Once again, a grain crisis hit the world as Russia refused to extend the Ukrainian grain agreement because the involved parties did not adhere to the quotas of poor and needy countries. European countries seem to have obtained more than 80% of the total quantities of grain that Russia sold to Ukraine.
The crisis, in fact, has two sides. The first is related to the Russian-Ukrainian war, as they are the main source of grain at competitive prices in the world. In addition, the war threatens the Ukrainian grain export infrastructure, especially after the Russian attack on ports in the Odessa region, and in the Danube River in Ukraine, which pushed wheat prices up dramatically.
The other aspect is related to the unprecedented climate changes in the last 10 years, which prompted India a few days ago to take a decision to ban the export of rice, in light of the escalating fears associated with the “El Niño” phenomenon on agricultural supplies, which is a global climate phenomenon. This is where the temperature change in one ocean affects the atmosphere in another distant region. This also moved rice prices towards its highest level in 10 years.
The Indian decision put the world in front of limited, difficult options, including the speedy diversification of rice sources, which would affect the prices and futures contracts in one way or another.
It prompted the International Monetary Fund to sound the alarm that the grain prices are likely to rise by 10-15% after the collapse of the grain agreement.
The weapon of economic sanctions has strong economic and social effects, which may affect civilians, destabilize the targeted economy, and affect people’s lives. However, they are sometimes used as a means of influencing the policy of the target country and achieving changes in political behavior or human rights violations.
Historically, countries such as America, Britain, and Russia have used grain as a weapon to attract countries or exert pressure on others, with the aim of attracting loyalists or bringing opponents to their knees. For example, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin exploited wheat in the 1930s to force Ukrainian farmers to work on collective farms. This is where wheat stocks were confiscated, and this caused the deaths of about 4.5 million people. As for America, it threatened to use a weapon for grain against the Arabs, who used the oil weapon during the 1973 war during solidarity with Egypt against Israel, and at that time Washington bargained, saying that “every drop of oil is for a grain of wheat.”
Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, also used the grain weapon in 1943, to control the Indian state of Bengal, which resisted the occupation, and took advantage of the drought to subdue the state’s population in exchange for allowing the British merchant fleet to deliver wheat and rice.
The same weapon was also employed in the plan to subdue Iraq prior to its occupation, under the name of “oil for food”, which killed more than 1.5 million Iraqi children.
The Russian-Ukrainian grain agreement guaranteed the export of Ukrainian grain to the world through a humanitarian corridor in the Black Sea, in exchange for Russia’s assistance in transporting its exports of food and fertilizers to global markets. The agreement has been renewed several times before, but Russia has repeatedly threatened to withdraw, noting that its demands to improve its grain and fertilizer exports have not been met. According to United Nations data, this agreement helped export 33 million tonnes of Ukrainian wheat from its implementation in early August 2022 until this month. The agreement helped reduce global grain prices by 20%.
Now the bread of the world is in danger at the mercy of the extension of the grain agreement. This is in addition to the Indian rice crisis, which put more than two-thirds of the world’s population in front of a major economic shock.
Food security for countries is an essential pillar of national security, and therefore the cost of obtaining food affects their budget deficits and poverty levels. This is in addition to the occurrence of negative consequences for those countries, which reflects the consequences of the collapse of the grain agreement on the markets, as well as the consequences of India’s ban on exporting rice.
The real problem is that the proposed solutions to the grain crisis are mostly long-term solutions. Examples of these solutions include the expansion of wheat cultivation, securing landlines to transport grain from Ukraine via Europe, opening ways of trade exchange, and importing wheat from other alternative countries. This is just as Egypt decided, for example, to cooperate with France and Romania as an alternative to supplying wheat. But in fact, all of these solutions are useless.
However, the bare fact confirms that there is a wide danger facing the world in light of its silence in the face of the use of economic sanctions as one of the tools of conflict. That is why there must be a binding international law that prohibits economic sanctions on countries, no matter what, because the peoples who have nothing to do with the conflict pay the price.
Dr. Hatem Sadek: Professor at Helwan University
