Inside Out | Russia’s war with Ukraine will hurt global food security

War in a breadbasket region like the Black Sea could impact food importers in the Middle East and Asia, especially as it comes at a time when pandemic dislocation has already sent food prices soaring around the world

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A sunflower is seen on a wheat field near the village of Zhovtneve, Ukraine, in July 2016. This former Soviet state has over the past two decades become a breadbasket to the world. Photo: Reuters

Published: 5:00pm, 27 Feb 2022Updated: 1:53pm, 9 Mar 2022

While bombs are falling across a bleak, wintry Ukraine, with Russian troops converging on Kyiv and forcing a land bridge between Crimea and the Russian-controlled eastern regions, it is right and proper that we are focusing on the human tragedy as it unfolds.

But the chance recollection of a brilliant Chatham House paper four years ago has got my head spinning in a different direction: the threat to global food security.

Most of us – even those able to stick a pin in Ukraine on a world map – may not realise that this former Soviet state has over the past two decades become a breadbasket to the world. Together with Russia, it is the source of 29 per cent of the world’s wheat exports. They also account for 19 per cent of exported maize and 80 per cent of sunflower oil.

In the 2017 Chatham House report “Chokepoints and Vulnerabilities in Global Food Trade”, the research team identified 14 critical “choke points” worldwide that could threaten global food chains – “critical junctures on transport routes through which exceptional volumes of trade pass”. Presciently, the report noted that choke points are “systematically overlooked in assessments of strategic food security”.

Some of these junctures, like the Strait of Malacca, the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal are maritime. Others are inland, like the Mississippi basin. Others are coastal – like Brazil’s southern food trade ports or the US’ Gulf coast ports.

But the most chokepoints converge around the Black Sea: the creaking Black Sea inland rail network; the Black Sea ports like Odessa, Berdansk and Sevastopol (which is now in Russian-controlled Crimea, and was closed to international shipping in 2014); and the Turkish Straits that allow passage out of the Black Sea and into the Mediterranean.