Ukraine’s landscape on global food supply

Geoeconomic impact of a near-border conflict

1. Disruptions in the production and distribution of goods from Ukraine and Russia have contributed to a global food crisis, (UNCTAD 2022). Affected critically are 30-odd African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian countries with food insecurity because at least 20 percent of their agricultural commodity imports come from Ukraine or Russia.

2. Before the war, Ukraine provided 46 percent of global sunflower oil exports, 9 percent of the wheat exports, 17 percent of the barley, and 12 percent of the maize on global markets, (U.S. Department of Agriculture, April 2022, Ukraine Agricultural Production and Trade).

It has to be said that Ukraine and Russia together accounted for 73 percent of sunflower oil exports, 33 percent of wheat, and 27 percent of barley.

3. The conflict had sent tanks rolling through fields, covered farmland with mines, and artillery shells landing on crops. Fuel and fertilizer prices soared. Labour had became scarce. Some farmers left to join the fighting; others died or fled as their villages were bombarded.

4. From the data extracted from  Planet Labs satellites and the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 mission that were acquired, and later analyzed, with NASA Harvest, about 22 percent of Ukraine’s farmland - including 28 percent of winter crops and 18 percent of summer crops - is presently under Russian control.

(These data on land occupation are partly extracted from the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project.)

Unfortunately, neoliberalism-is-neo-imperialism entity like the American Enterprise Institute created the Critical Threats Project in 2009 with the objective to "inform and educate policymakers, the intelligence and military communities,  to understand the nuance and scale of threats to America’s security."


5. The conflict's ramification is that wheat prices have risen by more than  10 percent in 2022 and have nearly doubled since 2019. Fertilizer prices have also  skyrocketed, thereby forcing farmers likely to use less of it, and would see lower yields in the seasons ahead:

An immediate consequence is the impact on our poultry farming and the ensuing inflationary trend in this TikTok country.