Politicians and agrifood lobbyists are using skyrocketing wheat prices in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to justify a sustained attack on EU plans to reduce pesticide use, Olivier De Schutter and Jennifer Clapp argue.
Olivier De Schutter is co-chair of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, and a professor at UCLouvain; Jennifer Clapp is a food security specialist with the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, vice chair of the UN’s High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition, and professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada.
In 2022, news headlines were filled with panic about global food shortages in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Wheat prices spiked to record highs as Russia blockaded Ukraine’s grain exports in the Black Sea.
Politicians and agrifood lobbyists used the situation to justify a sustained attack on EU plans to reduce pesticide use, claiming that maintaining chemical levels were needed to ensure food security.
Now, one year on, a very different story has emerged. Farmers in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria are up in arms about a glut of Ukrainian grain dumped on their doorstep. Last week, Poland’s Agriculture Minister Henryk Kowalczyk was forced to resign over the issue, and Polish farmers were driven to protest President Zelenskyy’s first official visit to Warsaw since the war.
These farmers have reason to feel aggrieved. Much of Ukraine’s grain harvest was redirected onto rail, and all tariffs and quotas into the EU were lifted to ensure the grain would not be trapped and go to waste. Unprecedented inflows of Ukrainian wheat, worth €1.17 billion, have crossed into neighbouring EU countries, forcing down local prices, and leaving many farmers’ produce languishing in warehouses.
The produce was meant to transit through those countries to international markets. But much of it has instead stayed in-country, taking up space in silos and entering the local market, due to a lack of transport capacity and rail infrastructure issues. Decreased demand from North African countries who have had to cut back food imports as their economies weaken in the context of rising interest rates has also contributed.
So are we facing too little food production, or too much?
The answer is neither. The glut of grain on markets in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria shows the ongoing food price crisis is not and never was about a shortage of food. It is all about distribution and dysfunctional markets.
Polish farmers are suffering now as their incomes plummet. But the dysfunction in food markets is a global phenomenon. For decades, farmers in many countries across the global South have been similarly undercut by the dumping of cheap foods onto their markets from Western countries that subsidised food production and export.
Many of those countries became reliant on food imports, which has left them particularly vulnerable to global market disruptions. These countries are now grappling with rising food import bills and ballooning debt repayments that threaten new waves of hunger, even as there is a glut of grain in Europe.
These kinds of outcomes are products of a failing industrial food system that prioritises the over-production of few staple food commodities for globalised just-in-time supply chains; and that encourages monopolisation by just a handful of agribusinesses – like the grain giants who saw record profits this past year as food markets went haywire.
It is a set-up that systematically fails to get food where it is needed, prevent rising hunger, or deliver stable livelihoods for farmers.
Moreover, food systems built on these layers of concentration are not just extremely vulnerable to shocks like war, climate change and financial instability. They are also prone to boom-bust cycles that habitually result in blockages, gluts and volatility that harm farmers and consumers the world over.
In the immediate term, impacted farmers in eastern regions deserve compensation. Funding for this could come from a windfall tax on the four-grain giants who have made record profits as food prices surged.
More effort needs to go into ensuring that grain can flow out of Ukraine and out of Romania, Poland and Bulgaria – and to the places that need it, i.e. to highly food-insecure regions. It should not be dumped on local markets nor fed to pigs and cows.
But it is also time policymakers acknowledge that the industrial food system is failing to deliver resilient food security or financial stability for farmers. Just producing more and more, and exploiting natural resources to eke out higher yields in the name of ‘food security’, is a recipe for continued chaos. And they have to end the race to the bottom and stop pitting farmers against each other.
Yes, we will always need equitable trade. But our food system needs to be completely transformed and diversified, to make it much more resilient in the face of shocks – and less prone to damaging boom-bust cycles, speculative bubbles, and dumping.
Farmers need to be able to produce a much greater diversity of foods for more local-regional markets.
And they need to receive a fair and stable price from consumers.
Source: Euractiv