Ukraine: Hunger games
Ukraine is the most fertile country on the planet. Without its grain, people across the world will starve. But its farms are now a warzone
The village of Krutyi Yar, 660km south of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, is about as close as one can get to the front line of the war without getting within range of Russian artillery. “If you stay here for a week, we would have a beer and you wouldn’t even flinch when the explosions happen. Humans can get used to anything,” says Sergii Kovtun.
The 50-year-old farmer, speaking through a translator, casually picks his way through the minefields that surround the village, wearing shorts and flip-flops. He is amused by The Continent’s flak jacket and helmet.
Farmers like Kovtun have made Ukraine one of the most important food exporters in the world – the World Economic Forum estimates that 10% of all grain on the world market comes from here. It also grows 15% of the world’s corn and 13% of its barley, alongside sunflower and other staple crops. Or grew, rather: the statistics predate Russia’s invasion last February.
Now Kovtun, and tens of thousands like him, are farming in a warzone. With a third of the country’s farmland occupied by Russian forces, or littered with deadly mines, Ukrainian farmers have planted 40% fewer crops this season, according to the agriculture ministry.
The future of global food security – and that of a number of fragile governments – may depend on the ability of these farmers to harvest and profit from their land.
Kovtun is chief operating officer for Barbet, a mid-size farming company that grows grain for export. In Krutyi Yar, the company grew mostly wheat and barley on its 2,000-hectares. It was a profitable enterprise until the war began. The village and its surrounds were occupied and overrun within the first few weeks of the conflict. Russian soldiers turned the company’s farm buildings into a makeshift base, storing artillery shells in the warehouse. They mined the fields and dug trenches along the treeline.
By then, Kovtun and his family, and most of their staff, had fled to safety in the west of the country. A sole security guard was left on the premises. He did not put up any resistance. “Through him, the Russian commanding officer contacted me and gave me his word that nothing would be taken. And they kept their word – all the big equipment was left intact and not stolen,” says Kovtun.
The World Economic Forum estimates that 10% of all grain on the world market comes from Ukraine
But everything else was destroyed. Weeds and wild herbs had overrun the crops by last November when, in a major counteroffensive, Ukrainian forces retook the area. Kovtun, without his family, returned shortly afterwards.
His fields were littered with debris from rockets and missiles, and seeded with landmines instead of wheat. The warehouse had been demolished by an American-supplied rocket fired by Ukrainian forces.
In the abandoned Russian foxholes – shed-sized underground bunkers, reinforced with wooden beams – he found stockpiles of bullets and live grenades. So hasty was the retreat that soldiers had left meals half-eaten, and unwashed clothes bundled in corners.
Before they could farm again, Kovtun and his team spent weeks collecting ordnance from the field. “Everything was kind of dangerous,” he says.
The mines are the hardest to clear out. Automated demining vehicles from the Ukrainian government are in scarce supply. And they clear only two hectares per day. At that rate it would take three full years before the farm is declared safe, and there are thousands of affected farms.
So Kovtun made his own plan. He tracked down an ancient, Soviet-era tractor and got it going again. He designed an armour-plated attachment to roll in front of it, heavy enough to trigger an explosion. And he asked his old classmates from Kyiv Polytechnic to install a remote control system so he can drive it from the safety of his office.
With his homemade demining machine, Kovtun has cleared half the farm – one thousand hectares – and resumed farming on that land. He grins as combine harvesters patrol the fields behind him, delighted to see them in action again.
Nonetheless, Kovtun’s operation is a fraction of what it used to be. “Everything we harvest now is damage control. We can’t profit,” he says.
As The Continent departs Krutyi Yar, heading north-west, away from the front lines, Kovtun sets off in the opposite direction. He lives in nearby Kherson city, close to where Russian forces are massed on the other side of the Dnipro River. The city is shelled constantly. “You sure you don’t want to come for that beer?” he asks as he waves goodbye.
