The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the global food crisis

[Bird on a Fire]

Hummus shortage: https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a-shortage

Oh, it's worse than that - Gin prices may soar!

We'll be seeing a lot of these stories, till folk get bored of them.

Fossil energy prices are up, and it takes several calories of fossil fuels to deliver a single calorie of food. (Depending on production systems and type of food - see e.g. this summary table).

On top of which, climate instability was already pushing up prices, with lots of areas losing crops to drought or flooding. This will get worse as many regions (the southwest US and Spain, for instance) have already used up huge amounts of their water reserves, and they're not going to come back.

The sanctions on Russia - one of the few productive regions in the world that will probably see a net benefit to its agriculture from climate change - are exacerbating the issue, of course, but as places like China and India aren't participating I'm not sure that there's much of a net loss to the global food system, and these are global price hikes (worse in the west).

Obviously writing stories about "wheat" and "chickpeas" - global staples providing huge proportions of necessary staple calories and protein - would be too boring, so it's framed in terms your average punter would care about. But part of why gin's going up is the same reason cheap pasta has doubled in price in the UK - the global food system can't cope with the environmental changes it's partly responsible for.

[EACLucifer]

The sanctions on Russia - one of the few productive regions in the world that will probably see a net benefit to its agriculture from climate change - are exacerbating the issue, of course

1) No they aren't. There aren't any sanctions on Russian food export. It's a popular talking point with Russian propagandists and their useful idiots, of course, but it isn't remotely true. Many on the far left* are useful idiots for Russian propagandists, and not just tankies who openly side with Russia either.

2) Russia's deliberate blockade of the Ukrainian coastline is blocking the export of all sorts of foodstuffs from Ukraine. Partly this is done to hurt the Ukrainian economy, but it is also part of a deliberate policy to weaken western resolve by creating chaos in poorer countries through soaring food prices. There's been hunger protests in Ghana and Iran and Sri Lanka and other places. Putin hopes this will result in a surge in refugee numbers, with the idea being that western governments will then struggle to politically handle the arrival of lots more refugees - though it is likely to work via exploiting western xenophobia, if western governments did the right thing and took in refugees, there is still the issue of feeding them. It also boosts Russian revenue, as if people are desperate enough for food to pay high prices, Russia's own exports sell for a higher price.

3) This Russian blockade has prevented the export of vast quantities of food from Ukraine, one of the most fertile places in the world. In addition to leaving crops to rot in their silos as they cannot be exported by sea, the Russians have also directly targetted grain storage and transport facilities. The Putin regime has form for using starvation as a weapon, having targetted bakeries and poultry farms and water treatment plants and so on in Syria.

4) This campaign has had most direct effect on wheat and sunflower oil. However, though Ukraine is a relatively small chick pea producer, they do export some, and in addition chick pea prices are driven up as people move from other staples to chick peas.



*And the far right, especially the christofascist far right, but I doubt BOAF is getting (mis)information from them.

[Bird on a Fire]

Hmmm. The guardian article of the evening, the hummus one, says

Sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine have interrupted shipments from Russia, which is usually a top chickpea exporter accounting for about a quarter of global trade, according to Navneet Singh Chhabra, the director of Shree Sheela International, a global chickpea trader and brokerage firm.

Ukraine, meanwhile, could not seed its total chickpea crop due to the war, removing 50,000 tonnes that is usually bound for Europe.

“Russia is exporting about 200,000 to 250,000 tonnes, minimum, a year. When the war started in February, the supply was destroyed, totally,” Jeff Van Pevenage, the chief executive of Columbia Grain International, a grain and pulse merchandiser and supplier headquartered in Portland, Oregon, told Reuters.

I honestly don't know anything about the sanctions, so I'll happily defer if that is far-left (or christofascist ) propaganda. Reading again, I think I just assumed the two quoted paragraphs about Russia were causatively linked, when Russia's chickpea supply could well have been destroyed for non-sanction reasons. Is that the case?

Eta linky https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a-shortage Business section eh? Hotbed of crypto-Marxists probably.

