At the beginning of his rule, Russian President Vladimir Putin made fun of climate change.

One or two degrees more could lead to richer grain harvests, he said in 2003, but that might not be so bad after all.

In the meantime, Putin speaks quite differently, for example warning of the dangers of thawing permafrost.

But the theory that the agriculture of northern countries like Russia could gain from warming is still widespread.

Katharina Wagner

Business correspondent for Russia and the CIS based in Moscow.

  • Follow I follow

The “New York Times”, for example, published a large article a year ago under the title “How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis”: The largest country in the world is best positioned globally to make profit from the warming, it said because a lot more land would be usable for the cultivation of grain and at the same time climate refugees from Bangladesh and India could move as workers to Siberia, which was previously scarcely populated.

Wheat cultivation is booming

Indeed, it appears that Russia's grain production has benefited from warming so far. As far as the cultivation of wheat is concerned, the country has made an astonishing development: from the world's largest grain importer, which was the Soviet Union, Russia has become the largest wheat exporter since the beginning of the millennium, which represents a good fifth of the global wheat market. In 2017, Russia overtook the United States and Canada for the first time. According to some experts, this is at least partly due to rising temperatures.

According to Andrej Sizow from the agricultural consultancy firm Sovecon, the milder winters in the particularly fertile areas, the Black Sea region and in central Russia, mean that winter crops no longer freeze to death.

And since they bring higher yields than the summer crops, Russia has been able to grow more and more grain and, above all, wheat over the years.

There were other reasons: the opportunity to lease land, the opening of the world market to Russian exporters, higher productivity and better technology.

Weather-related fluctuations in yield

Finally, the sharp devaluation of the ruble that followed Western sanctions following Russia's military interference in Ukraine in 2014 gave Russia's exporters a competitive advantage. The Russian “counter-sanctions”, a ban on imports of Western food, promoted domestic production of vegetables and dairy products and caused prices for Russian consumers to rise significantly, but had little effect on the grain sector, as grain has not been imported for a long time.

Some scientists see it differently from Sizow;

according to them, without warming Russia could have grown even more wheat.

According to Florian Schierhorn, who researches transformation economies for agriculture in Russia at the Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Development, a study from 2011 shows that Russian wheat yields between 1980 and 2008 would have been 15 percent higher if the climate had not changed during this period .

In addition, there would be “weather-related fluctuations in yield”, ie crop failures due to too dry and too hot summers, but also heavy rain and extreme frost, which “have been high for many years and are still increasing”.