Bitter harvests
From the window of a long-distance train, Ukraine is endless miles of yellow wheat and blue skies. This image is immortalised on the country’s flag, and made possible by the thick layer of chernozem – the “best arable soil in the world,” according to Unesco – that covers two thirds of its arable land. So valuable is this soil that trade in it is tightly restricted, and the chernozem black market is worth nearly a billion US dollars.
The grain grown in this soil went to ports along the Black Sea and then on to countries like Egypt and Ethiopia, both heavily reliant on imports to feed their people. That route halted abruptly when Russia invaded. Its warships attacked cargo vessels in the deep sea ports of Odesa and Mykolaiv, and mined Ukraine’s Black Sea waters (Russia claims that Ukraine mined their own waters).
“Not a ship left, and not a ship came,” says Dmytro Barinov, deputy head of Ukraine’s Seaport Authority, speaking in the deserted ferry terminal – once Europe’s busiest – in the port of Odesa.
The consequences for global food markets were immediate, and devastating. In Africa, the price of wheat soared by 45%, according to the African Development Bank. The steep increase was exacerbated by American and European commodities traders who profited by speculating on the price of wheat (as reported by The Continent and Lighthouse Reports in Issue 83). Just three companies control 90% of the world’s grain market, giving them barely regulated control over who gets food.
For countries that cannot produce enough food for their people – and this is most African countries – life suddenly became more expensive, and politics more unpredictable.
In July last year, the United Nations and Türkiye brokered an agreement that eased, but did not eliminate, the blockade. The Black Sea Grain Initiative allowed for a limited number of cargo ships to leave Odesa along a tightly-controlled maritime corridor, subject to Russian inspections.
It helped Ukraine shift 30-million tonnes of grain, and lifted some of the international sanctions against Russian exports of grain and fertiliser. Food prices dropped – until Russia declined to renew the deal late last month, claiming that those sanctions had not been eased far enough.
The price of wheat spiked immediately, and rose further in the wake of intensive Russian air attacks on port facilities in Odesa and Mykolaiv (the bombardment commenced just hours after The Continent left the region – Russia claims that this infrastructure is being used for military purposes).
This means that, once again, millions of tonnes of Ukrainian grain is trapped in a vast network of silos along major rivers and ports.
Food for thought
In the novel Supernova Era by Liu Cixin, an astronomical event kills all adults, leaving the world to be run by children. Knowing he is about to die, the president of China must teach his teenage successors to govern. He tells them: “Above all, ensure that the country is fed. Every day we need to provide the people with a trainful of MSG, 10 trains of salt, a lake of oil, and several hills of rice and flour. One day without, and the country will plunge into chaos. Ten days without, and there’s no country any more.”
This is governance at its most fundamental. Feed the people. Or else.
Not all countries are created equal in this respect. Take Niger. The landscape of this landlocked West African country, arid and mostly-desert, cannot grow enough food for its 25-million people. It must import about a fifth of what it needs.
When prices rise on international food markets, they rise in the markets of Niamey and Zinder too. And then families go hungry. People die. Governments are toppled – most recently, last month, that of President Mohamed Bazoum. He was overthrown in a military coup that was a response, in part, to a steep increase in the cost of living.
Bazoum was overthrown in a military coup that was a response, in part, to a steep increase in the cost of living.
This is a weakness that Russia is already exploiting. At last month’s Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg, attended by 17 African heads of state, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said: “Our country can replace Ukrainian grain, both on a commercial basis and as grant aid to the neediest African countries, more so since we expect another record harvest this year.”
Putin promised free food aid to six African countries, including Niger’s neighbours Mali and Burkina Faso – both of whom are similarly vulnerable to food price shocks, and have recently experienced military coups. Putin did not mention that this “record harvest” was only possible thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its occupation of Ukrainian farmlands, whose yields have been included in Russia’s statistics.
