Ukraine and the global food emergency

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: Ukraine and the global food emergency

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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s edition is coming from the World Economic Forum in Davos. Despite the spring weather here, the main topics of discussion are very bleak. On the economic front, people are worried by the resurgence of inflation. The war in Ukraine often dominates conversation. And that conflict has increased concerns about a global food shortage and the threat of famines around the world. One of the most compelling speakers I’ve come across in Davos is David Beasley, the executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, and he’s my guest on this week’s podcast. So, with millions of people threatened with starvation, what must the world do?

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Even before the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the global food situation was increasingly dangerous. One major factor are droughts in Africa, south Asia and the United States that are crippling food production.

News Report
Well, some farmers are issuing a warning of a perfect storm of rising prices, supply chain issues, poor planting weather that could lead to a shortage of corn by the end of this summer.

Gideon Rachman
Reporters in east Africa have found many communities already threatened by famine.

News Report
Ikiru says he doesn’t know his age, but he does know he’s starving. Famine is stalking the sun blasted plains of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. And according to aid groups, up to 20mn people like Ikiru don’t know if they’ll eat today or tomorrow.

Gideon Rachman
Now, the war in Ukraine is threatening to further drastically restrict the global food supply by preventing grain from the breadbasket of Europe from reaching world markets. Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, accuses Russia of stealing his country’s grain.

News Report
These new satellite images show what appeared to be the ramping up of theft by Russia of Ukrainian grain being poured into the open hold of a Russian ship. This was in the Crimean port of Sevastopol on May 19th. Then, two days later, a second ship docks and it too is filled. Now both Russian ships are sailing away. (Zelensky speaking in Ukrainian). This weekend, President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of fuelling a food crisis and of gradually stealing Ukraine’s food supplies and trying to sell them.

Gideon Rachman
Meanwhile, global attention is increasingly focused on the closure of the Ukrainian port of Odesa, from which the country usually exports the vast majority of its grain. This is an increasingly urgent problem. David Beasley was in Davos to appeal to some of the world’s richest and most powerful people to act quickly to deal with the world’s food emergency. As he explained to me, the removal of Ukrainian and Russian grain from world markets threatens a catastrophic rise in world hunger.

David Beasley
When you take a nation that grows enough food for 400mn people and you pull it off the market on top of already a food crisis is creating truly, a perfect storm within a perfect storm, a catastrophe on top of catastrophe, and it literally could lead to hell on earth because what we’re going to be facing in the next 10 to 12 months is massive food processing problems, hunger, starvation, and then possibly and probably in 2023, a food availability problem. So, it is a very, very serious situation.

Gideon Rachman
And the situation in Ukraine. I mean the grain is there, it’s getting it out. And I think he was saying opening the port of Odesa is absolutely crucial and has to be done, what, in the next few weeks?

David Beasley
Well, here’s what’s hard to understand. Before Ukraine war, we were facing a food crisis around the world because of two years of Covid, economic ripple effect, fuel prices, commodity price, shipping cost, the Ethiopian war, Afghanistan on top of other wars and climate shocks so we had already seen the number of people marching to starvation jumped from 80mn to 135mn right before Covid.

Gideon Rachman
When you say marching to starvation, you mean literally they could die of hunger?

David Beasley
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that number went from 135 pre-Covid to 276mn people. These are people that are struggling to find food. And in that 276, 49mn people are knocking on farmers door as we sit here right now in 43 countries. That’s all before Ukraine. So, Ukraine war comes the wall, knocking out the breadbasket of the world. When you got Russia and Ukraine, that grows enough commodities to providing 30 per cent of the world’s supply of wheat, 20 per cent of the world’s supply of maize, 76 some odd per cent of sunflower oil. Let me keep going on. Then you got the fertiliser problem that’s being now compounded by Belarus and Russia. What do you think happens when you don’t have fertiliser? What cuts your yield down in half? On top of that, we’ve got some of the worst droughts in the States, in Horn of Africa, and I could keep going on and on. So now, with that port being shut down, the silos that would normally be empty, and now to ship food around the world, we buy 50 per cent of our grain from Ukraine. We feed 128-130mn people, on any given day, week or month. So, it hits us. But there are over 26 countries that depend on 50 per cent or more of their grain like Egypt, Senegal, Lebanon. I could go on and on.