[Bird on a Fire]

Ontologically there must be at least one guy at the intersection of crypto and Marxism, which must be a fascinating car crash.

[EACLucifer]

Hmmm. The guardian article of the evening, the hummus one, says

Sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine have interrupted shipments from Russia, which is usually a top chickpea exporter accounting for about a quarter of global trade, according to Navneet Singh Chhabra, the director of Shree Sheela International, a global chickpea trader and brokerage firm.

Ukraine, meanwhile, could not seed its total chickpea crop due to the war, removing 50,000 tonnes that is usually bound for Europe.

“Russia is exporting about 200,000 to 250,000 tonnes, minimum, a year. When the war started in February, the supply was destroyed, totally,” Jeff Van Pevenage, the chief executive of Columbia Grain International, a grain and pulse merchandiser and supplier headquartered in Portland, Oregon, told Reuters.

I honestly don't know anything about the sanctions, so I'll happily defer if that is far-left (or christofascist ) propaganda. Reading again, I think I just assumed the two quoted paragraphs about Russia were causatively linked, when Russia's chickpea supply could well have been destroyed for non-sanction reasons. Is that the case?

Eta linky https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a-shortage Business section eh? Hotbed of crypto-Marxists probably.

That there are no sanctions on Russia exporting food is a simple fact. The thing about propaganda is that it permeates. I'm not accusing you of supporting Russia or anything like that, you've made it pretty clear you are on the right side of this one. Yet this isn't the first time you've posted something that is rather closer to the Russian propaganda line than it is to reality.

And the press are very guilty on this - consider how often they've talked about "Separatists" "Russian-backed Separatists" or even, in one recent report "Ukrainian separatists", the report in that case referring to forces that Putin clearly considered Russian. Think how many times you've seen those phrases in the last eight years - and then remind yourself that there hadn't been anything of a meaningful separatist movement in the Donbas prior to 2014, and that the troops that appeared in Crimea were Russian troops in Russian uniforms with the insignia removed, and that the people that invaded the Donbas were ultranationalist Russians from Russia with supplies from the Russian government and led by Russians like Igor "Strelkov" Girkin and Arsen Pavlov.

One problem is the degree to which the press will offer statements from both sides, which is a particular problem of course when one side lies as much as the Russian government does, but even without that, it's still weird to see "X says this, Y denies it" when evidence is available. A couple of examples come from reporting on Belgorod. A while back, the BBC were reporting "Russia says Ukraine blew up our fuel depot, Ukraine didn't comment" when there was footage of Ukrainian helicopters flying at treetop height and firing rockets into the fuel depot, which was a legitimate military target, of course. A more recent one would be reporting that Russia had accused Ukraine of firing a Tochka-U which struck a residential area and Ukraine denying it. The governor of Belgorod oblast reported that the missile had been knocked off course by an unsuccessful interception, there's pictures doing the rounds showing parts of the type of missile Russia use for intercepting that sort of incoming missile, there's pictures of the engine section of a Tochka-U peppered with fragments as one would expect for the scenario, and even footage showing first the interceptor exploding above the city, then soon after that the much larger explosion of the Tochka-U hitting some poor bugger's house.

[Bird on a Fire]

Could sanctions against things like ships and the movement of money have impacted food exports without their being the intentional target?

[Woodchopper]

Thread split from the most guardian article of the day.

[Woodchopper]

I have in fact co-written a short piece on The Role of the Invasion of Ukraine in the 2022 Food Supply Crisis

Note that the short format didn't allow enough space to post links to all the sources, but I can post them here if you're interested.

[WFJ]

Could sanctions against things like ships and the movement of money have impacted food exports without their being the intentional target?

There are plenty of ways sanctions will be affecting food exports, shipping and finance would only be two factors. Russian infrastructure and logistics are screwed by sanctions. That's the main aim of the sanctions, to cripple the Russian economy.

