This CNN report on the Ukraine war has to be upsetting anyone who cares about food prices:
Russian forces are stealing farm equipment and thousands of tons of grain from Ukrainian farmers in areas they have occupied, as well as targeting food storage sites with artillery, multiple sources have told CNN.
The phenomenon has accelerated in recent weeks as Russian units have tightened their grip on parts of the rich agricultural regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine, the sources said. Sowing operations in many areas have since been disrupted or abandoned.
The actions of the Russian forces may threaten the harvest this year in one of the world’s most important grain-producing countries. The volumes involved are said to be huge.
And
“They took away a new harvester, which was recently delivered to us. They took away the sowing complex, a large and expensive machine. And they overturned one of the tractors, driving around drunk. Now it’s lying in a ditch.” Tsvigun said.
As for his grain — 2,000 tons of it — Tsvigun said “most likely, they took it too. But about the harvesters, this is already a fact.”
This sort of tactic is meant to ruin and sow terror, but it also marks the Russians not as a civilized people, but bandits. Desperate bandits, too, because no matter how much they steal, it’s unlikely to add a lot to their currency reserves, their reputations, or really much else, except their own casualty count. They’re modern day Vandals, but as more parents lose sons and daughters to Putin’s War, the less support there will be for the Russian government, which is a risk in itself.
And, worse, in our highly interconnected world, a war can trigger problems half way around the globe, as AL-Monitor reports:
The Russian-Ukraine war’s impact on food and energy prices has hit Turkey’s economy especially hard, where annual consumer inflation reached a two-decade high last month.
Sibel Hurtas writes that the rising costs have exposed long-running problems in the country’s agricultural sector, including its increasing reliance on imported materials to make livestock fodder and fertilizers. (Russia and Ukraine are providers of such materials.)
Plus, Mustafa Sonmez explains why Turkey’s chronic income inequalities are exacerbated by the soaring inflation, which is set to top 100% in the fall.
There may be a backlash even for the Egypt-Sudan-Ethiopia contretemps, as AL-Monitor suggests in the above article, around the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, already a flashpoint as Egypt’s primary water source may be dammed by Ethiopians hungry for more power and control of the water.
Ukraine is a leading food producing country, and Russia’s decision to ruin it, even if only temporarily, could lead to higher food prices, and as food prices in this scenario function in inverse correlation to food scarcity, we may even see starvation in some sectors of the globe. In turn, NATO and allied countries will need to consider punishment for the miscreants of Moscow, and that, in turn, may increase the risk that Russia will try to use nuclear weapons.
If that happens, then we’ll discover how well their nuclear weapons, inherited from the Soviet Union to some extent, function – and whether or not the United States actually has a rumored anti-missile technology that has never been formally revealed.