Gideon Rachman
They depend on 50 per cent from Ukraine or Russia.

David Beasley
Ukraine or Russia. So when you add all these factors together, we’re now looking at an additional 50mn people on top of the 273mn people. And so these ports have got to open and they got to open now. Why? Because the silos are full. Why are the silos full? Because the port’s not operational. Why is the port not operational? Because of military blockade. The problem is the harvest for Ukraine grain is in July and August, and we’ve got to empty the silos to be able to get the harvest out of the fields into the silos so we can then send it to the ports to ship around the world. And so if the silos were full, then that means the grain that feeds 400mn people still have to be ploughed up right in the field. It’s a big problem and you can’t truck enough out compared to the shipping of the infrastructure that’s in place now.

Gideon Rachman
How much could be done by truck? I mean if the port didn’t open.

David Beasley
We’re working on that left and right, up and down, and we’re looking probably a million metric tons per month versus the norm of five or more.

Gideon Rachman
It’s only 20 per cent.

David Beasley
But it will help. It will help. But the cost significantly increases. And if you increase costs of a commodity too much, well, then nobody’s go buy because there might be available other commodities in the market. Now, that would be a nice problem to have, so to speak. Right now, we’re facing pricing and availability issues over the next two years.

Gideon Rachman
I know it’s not strictly your department, but you must be following closely. I mean, what is the prospect of the Port of Odesa opening? I guess you need Russia to play ball. You need Ukraine to play ball. Even in Turkey to play ball because of the going up through the Black Sea.

David Beasley
Well, everybody has to play ball on this issue. Failure to open up the port, in my opinion, is a declaration of war on global food security. Right now, we are already taking food from the hungry children to feed the starving children because we don’t have enough money and enough food. So this is truly a catastrophe. And so the port has got to be opened. And that’s been my message very clearly. Uhm, think about Ukraine’s economy. Over 40 per cent of their GDP comes to the ports. So if you shut that down, it’s not going impact just Ukraine. It’s going to impact the entire world, the entire world. The market volatility that we are already seeing, putting food pricing out of reach. And the World Food Programme already because of food pricing increasing, fuel pricing increasing, shipping cost increasing, the impact on our expense is already $71mn more per month, per month. So just do the maths, that’s about $850mn that we will have an additional cost just to reach the people we’ve been reaching. Not even considering the fact that the number of people that we need to reach is doubled. And so, who’d you pay the price of that? The poorest of the poor. They can’t afford it. We can’t reach them. We are already cutting beneficiaries like in Yemen alone, for example. Eight million beneficiaries were cut to 50 per cent rations in Chad this year.

Gideon Rachman
When did that happen?

David Beasley
Over the last few months.

Gideon Rachman
Simply because your budget won’t cover what’s needed.

David Beasley
The increase of the demand for food of the increase in the food and security of the number of people that are now starving. I’ve got women telling me, Mr Beasley, this is like for example in Syria or in Afghanistan, I had to choose between freezing my child to death or starving my child to death. I didn’t have the money to buy cooking fuel and heating fuel, or my husband didn’t want to join Isis in Mali and Niger, but we hadn’t fed our child in two weeks. What were we supposed to do? And if they can’t migrate, they go adapt in any way they can. So if we don’t reach the people we’re talking about, you will have famine. You’ll have mass migration, and you’ll have destabilisation of nations. Now let me add, this factor in 2007, 2008, 2009, when you had Arab Spring.

Gideon Rachman
That was the run-up to the Arab Spring.

David Beasley
That’s right. Exactly. So there were over 48 countries that had riots, protests, political risk. The economic conditions and factors today are worse than then. Look at already the destabilising dynamics you’re seeing in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Peru. Look what happened in Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad. That’s a sign of things to come.