One of the biggest immediate problems they face is in their IT infrastructure. They can't get any new chips, beyond those available from China, to build new infrastructure or even to maintain their existing systems. Russian companies rely on enterprise software and cloud platforms from companies like AWS, Microsoft, Oracle but these are arranged in fixed-term contracts that can't be renewed due to sanctions. So as licences and contracts expire, companies lose all their IT systems. You can't export food if you can't organise logistics to ship it and track where it's going.

[Woodchopper]

Could sanctions against things like ships and the movement of money have impacted food exports without their being the intentional target?

There are plenty of ways sanctions will be affecting food exports, shipping and finance would only be two factors. Russian infrastructure and logistics are screwed by sanctions. That's the main aim of the sanctions, to cripple the Russian economy.

One of the biggest immediate problems they face is in their IT infrastructure. They can't get any new chips, beyond those available from China, to build new infrastructure or even to maintain their existing systems. Russian companies rely on enterprise software and cloud platforms from companies like AWS, Microsoft, Oracle but these are arranged in fixed-term contracts that can't be renewed due to sanctions. So as licences and contracts expire, companies lose all their IT systems. You can't export food if you can't organise logistics to ship it and track where it's going.

Its unclear to me the extent to which provision of IT services to the civilian economy is forbidden by sanctions, or whether the companies have just decided to pull out of the Russian market. As far as I know, the voluntary withdrawal of foreign companies has had a far greater effect than the sanctions themselves. Though the sanctions could be seen as indirectly leading to the voluntary withdrawal by sending a message that responsible companies shouldn't trade with Russia.

[WFJ]

Its unclear to me the extent to which provision of IT services to the civilian economy is forbidden by sanctions, or whether the companies have just decided to pull out of the Russian market. As far as I know, the voluntary withdrawal of foreign companies has had a far greater effect than the sanctions themselves. Though the sanctions could be seen as indirectly leading to the voluntary withdrawal by sending a message that responsible companies shouldn't trade with Russia.

My comments were based on talking with our suppliers about what they are doing, so admittedly these are second/third hand accounts. Some have chosen to pull out completely, but some are honouring existing service contracts*. From what I understand these cannot be extended, but it's possible these were voluntary company decisions not to allow new contracts.

* I think many companies who were initially honouring contracts have since chosen to pull out.

[Bird on a Fire]

Thanks for the split.

I didn't realise this was a hot topic, I was just reacting to the guardian article about chickpeas.

Clearly in the case of other crops the loss of Ukraine's exports is more significant, and blaming "the invasion of Ukraine" is more inclusive, and therefore accurate, than "Russian sanctions."

Thanks for the link Woodchopper - and nice work! I first realised Ukraine was an agricultural powerhouse reading about sunflower oil. It could well be that the loss of Ukrainian exports is more important than the loss of Russian ones.

But it is the case that the sanctions on Russia have no effect? What is the guardian's source on about?

The PRIO report mentions

Safety concerns have inhibited shipping from Russia’s Black Sea ports, and as an indirect result of sanctions international banks and traders have been unwilling to provide services to Russian entities involved in export trade.

for fertilizer specifically, but would that not apply more widely?

[Bird on a Fire]

Ah, the original Reuters gives a bit more explanation:

Sanctions aimed at cutting Russia’s access to the global financial system have also hampered purchases of its agricultural products, he said, as some buyers seek to avoid complications with payment. A top chickpea exporter, Russia normally accounts for about 25% of global trade, he said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/ukraine ... FL1N2XV2R6

[EACLucifer]

Ah, the original Reuters gives a bit more explanation:

Sanctions aimed at cutting Russia’s access to the global financial system have also hampered purchases of its agricultural products, he said, as some buyers seek to avoid complications with payment. A top chickpea exporter, Russia normally accounts for about 25% of global trade, he said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/ukraine ... FL1N2XV2R6

There was a trend in journalism prior to February 2022 (and after that too, often) of covering Ukraine issues as a subset of Russian ones, leaving them to a Moscow bureau. I would say that the press doesn't seem to understand the need to apply a postcolonial lens to territories once colonised by the Russian Empire, but honestly, they aren't very good at doing that anywhere.

