Russia e Ukraine produce only a third of the world's wheat and barley, but most of this is sold to African countries, which import 40% of their needs from them, while Rwanda, Tanzania e Senegal arrive at 60%, theEgypt to 80%. The grain freeze cost Kiev 11% of its GDP, while the entire sector is worth only 5% for Moscow. Last month, according to AGFlow, Ukrainian grain exports fell by 32%, while Russian exports increased by 18%, bringing $ 1,9 billion into the Federation's coffers.
The president of the African Union, Macky Sall was in Sochi, at the residence of the Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin. He has received assurances that the grain crisis will be resolved in 3-5 weeks.
African states, said Sall, however, are not only worried about the blockade on grain exports from Ukraine imposed by the Kremlin, but also and above all the exclusion of Russian banks from the Swift system for interbank transactions. This sanction, in fact, not only damages Moscow, but is putting everyone's payments at risk and therefore the possibility of African states to buy cereals from Russia.
Sall he then recalled the data of the FAO on the state of food security and nutrition in the world in 2020: the numbers indicated that 282 million people, more than a third of the undernourished individuals in the world, lived in Africa. To these, we must add another 46 million Africans at risk of hunger and malnutrition due to the Covid-19 pandemic and families today affected by the increases in cereals.
Days ago also the Chad declared a food and nutrition emergency. According to the World Food Program, in Horn of Africa more than 14 million people are on the verge of hunger, 40 million when you consider the wholeWest Africa. The country that suffers most from the dependence of Russian wheat is theEgypt which at the beginning of June bought 465.000 tons of the cereal from Russia, Romania e Bulgaria at a cost of $ 480 per ton, a 141% increase over the last purchase, made before the Russian invasion.
To counter the danger of hunger, Cairo has announced to ban the trade in wheat by third parties at least until the end of the summer with the aim of obtaining complete control of the market.
The moves of the UN
In the meantime theUN accelerates negotiations with Russia to unblock the wheat crisis, but Moscow is calling for sanctions to be lifted, suggesting an overland passage from Belarus. Kiev, for its part, remains firm on the solution of exporting the 20 million tons through its ports. Kiev then accused Moscow of stealing its wheat and selling it to Syria. On May 2, the freighter Matros Pozynich set sail from Sevastopol and crossed the Bosphorus to go to Alexandria, but in reality it then headed for the Syrian port of Latakia to place the stolen grain.
The agreement being worked on at the UN headquarters provides for the de-mining and unblocking of Ukrainian ports, in particular Odessa, from where the grain cargoes escorted by Turkish ships should leave. In return, Russia would get the right to export its cereals and fertilizers without primary or secondary sanctions. All guaranteed by a resolution of Security Council.
The American ambassador to the UN Thomas Greenfield he guaranteed that his government is ready to deliver letters of guarantee to the insurance companies and banks involved, but made it clear that food products are already not subject to sanctions.
The Russian colleague Fog he answered: "we did not put the mines in the ports. If the Ukrainians remove them, we are ready to guarantee the safe passage of the grain ”. Putin, however, has asked that it only pass through the ports under his control, demanding a general relaxation of sanctions. Guterres himself spoke Friday with lukashenko, which confirmed his willingness to bring Ukrainian wheat to the Baltic ports by land, in exchange for the green light to use the same ports to export Belarusian goods.
Washington is thinking of building temporary warehouses to save the harvest, and is studying ground transportation that reaches Europe without passing through Belarus. Behind the scenes, at the UN and in the US, it is repeated that Putin has the levers to avoid the humanitarian catastrophe: "if he does not use them, it will demonstrate how he is ready to sacrifice millions of lives to satisfy the ambition to impose his power".
The role of Turkey
Ibrahim Kalin, spokesman for the president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in an interview with the news agency Anadolu assured that Ukrainian grain supplies could resume soon through the Black Sea and straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. To unlock the resumption of exports could be the signature of a memorandum on the occasion of the visit of the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which will be in Ankara on Wednesday.
Kalin then said that "a decision will be made and supplies will begin as soon as possible. I can say this: if for example we reach an agreement tomorrow, the sea freight will start 3-5 weeks later. First you need to clear the sea and create a corridor ".
The appeal of Italy
The Foreign Minister, Luigi Di Maio, at the G7 in Germany reiterated the urgency of an unblocking of grain exports from the regions affected by the conflict in Ukraine: "The World War on Bread is already underway and we must stop it. We risk political instability in Africa, the proliferation of terrorist organizations, coups d'etat: this can produce the grain crisis we are experiencing. If we do not stop the world war of bread, the food crisis of wheat, we could find ourselves not only with new wars, greater instability in Africa, but above all with greater migratory flows. We must not forget that there are 30 million tons of wheat blocked in Ukrainian ports by Russian warships, what we are doing is working for Russia to unblock the export of grain in Ukrainian ports ”.