137 - Starving the World's Poor

            Among the catastrophic conjunctions that the peoples of the globe must endure in 2023 are the compounding of Putin’s vanity war in Ukraine together with climatic perturbation. The UN World Food Program estimates that more than 345 million world citizens – an unthinkable number -- are at risk of “acute food insecurity,” thanks to war, drought, and elevated prices.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has combined with massive bouts of drought (interspersed with sudden cascades of rain) to imperil as many as 10 million hapless inhabitants of the Horn of Africa, plus millions more in the rest of eastern and southern Africa. USAID Administrator Samantha Power accused Putin of “spiking global hunger when people are already on the brink of famine.”

In addition to desperate days in the Horn of Africa, varied sectors of the populations of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, war-consumed Yemen, and much of Pakistan (since experiencing once in a millennium floods), are this year bitterly tasting deep hunger.

            It has not rained seriously in Somalia, Northern Kenya, southern Ethiopia, and much of Sudan for five years. In a part of the world where irrigated crops are rare and subsistence farming is entirely rain-dependent, citizens rely on home grown resources to subsist. In (southern) Somalia’s case, this means bananas, plantains, sorghum, rice, beans, and maize. It also means slaughtering goats and sheep, ruminants that must graze if they, in turn, are destined for human consumption.  But all of it takes water.

           Twelve years ago, during another major drought in the Horn of Africa, 2 million people were affected and as many as 260,000 people died of malnutrition in Somalia alone.  This year promises to be even worse, especially if the monsoon fails to continue to deliver steady rains and the no longer reliable intertropical convergence does the same. Farther south in Africa it is almost as dry; the water in the vast lake behind the Kariba Dam’s hydropower facility on the Zambezi River, downstream from the Victoria Falls, has fallen to 1 percent of capacity (crippling electricity availability in both Zimbabwe and Zambia.

            In normal years, Somalia’s 18 million people purchase wheat, and sometimes maize, to provide or supplement whatever they can grow on their own. Like many Middle Easterners and North Africans, they bake bread from Ukrainian or Russian wheat.  But last year and this year the usual supplies of wheat, barley, and other grains have been either difficult to obtain or vastly expensive. Egypt and Lebanon are particularly short of their customary staples.

            When their own crops have failed because of drought, their animals have died for the same reason, and durum wheat is either scarce or unavailable in the stores, Somalis go hungry and die in their millions. According to the World Food Program, approximately 10 of 18 million existing Somali are today malnourished, with food insecurity levels rising, and a famine about to be declared independent of Somali government political preferences. Forceful disruptions to already limited relief food distributions by the Islamist al-Shabaab insurgents across Somalia adds to turmoil and calamitous outcomes. In 2023 alone, 5 or 6 million Somali could die.

         Strenuously urged by the UN’s secretary general and Turkey, in July Putin stopped fully blockading Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, thus allowing some Ukrainian wheat, barley, and sunflower oil to reach needy importers in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. But those export flows have since slowed because of Russian interference, overt restrictions on ship movements, and “inspection” delays in the Black Sea and in the Turkish-monitored passage of vessels through the Bosphorus strait.

Russia still blocks seven of Ukraine’s ten Black Sea ports. As a result of war and Russian machinations, only 3.5 million metric tons of Ukrainian grain and oilseeds have been exported, down from the 7 million metric tons that Ukraine exported monthly before Putin’s invasion. (Ukraine still has great supplies of grain, waiting to be shipped, although Russia recently has been targeting Ukrainian grain silos with missile and drones as well as the electricity grid that powers Ukraine’s export terminals, plunging Ukraine into darkness and her people into hunger.

         This enforced supply retrenchment, plus Russia’s slowing of its own wheat exports because of the war’s overall disruption of commerce, has systematically deepened food insecurities everywhere. So has inflation, another fallout from war, raised the procurement as well as the transportation expenses of imported grain, especially in the world’s poorest regions. In North America, wheat and barley prices have risen by as much as 60 percent, in places like Sudan by 1,900 percent. Many states simply have too little cash to purchase as much grain as they did last year and the year before. 

Moreover, because natural gas is such a key component of fertilizer and its costs have skyrocketed, fertilizer (much of it derived from a Russia at war) has become scarce and doubled in price. Consequently, countries import fewer tons of fertilizer and farmers use it more sparingly than before; crop yields this year will fall, harvests will be less abundant, and food scarcities will compound. The war in Ukraine has tumbled and battered the global food chain just as the rains have faltered in key sections of the globe.  Power’s deputy says that “the effects of this war are hugely disruptive. Putin is pushing millions…into poverty.”

         Saving the lives of Somali, Yemenis, Afghans, Ukrainians, and many more depends on massive food assistance from the United States, Europe, and Asia, on lower prices for critical commodities, and on a swift end to hostilities in Ukraine. Saving Ukraine will save the world.