Gideon Rachman
Now, you know, the people here are often referred to as the global elite. So if anyone can mobilise action, it should be the combination of politicians, businessmen and so on. How receptive are they to your message? I mean, presumably they’ll listen, do you think they’ll act?

David Beasley
There’s $430tn worth of wealth on planet earth today. And the men and women at Davos are the wealthiest of the wealthy. If they’re not going to do it out of the goodness of their heart, then they better do it out of the national security interests because we can’t afford for the world destabilised any worse than it already is. Eighty per cent of our operations right now are in war zones, areas of conflict. We’re the world’s largest humanitarian operation. For every 1 per cent increase in hunger, there’s a 2 per cent increase in migration. You’ve got to pay for it one way or the other. I mean, Germany is just a simple study of a million refugees that ended up in Berlin or Germany from Syria cost the German taxpayers $125bn at a cost of about over $71 per day. If I had the money to reach that Syrian inside Syria, the cost would be $0.50. And guess what? People don’t want to migrate. They don’t want to leave home. When you feed 230mn people, you talk to them all the time, and you survey them. People don’t want to leave home. But if they don’t have food or any degree of security, they would do it any mom and dad would do for their family — flee, find it wherever it is. And the cost is always 100 to 1,000 times more. And then if you get destabilisation where there’s war, conflict, well, it’s thousands upon thousands of times more. And so we’ve got solutions, short-term solutions we need, yes, in this time of crisis, I normally tell the wealthiest of the wealthy that I don’t need your charity, I need your game. But right now, because of this perfect storm, you know, the average net worth increased per day during Covid was $5.2bn. I just need one or two days worth of your net worth increase to create stability in nations around the world. So we don’t have famine. We don’t have destabilisation. We don’t have mass migration. Is that too much to ask? I don’t think so at all. I mean, have a heart. It’s time to realise how bad people are suffering out there. Step up or call to action to the people on planet earth who need the wealthy of the wealthy right now. Now, if we get through this crisis, I need these big corporations and wealthy, incredibly brilliant people to at least solve the hunger problem. Because I want to put the World Food Programme out of business. We’re no longer needed. I mean, when you look at the fact that 200 years ago, 95 per cent of the people on planet earth were in extreme poverty, a population of 1.1bn and now 7.7bn, we got less than 10%. We don’t need to tear down the 90 per cent to reach the 10. Let’s now focus on that 10 per cent and the wars and bring hope to people who aren’t experiencing this better way of life. And I do believe with the ingenuity, the technology and the artificial intelligence and the brilliance of the men and women walking around Davos, my God, we could put people on Mars and what we do with smartphones and put rockets in space now with people, you know, tourism bases. Well, my goodness. What’s more important than keeping someone from starving to death.

Gideon Rachman
Indeed. I mean, but breaking it down into the short term and the long term. So we talked about short term things. One is the port of Odesa. The other sounds like, it just need, in the short term, more money, more budget to buy. And is there anything else that you would say, you know, to avert this immediate risk of famine that needs to be done?

David Beasley
Yeah. There are several things. But number one, get the Port of Odesa open because that will help diminish market volatility. Number two, we’ve got to get the fertilisers out. We got to do everything we can there. We got to make sure that we don’t have trade wars and export bans and things like that and then get us the money we need. We averted famine and destabilisation of mass migration in 2020 and 21 because the world leaders stepped up, and we had the sufficient funds to reach the people that needed to be reached because we thought Covid would be behind us by 2022. And it recycled again, compounding a fragile earth where debt escalated because the safety net programmes in poor countries, especially $27tn dollars worth of economic stimulus packages around the world. The world don’t have any reserve money down to throw at our problems so we’ve got to fix this thing. And we can’t afford to ignore. That’s why the ports critical right now. The world’s very, very fragile. People are struggling in these poor countries unlike any time period we’ve seen before.

Gideon Rachman
And you said 43 countries. So obviously it’s not one or two as we said in the past. It was Ethiopia in the 80s. It’s widespread, but if you had to point to particular regions that really need help right now?