Russia is offering potential allies a solution to a food security crisis that it caused by invading Ukraine. But the longer the invasion continues, the worse the food security crisis is likely to get. And its impact will be felt far beyond the fields and the battlefields of Ukraine.
Russia sees things differently.
“The Ukrainian conflict per se has no significant impact on the global food security situation,” said a spokesperson for the Russian Embassy in South Africa.“There’s clearly a certain interest to blame current economic hardships on Russia, pointing to the Ukraine conflict as the reason, but the truth is that these problems originate from Western countries’ ill-advised actions in erroneous economic policy, consequences of Covid-19 pandemic and anti-Russian sanctions.”
A new reality
Andrii Vadaturskyy is the chief executive of Ukraine’s largest grain exporter, Nibulon. He thinks that politicians, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, are focusing on the wrong problem. Yes, he says, securing an export route for Ukrainian grain is important. But unless something changes, and soon, Ukraine won’t grow enough grain to export at all.
His father, Oleksiy Vadaturskyy, founded the company and became one of the country’s richest men. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he made billions of dollars by modernising the country’s agricultural supply chain: building silos to store grain, a fleet of barges and trucks to transport it, and port facilities to export it to the world.
When the war broke out, Nibulon had to adapt, and quickly. Nearly half of the company’s staff either fled or joined the army. Mykolaiv port – through which the company usually exports five million tonnes of grain every year – was blockaded, and several Nibulon ships were lost to Russian shelling. Russian forces occupied 75,000 hectares of Nibulon farmland.
In desperation, Vadaturskyy senior invested $22-million to build a new terminal on the banks of the Danube River, from where grain can go by barge along the river and into the European Union.
The day after construction began, he was killed, alongside his wife. A Russian missile slammed through the wall of their home in Mykolaiv. “The missile exploded 3.5 metres away from my father and mother. It was very hard to believe it was an accident,” his son tells The Continent, although he has been unable to prove that his father was deliberately targeted.
Vadaturskyy junior, who took over as chief executive, speaks from a company boardroom in the port of Mykolaiv, Nibulon’s main export hub. It is quiet. There is no movement of trains or trucks or barges, and skeleton crews maintain ships that have not sailed in months. The enormous silos overflow with grain that has nowhere to go.
There is no movement of trains or trucks or barges. The silos overflow with grain that has nowhere to go.
Nibulon has been heavily affected by Russia’s Black Sea blockade (in 2022, the company’s revenues were down by two thirds). But, as Vadaturskyy sees it, this is a short-term difficulty that distracts from a much more fundamental problem.
At the moment, he explains, there is plenty of Ukrainian grain to export, either through the Black Sea corridor or other, more expensive routes. This is because 2021 was a bumper harvest, and although 2022 was poor, there was still a surplus. “So politicians looked for a way to export the crop we have. But no politician is thinking what is after the corridor… You can have the corridor, but if there’s no goods to export through the corridor? How do we solve that?”
Ukrainian farmers planted 40% fewer crops this season than in 2021 because many have fled their farms for safety, or joined the army. Others can no longer make the finances add up. Still others cannot access their land at all: Last year, the agriculture ministry said that 30% of the country’s farmland was either occupied by Russian forces or had been mined by Russia.
Vadaturskyy predicts that by 2024 or 2025 “Ukraine could be out of the export business”. That means a global shortfall of more than 50-million tonnes of grain. To put this in perspective, that is more than the entirety of North Africa’s grain consumption. “We can’t replace it… It would take every region elsewhere producing perfectly, and perfect weather, to make up the shortfall,” he says.
In a rapidly warming world, the chances of perfect weather and perfect production are slim to nonexistent. Droughts in the United States, alongside extreme weather in Brazil, India and China, mean Ukraine is not the only place struggling to grow to vital crops.
Those shortages are adding up. At the moment, even if prices are rising, the world is able to grow enough food to feed everyone. But what happens when there is simply not enough food to go around? “It will be a new reality,” says Vadaturskyy. He does not want to contemplate what that new reality might look like.