War in Ukraine Is Worsening East Africa’s Food Crisis

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned last week that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is leading to a growing hunger crisis in African countries. There is no solution to the problem “without bringing back the agriculture production of Ukraine and the food and fertilizer production of Russia and Belarus into world markets despite the war,” Guterres said.

The United Nations has also called for Black Sea ports to be reopened to allow grains from Ukraine to reach Ethiopia and South Sudan as well as Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Currently, those ports are under a Russian blockade, which Josef Schmidhuber, an economist with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), called a “grotesque situation” because in Ukraine, there are “nearly 25 million tons of grain that could be exported but that cannot leave the country,” he said at a press briefing on Friday.

The indirect effect from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is worsening an ongoing food and security crisis in parts of East Africa—with Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan forecast to be hardest hit, said the U.N. World Food Program (WFP).

The Horn of Africa region is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years. Three consecutive rainy seasons have been dry. On occasions when rain has come, it has been extreme. October to December 2019 saw the wettest period, affecting 3.4 million people and heralding a swarm of locusts that further devoured crops.

Temperatures in parts of the region have soared to record highs, linked to climate change. Some 3 million livestock have died across southern Ethiopia and within the arid and semi-arid regions of Kenya since mid-2021. The U.N. said up to 20 million people in the Horn of Africa could go hungry this year.

African leaders are struggling to control rising inflation and tumbling currencies. Sanctions against Moscow have limited exports and raised costs for commodities such as wheat, gas, and oil. Meanwhile, fertilizer costs have risen beyond what most farmers can afford, threatening next year’s harvest as fewer crops are planted.

Ethiopia has already endured 10 major droughts since 1980. Now, amid a war in the northern Tigray region, the price of fertilizer has shot up 200 percent in the country. As the Ethiopian Reporter tells it, April’s food item inflation reached an unprecedented 43 percent.

Even before the Ukraine war, drought in Kenya had already caused a 70 percent slump in crop production, and more than 3 million people in the country faced acute hunger. (Russia provides 67 percent of Kenyan wheat imports, and Ukraine provides 22 percent.) If the rains fail to materialize by June, around 6 million people in neighboring Somalia—38 percent of the population—face extreme food insecurity, humanitarian groups warn.

As aid and attention has shifted to Ukraine, an appeal by the WFP to prevent famine in the Horn of Africa raised just 4 percent of the required amount. “We are most definitely now sitting on the brink of catastrophe,” Rein Paulsen, director of emergencies and resilience at the FAO, said in February. “Time is running out.”

Source: Foreign Policy