The battle to prevent Putin starving the world

Liz Truss is on her way to Turkey for crisis talks on how to solve Russia’s devastating Black Sea blockade of Ukrainian ports which is exacerbating food shortages around the world. The Foreign Secretary and her opposite number will discuss ways to get millions of tonnes of grain trapped in Ukraine out of the country, ahead of Turkey’s plan to host Russian, Ukrainian and UN officials for negotiations aimed at ending the diplomatic stalemate.

Vladimir Putin is holding the world’s food supply hostage. Russian forces have mined the waters around Ukrainian ports and refused to allow grain-laden ships to depart, preventing 20 million tonnes from getting to the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia. Around 90 per cent of Ukrainian grain is usually exported via the Black Sea.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that up to 181 million people in 41 countries could face a food crisis or worse levels of hunger this year.

With just weeks to go until Ukraine’s summer harvest, Western leaders are scrambling to unlock the country’s trapped grain. 

Joe Biden said last week that the US had started working with European countries to help evacuate grain from Ukraine and store it in specially built silos over the border in Poland. Ukraine’s deputy food minister, Markiyan Dmytrasevych, has warned the European Parliament that his country will be short between 10 and 15 million tonnes of grain storage by October. 

Storage is only one part of the problem. To get the grain to its final destination, Brussels has been coordinating with Washington to expand “solidarity lanes”, a patchy network of rail and lorry routes out of Ukraine, with the aim of eventually shipping the grain from Romanian Black Sea ports.

So far, only a trickle has reached the EU. Logistical challenges and red tape are hampering efforts. Ukrainian rail gauges don’t match Polish ones, for instance.

Even if these hurdles are overcome, it’s unlikely solidarity lanes alone will be enough. Ukrainian MP, Larysa Bilozir, told MEPs that expanding overland routes would not “help substantially in significantly increasing exports […] without deblocking southern Ukrainian ports or rerouting through Baltic ports.”

That leaves diplomacy.

Turkish government sources told Al Jazeera that Ankara’s plan to break the deadlock involves establishing three safe corridors from Ukraine’s port city of Odesa under Kyiv’s supervision, and that both Ukrainian and Russian food products would be shipped from there. It would allow for 30 to 35 million tonnes of grain to leave the country in the next six to eight months.

The plan sounds sensible. But with food blackmail as one of Vladimir Putin’s few remaining levers to exert influence over the West, the odds of a breakthrough are slim indeed.