Reuters were probably the worst at this, right down to a formal partnership with TASS. A lot of their articles prior to this February (note - not prior to the invasion. The invasion was in 2014) incorporated quite a few Kremlin talking points.

In the long run, sanctions may affect Russia's food production, by preventing replacement or repair of agricultural machinery. Sanctions on the financial sector are unlikely to have a major impact - contrary to various claims that Russia's been cut off from SWIFT, in truth, only a few Russian banks have been cut off from SWIFT. There's plenty of ways to pay Russia/Russians for things they export, and indeed European countries have spent rather more money buying energy from Russia than they have sending aid to Ukraine. The potential long term consequences are just one more reason why it is so important to send sufficient military aid to get the war over as soon as possible.

It's not just Reuters who are reporting without the necessary background understanding, though. Here's a recent one from the NYT.



Is Igor Vsevolodovich Girkin a military analyst critical of Russia's strategy in Ukraine? Well yes, but he's also a few other things worth noting. Also known as Igor Strelkov, he was an FSB operative for many years. He got up to no good in Transnistria and Bosnia - where he is accused of involvement in the Visegrad massacre. In Chechnya, he was involved in the abduction, torture and disappearance of Chechens opposed to Russian rule. He had a major role in the invasion of Crimea, and his own statements are one of the pieces of evidence that confirm the seizure was done by force, and was not a pro-Russian revolt by Crimeans. He was then instrumental in the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine, where he was involved in the torture and murder of POWs and political captives. During this period, he was supplied with heavy equipment by the Kremlin, including the Buk-9M83 missile his forces used to shoot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, an attack that killed almost three hundred people.

So yeah. He analyses military stuff, but leaving it at that is either ignorant, or downright negligent, and in neither case acceptable for a journalist. Girkin is a popular source in OSINT spheres as he gives relatively accurate reports that are based on information from the Russian side of things, but are critical of Russian leadership. He is not critical because that leadership is revanchist and imperialist and waging a needless war of choice, though - he is critical because that leadership is not imperialist or ruthless enough, and is not winning the needless war of choice and not, in his view, doing enough to do so.

[Bird on a Fire]

So what did happen to the Russian chickpeas?

[dyqik]

Ontologically there must be at least one guy at the intersection of crypto and Marxism, which must be a fascinating car crash.

It's easy to frame crypto as allowing the working masses to break the dominance of international globalist finance.

It's usually done from the libertarian POV, but it's not a massive leap from that argument to an economically illiterate (about how crypto actually works and the cost of participating in it) Marxist one.

[dyqik]

Could sanctions against things like ships and the movement of money have impacted food exports without their being the intentional target?

There are plenty of ways sanctions will be affecting food exports, shipping and finance would only be two factors. Russian infrastructure and logistics are screwed by sanctions. That's the main aim of the sanctions, to cripple the Russian economy.

One of the biggest immediate problems they face is in their IT infrastructure. They can't get any new chips, beyond those available from China, to build new infrastructure or even to maintain their existing systems. Russian companies rely on enterprise software and cloud platforms from companies like AWS, Microsoft, Oracle but these are arranged in fixed-term contracts that can't be renewed due to sanctions. So as licences and contracts expire, companies lose all their IT systems. You can't export food if you can't organise logistics to ship it and track where it's going.

Supply of things like farm equipment and trucks, which nowadays need chips, and parts for the same, will also be an issue. Plus packaging equipment and supplies, even basic things like shipping containers (a problem in the West due to CoVID, as well as Russia).

The truck and equipment issue is probably also affected by the demand for trucks and other things to support the invasion, as well as sanctions.

At some point, farm and factory labor may also be impacted by conscription.

ETA: I'm not sure where chickpeas are grown in Russia, but the early harvest might well be from regions closer to Ukraine, which are also being disrupted by military logistic operations. As may shipping of produce, which I can well imagine is via the Black Sea, as the Mediterranean and Middle East is probably a relatively large market.

