Victoria Shevchenko
17 июн. 2022 г.
The war in Ukraine could have a huge impact on countries located thousands of kilometers from the region of Eastern Europe, an analyst of the World Food Programme warned.
The conflict has already directly disrupted the physical, logistical and market dynamics of the Black Sea region, a key route for the delivery of wheat, feed grains and sunflower products to world markets, especially the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
This has led to an increase in prices, and as the end of the war approaches, this trend will continue.
One part of the solution could come from other producing countries that could feed the rest of the world.
But this does not seem easy, as 23 countries have already announced severe restrictions on food exports, or even outright bans because of extreme climatic events and fears of domestic scarcity.
India was one of the major countries that imposed a ban because of the intense and irrational heat.
For Eugenio Dacrem, an economic analyst from the World Food Programme, this is "a serious problem".
"India was supposed to be the last resort and the last hope for a stable wheat market."
Dakrema said that there were countries with "domestic production deficits", and only a few of them would be able to import "key necessities such as wheat". This will lead to instability and famine.
As early as March, the United Nations World Food Programme predicted that if the conflict did not end by the end of May, there would be an additional 47 million people in the world suffering from food insecurity.
But it seems worse because the exposure has been even more in the last two months than expected.
"As the war is not over, the problems in the international food market are not over, they are probably only just beginning. It is quite natural to think that this will only increase, not be decided".
Pakistan and Kenya are some of the countries that, according to Dacrema, have already had protests related to increasing food volumes.
The World Food Programme also stressed that, along with the conflict, we have entered a new normal' era, when droughts, floods, hurricanes and cyclones decimate agriculture and livestock production many times over, and all of them may very soon lead to mass migration.