Who is responsible for the global hunger crisis?

The Foreign Policy website published a report that talked about an imminent global food crisis due to the Russian war on Ukraine, and identifying who is responsible for that crisis, and referred to a recent report by the World Food Program saying that if the war continues in Ukraine, about 47 million people In 81 countries they will join the bloated ranks of those who are acutely hungry.

The report pointed out that even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the world was facing a wave of increasing hunger, with about 276 million people facing acute hunger.

According to the report, listening to Zhou Dongyu, director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), you would never know that Russia was bombing Ukrainian farms and granaries, imposing a naval blockade on Ukrainian grain exports, and generally accelerating the global food emergency that It threatens to put tens of millions more people into a severe hunger crisis.

He added that since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Zhou - a former senior agricultural official in the Chinese government - has diligently avoided issues related to Russia's responsibility, talking loosely about the impact of the war in Ukraine on food supplies, while remaining silent about The Russian blockade of the Black Sea prevented Ukraine from exporting millions of tons of grain to the world market.

Meanwhile, Zhou has repeatedly echoed Russia's concerns that international restrictions on its exports are responsible for growing food scarcity.

In a statement issued on March 25, he warned that "sanctions are a double-edged sword. To prevent a global crisis in food security, we must ensure that global trade continues to operate smoothly and openly. Exports should not be restricted or taxed, and exports should be maintained Markets are open.

The report pointed out that the war in Ukraine presented a critical test for the Chinese leadership in the FAO in a crisis with global political, economic and humanitarian repercussions that could help shape the balance of power in Europe and beyond.

Both Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington have raised concerns in the past that Chinese leaders of international organizations will not be able to act as impartial civil servants, and instead serve the interests of Beijing and its allies.

In recent weeks, the administration of US President Joe Biden has been seeking to drive a wedge between Russia and China, and is putting pressure on Beijing not to take steps to protect Moscow from the sting of sanctions.

This effort has been extended to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

American and European policy makers outraged

The FAO Director-General's cautious public statements infuriated US and European policymakers, who pressed him to emulate UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who has openly and repeatedly denounced the Russian war as a flagrant violation of the UN Charter.

For the West, Zhou's handling of the Ukraine crisis is a critical test of whether a new generation of Chinese leaders for international organizations can act with integrity.

"Russia's actions affect the entire global food supply chain, as the world is still grappling with the pandemic and the devastating repercussions of climate change,” she said, adding, “FAO must ally itself with the UN Secretary-General and the overwhelming majority of UN members in condemning Russia’s actions, calling for its immediate withdrawal, and explicitly linking Russia’s actions to exacerbating global hunger.”

The Rome-based food agency is at loggerheads over competing Western and Russian accounts of the causes of the global hunger crisis, as part of a propaganda battle between East and West aimed at shifting responsibility to what many policymakers fear is an escalating global food disaster.

The United States, which will assume the rotating presidency of the Security Council next month, plans to host a high-level meeting on food security, chaired by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

Black Sea

The United States and its Western allies stress that the responsibility for the recent surge lies squarely with Russia, because its military intervention has deprived the world of much-needed wheat and grain.

Its blockade of the Black Sea leads to one of the world's largest exporters of wheat and other staple foods, as well as attacks on Ukrainian farms;

To the soaring cost of global food prices at a time when supplies are already dangerously tight.

An FAO adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the agency's response to the Ukraine crisis, said Zhou's public comments were "essentially anti-sanctions and largely reflect the position of the Chinese government."

"However, there are some good arguments for exceptions to sanctions on fertilizer and other agricultural inputs, and to make these arguments fit with previous FAO policies opposing trade restrictions, I actually believe that FAO would have come out with the same result if the Director-General had not been Chinese."

Penalties

But the general lack of interest in FAO's position on Russia's actions is alarming, said Joe Krause, policy director for transparency and accountability at ONE, an anti-poverty advocacy group.

"I imagine that the sanctions imposed on Russia did not help in establishing food security, but I do not see it as the central issue, there is also very concrete evidence that Russia is deliberately targeting farmers," Krause said.

"I hope people in official positions of power will look at the evidence, and if there is clear evidence that one side is targeting food supplies that could cause tens of millions to starve, they should tell the truth," he added.

For Courtney Fong, an assistant professor at Macquarie University in Australia who studies China's role in international organizations, the US pressure campaign is part of a test.

"By pressuring the head of the FAO to issue a public condemnation of the Russian invasion, the Biden administration is investigating how China operates in multilateral institutions, another arena of strategic competition. Will Chinese officials who head UN agencies stick to China's line of the Ukrainian situation or join the community?" she said. International condemnation of the Ukrainian war and the repercussions of the Russian invasion?

conflict

"China emphasizes leadership in technocratic and depoliticized global governance. From the Chinese government's point of view, it is better for FAO to address the emerging food crisis by avoiding Zhou's high politics and focusing on his institution's mission of defeating hunger," Fong added.

The dispute comes as Guterres is sounding the alarm about the global impact of the war, saying the conflict is exacerbating a food, energy and financing crisis that is "already hitting some of the world's most vulnerable people, countries and economies".

Guterres said the combination of war in Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and a lack of international funds to help poor countries weather these crises is creating a "perfect storm that threatens to destroy the economies of many developing countries."

He added that 36 countries depend on Russia and Ukraine for more than half of their wheat imports, including some of the world's poorest and most vulnerable countries.

Russia has sought to downplay the role of its invasion of Ukraine, arguing that the global hunger crisis has been precipitated by US sanctions and conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya.

"The conflict in Ukraine has become just another drop in the bucket of conflicts, a bucket that has been filling for 20 years now," Viktor Vasiliev, Russia's envoy to the United Nations food agencies wrote in a letter on April 8 to the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization.

"The special military operation carried out by Russia in Ukraine has little impact on global agricultural production," he said in a statement to the Executive Board of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). "The main problem is the disruption of industrial transport and financial chains due to the imposition of unilateral sanctions." and illegal against our country by the West. In fact, a full-scale economic war has been declared on Russia."

But Russia, the world's largest wheat exporter, has warned that it will use food as a weapon of war and limit its exports to friendly countries only. "We will only supply food and crops to our friends," Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and current national security adviser, wrote recently on Telegram.

The US State Department spokesman rejected Russia's claim that Western sanctions are contributing to the global food crisis, noting that trade in food, humanitarian supplies and vital products such as fertilizers are all exempt from US sanctions.

"It is Putin's unjustified war against Ukraine that has put millions around the world at risk of food insecurity," the spokesperson, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Foreign Policy. "In doing so, Putin ensured that the cost of his reckless campaign would be felt by the world's most vulnerable citizens."

global food prices

Ukraine and Russia provide about 30% of the world's wheat and barley, a fifth of corn, and more than half of sunflower oil, according to United Nations figures.

In March, global food prices were 34% higher than the previous year, while gas and fertilizer prices more than doubled, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Exports of food, fertilizer, and other basic commodities are largely exempt from sanctions, providing Russia with an opportunity to sell on the open market.

But Russia has imposed its own restrictions on fertilizer exports, increasing pressure on an already tight global fertilizer market.

But Western financial sanctions and other measures against Russia and its main ally Belarus have limited food exports.

For example, Belarus, which produces about 20% of the world's fertilizer potash, cannot ship through the Baltic Sea due to export restrictions imposed on the government last year.

The restrictions were imposed after Belarus forced a Ryanair airliner to land in Minsk, where the government arrested an opposition activist.

Western financial sanctions have exacerbated humanitarian crises in other countries, especially in Yemen, deterring international traders from importing food, fuel and medicine into the conflict-torn country for fear of sanctions.