[Woodchopper]

Thanks for the split.

I didn't realise this was a hot topic, I was just reacting to the guardian article about chickpeas.

Clearly in the case of other crops the loss of Ukraine's exports is more significant, and blaming "the invasion of Ukraine" is more inclusive, and therefore accurate, than "Russian sanctions."

Thanks for the link Woodchopper - and nice work! I first realised Ukraine was an agricultural powerhouse reading about sunflower oil. It could well be that the loss of Ukrainian exports is more important than the loss of Russian ones.

But it is the case that the sanctions on Russia have no effect? What is the guardian's source on about?

The PRIO report mentions

Safety concerns have inhibited shipping from Russia’s Black Sea ports, and as an indirect result of sanctions international banks and traders have been unwilling to provide services to Russian entities involved in export trade.

for fertilizer specifically, but would that not apply more widely?

Cheers, and sorry for the delay in replying.

Yes, I assume that it will affect food exports as well. The basic problem is that insurers and shipping companies are reluctant to touch trade with Russia, and are reluctant to send ships near to the war zone. This doesn't mean that its impossible for Russia to export fertilizer or food cargoes. But it does increase costs and involves delays.

Here's something from the trade press: https://lloydslist.maritimeintelligence ... -war-risks

[EACLucifer]

The basic problem is that insurers and shipping companies are reluctant to touch trade with Russia, and are reluctant to send ships near to the war zone.

Russian attacks on neutral vessels like the Millenial Spirit will have influenced that attitude.

One bit of good news, though - since the fall of the Russian garrison on Snake island, observers report an uptick in traffic to Ukraine's Danube port of Izmail. As ships can do most of the run in Romanian waters, it's safer than trying for Odesa, though grain handling facilities are, I gather, more limited than at Odesa and Mykolaiv, though the latter's ones have been targetted by Russian strikes. Romania is also working on getting broad gauge rail in place to connect Ukraine's rail network to Romanian ports, which would also help a great deal, as railway wagons that can handle the change in gauge aren't available in sufficient number.

The best ways to ensure food security in this area remain the destruction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and Russian defeat in the war.

[Woodchopper]

EU to soften sanctions on Russian banks to allow food trade

https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/ ... 022-07-19/

[EACLucifer]

Less than twenty four hours between Russia signing an agreement to effectively unblock Ukraine's grain exports and firing missiles at the port of Odesa. Less than a day.

The only way any treaty or agreement with the Russian regime has a chance of working is if it's breach will inevitably and unquestionably met with the swift and well directed application of significant violence.

[EACLucifer]

The UN, while condemning the strikes on Odesa and calling for the agreements between Turkey, Russia and Ukraine to be honoured, couldn't even manage to name which country conducted them, in case you were about to mistake the UN for a remotely worthwhile entity.

The attacks were carried out using Kalibr cruise missiles. These are made in Russia, and used by Russia. Though exported to a few countries, I think we can assume this wasn't Algeria, India, Vietnam, Iran or Red China.

[JQH]

The UN, while condemning the strikes on Odesa and calling for the agreements between Turkey, Russia and Ukraine to be honoured, couldn't even manage to name which country conducted them, in case you were about to mistake the UN for a remotely worthwhile entity.

I stopped making that mistake during the Bosnian War

[jimbob]

The UN, while condemning the strikes on Odesa and calling for the agreements between Turkey, Russia and Ukraine to be honoured, couldn't even manage to name which country conducted them, in case you were about to mistake the UN for a remotely worthwhile entity.

I stopped making that mistake during the Bosnian War

Likewise. "Counties" shouldn't have "rights", people should.

[Grumble]

The UN, while condemning the strikes on Odesa and calling for the agreements between Turkey, Russia and Ukraine to be honoured, couldn't even manage to name which country conducted them, in case you were about to mistake the UN for a remotely worthwhile entity.

I stopped making that mistake during the Bosnian War

Likewise. "Counties" shouldn't have "rights", people should.

Especially not Yorkshire