Russia may turn food into a weapon in future crises

Agricultural production – traditionally a region in which Russia has performed poorly due to the low quality of its cold, drought-prone agricultural land – has boomed over the past decade. This is important, as food exports have long been a significant contributor to security and diplomacy, and one in which the US and the EU have an inherent advantage. Even though President Vladimir Putin played a weak hand in his invasion of Ukraine, food is one area where Russia’s dominance is set to grow rather than increase in the coming decades.

The rise and fall of the Soviet Union was caused by grain. Agricultural production declined during World War I, when conscription changed more than 10 million farmers from food producers to consumers, leading to the food riots culminating in the Revolutions of 1917.

Collectivization and brutal famine in the 1930s killed nearly 4 million Ukrainians, stagnating agricultural production where, by the 1970s, the USSR was importing an unprecedented amount of grain. Moscow’s inability to pay for its grain purchases due to the fall in oil prices in the mid-1980s reduced the value of its petroleum exports, a major factor in the collapse of Soviet communism, rationing and starvation. Amidst the new fear of

This situation has reversed dramatically in recent years. Since the 2014 invasion of Crimea, Russia has transformed itself into one of the world’s major food importers, largely from an exporter. Wheat shipments overtook the European Union, the US and Canada in 2017 to return the country to its Tsarist-era status as the world’s largest exporter of that grain (1). Chicago wheat futures hit their highest level since 2008 on Friday.

Meat imports, which overtook post-Soviet cereals as the biggest food drain on the current account, have shrunk to almost zero. The warming seas of the North Pacific have led to an increase in seafood sales in the increasingly thriving markets of South Korea and China. Even dairy products – a sector in which Russia is still at a deficit – are less of a problem than they may appear, as the imbalance looms large in Belarus with Moscow’s close ally. The country is completely self-sufficient in basic food items, with Putin announcing a cost increase later in the year, before announcing a cap on the price of products such as sugar and oil in 2020.

The main reason for the high production is increased fertilizer use and commercialization, especially in the southern agricultural region located between Ukraine and Kazakhstan. It is inspired by a conscious effort in the Putin era to reduce import dependence and then tightened targets set out in updates to the country’s food security doctrine in 2010 and 2020. A counter-embargo in 2014, in which the country stopped imports. Western countries emphasized this trend in response to sanctions imposed after the annexation of Crimea.

This process is only going to accelerate as the planet warms. The latest report, published Monday from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, paints a world in which plant and animal species are already rapidly fleeing warm and turbulent tropical latitudes and moving further north.

According to the report, even if warming is kept below 1.6 °C by 2100, 8% of today’s agricultural land will be unsuitable for agriculture by the end of the century. Marine life is migrating to the poles at a rate of 59 kilometers (36 mi) every decade, adding to Russian waters the rich fisheries of the Pacific Ocean. Climate change, already slowing growth in agricultural yields that has fed the world for the past century, will put much of the global population at risk of starvation, according to the IPCC. Russia would be well prepared to reap the strategic advantages of that more chaotic future, as the same factors open up new regions in the north with longer growing seasons and warmer conditions.

It is a distorted reward for a country that has contributed substantially to a warming climate through its role as the world’s largest fossil fuel exporter – but it is one that rival powers will have to reckon with.

In the 20th century, fossil fuels replaced food as one of the major ways for countries to lose weight in world affairs. The crisis in Ukraine may see the tall tide begin to subside. If Europe was looking for additional reasons to switch to renewable energy that cannot be cut at the border, Russia’s behavior on its gas exports in recent months provides the perfect excuse. However this will not be the end of this story. Humanity’s oldest energy dilemma – how to source the grains, vegetables and meats that fuel our living bodies – will still be with us for many years to come.

(1) Tsarist-era figures also include substantial exports from Ukraine, which has been a major grain exporter since the era of classical Greece.

David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities as well as industrial and consumer companies. He has been a reporter for Bloomberg News, Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and The Guardian.