West, UN inflating impact of Ukraine grain deal demise

Now that Russia has pulled out of the Black Sea deal that allowed war-wracked Ukraine to export grain and help abate food shortages in Africa and elsewhere after Moscow blockaded Kyiv’s ports, Western powers and their tool, the United Nations, are busy playing up the likely impact on global food supplies.

Russia cited, among other reasons, a lack of reciprocal action on its own food and fertiliser exports, insisting its decision was final.

This promptly touched off a wave of scaremongering. UN chief António Guterres responded that grain prices, which, he claimed, had dipped under the deal (though the truth is more complicated), had started rising. Guterres warned that the decision will “strike a blow to people in need everywhere”, sentiments that were echoed by US officials. Asked by a US broadcaster who she thought would be most affected by the decision, the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said, reflexively,” The global South”.

We heard more of the same bile from European Union officials. EU foreign affairs head Josep Borrell Fontelles was quoted calling Russia’s move “unjustified”, arguing that Putin had turned “people’s hunger into a weapon”.

This self-serving rhetoric allows Western officials to sidestep an unpleasant truth about the grain accord— it was a boon not for the global South but for rich countries. Look at the numbers.

As of May 2023, figures from the Black Sea Grain Initiative Joint Steering Committee quoted by the European Union Council show, more than 30 million tonnes of Ukrainian grain and other food items were exported under the initiative.

Where did the grain go? The committee claims 64 per cent of wheat and 51 per cent of maize went to “developing countries”. But this set includes China, the world’s second-largest economy, which, the UN says, received 25 per cent of the 32.9 million tonnes exported, thus muddling the true picture. Some 44 per cent of exports went to high-income countries.

Only 655,000 tonnes of wheat left Ukrainian ports destined for Afghanistan, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. However, Russian officials have argued that most of the grain found its way to “rich” countries. Their view makes sense if China is included, as it should, among the rich countries.

Russia’s decision to quit the grain deal opens the window for us to point out again that we wouldn’t be here if Western powers hadn’t instigated the conflict. As the American political scientist and famed critic of US foreign policy John Mearsheimer has argued, US efforts to expand Nato eastward to include Ukraine and other former Soviet republics and the push to give Kyiv a pathway to EU membership had set the stage for the war.

Mearsheimer told a journalist a week after Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year: “(A)ll the trouble in this case really started in April 2008, at the Nato summit in Bucharest, where afterwards Nato issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of Nato. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand.”

The Western-based news outlets that we rely on for information about the world are saturated with barely veiled pro-Ukrainian propaganda and boosterism, and voices like Mearsheimer’s, which deserve greater play, are drowned out. The latest warnings about expected global food shortages resulting from Russia’s action are part of the West’s anti-Putin pile-on.

Mr Gekonde is a media consultant. [email protected].