Closing of Ukraine ports could trigger food catastrophe, UN warns

Geneva

AS Russia gears up for a military offensive in eastern and southern Ukraine, the United Nations (UN) warned on Saturday (Apr 16) that closures of ports on the Black Sea could trigger a global food catastrophe that yields starvation, mass migration and political instability.

Ukraine's silos are brimming with grains that, in a normal year, help feed 400 million people.

But the supply chain has been disrupted by the war, with ports unable to operate normally near the heart of a war zone.

"You pull that off the market," David Beasley, executive director of the UN World Food Programme, said in a phone call from Ukraine's western city of Lviv, "(and) you begin to realise you have a perfect storm coming our way."

The challenge for global food supplies is keeping open the southern ports of Odesa, Chornomorsk, Yuzhny and Mykolaiv on the Black Sea coast, which are in Ukrainian hands but threatened by Russia's anticipated offensive.

Beasley said that he had spoken by phone and set out his concerns in writing, but that the Kremlin had not responded to any of the UN's concerns.

"We have made no headway whatsoever," he said.

"This is where the international community has got to come in and make some very serious decisions about protecting ports for humanitarian purposes and opening up ports for the whole world, because the whole world is going to pay a price if we don't get the ports open."

Some 45 million people in 38 countries are "knocking on famine's door as we speak", thanks to the cumulative toll of wars, droughts and the Covid-19 pandemic, Beasley said.

He said that he is urging leaders of the Group of 7 leading industrial nations and other governments to get unused agricultural land back into production to offset the possible loss of Ukrainian and Russian food supplies but warned that global food market shortages and further dramatic hikes in food prices would spell disaster for poor countries.

"You will have famine, death and starvation," he said. "You will have the destabilisation of several nations, and you will have mass migration." NYTIMES