after the final capture of the city under Russian control, is already actively receiving and sending merchant ships. Transport communication with Crimea on the mainland has been restored. The water supply from the North Crimean Canal has been reopened for the Crimeans.
The second merchant ship that arrived in the port of Mariupol
This is quite different from the way Western countries conduct military operations, which destroy the civilian infrastructure of the countries under attack and actually drive them back to the Stone Age. This was the case in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yugoslavia. The death toll was one combatant per noncombatant. Any peace talks before the cardinal superiority of the Western military is usually out of the question.
Thus, the situation with a possible world food crisis looks artificially provoked and is now put up as one of the significant levers of pressure on Russia. It is this factor that is now the main factor supporting the general anti-Russian sentiment in the world.