David Beasley
Well, Yemen is one them. The Sahel, I mean, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, and you’re down to CAR, DRC, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia. Then we get into, let’s say, Central America, where you like Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador. The number of people now talking about migrating to the United States more from just Central America compared to one year ago is now ten times, ten times. It ain’t complicated. You could pay for it one way or the other. And we’ve got solutions. Number one right now is money. And compared to $430tn dollars worth of wealth on earth today, when billionaires are making over $5-$6bn a day, come on.

Gideon Rachman
But some policies seem to be moving in the wrong direction because you’re seeing more and more countries putting export bans on food. How big a problem is that?

David Beasley
Export ban on food can create havoc in the market. We ask countries not to do that. We have that Covid, particularly. A lot of restrictions of movement, and we were all on the phone every day with leaders around the world. Don’t do that. I know your intentions were good, but let me explain what’s gonna happen and many of them backed down. And so, we’re asking leaders in countries not to put these restrictions on with this much transparency we can in the private sector, in the government, etc because all these things matter right now. Because when you look at the comprehensive picture, put it all together, you begin to realise, wow, there’s not going to be one simple solution. It’s a complex number of initiatives that got to be all brought together to stabilise over the next couple of years.

Gideon Rachman
And over the longer term, I mean, it does look like climate change is making things . . .

David Beasley
In climate change . . . So last year alone, who would have ever believed that we had more internally displaced people from climate change than we did from conflict. Thirty million people from climate change versus 10mn, literally 3 to 4 times. That’s unprecedented. Now you can debate what’s caused the climate to change. I’ll leave that to the experts. But I can tell you the World Food Programme, we feed 128-30mn people any given, week, day, month. We see it out there. The climate is clearly changing, and people and the poorest of the poor areas, they have to adapt or they die. And so we are developing adaptation programmes. How do we harvest the little bit of water that we get? How do we green up the communities so that they can survive while the world works on mitigation issues? You know what’s going to happen to any reasonable family of any degree of income in the west? They can watch one less Netflix movie? Whereas the poorest of the poor we’re talking about, who’s struggling because of climate and economic deterioration, and Covid, and now food crisis. They’re living hand-to-mouth.

Gideon Rachman
And right now you have temperatures of 49-50 degrees in south Asia.

David Beasley
Seeing unprecedented temperatures that is dynamically impacting harvest, nation’s inputs, outputs. And I had somebody one day said, yeah but that look at the country you are talking about, you know, that’s the same rainfall last year there was ten years ago. I said, you know what, that country you talking about? That’s right. But let me tell you what happened in the spring and the fall. They had vast drought in the spring and massive floods in the fall. It averaged out the same for the year. But when you had the planting season, you had a drought. When you had the harvest season, you had an absolute flood. So you got to look at all 12 months because it’s shifting out there. Places before they weren’t getting rain, they’re getting rain. Places before they got rain they’re not getting rain. In, you get in the Sahel where they only have inches of rain per year and wow, how do you survive? And goodness, it’s like that. And if we don’t give them the tools they need to survive, well, they go migrate, by necessity.

Gideon Rachman
Just a message getting home in the west. I mean, you know, in your own country, the United States, you’ve got a very serious drought now. Do you think people who were sceptical are beginning to understand?

David Beasley
They are. And I think the key is the media getting the word out. That was hard on the media the last four or five years. I said, look, we’ve got this food crisis coming. And now when I turn off the TV, all I to see a Trump, Trump, Trump or Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, or this or that. And I’m like, I don’t care how you feel about those issues. But we got people dying all over the world because of food insecurity. And I think because of the Ukraine crisis, it’s a wake-up call to the rest of the world. Because if we’re struggling to feed 7.7bn people today, what do you think’s going to happen when we have 10, 11, 12 billion people? And so it’s one thing when the people in Chicago don’t have enough to eat or the people London or the people in Berlin? Imagine, and so the world needs to wake up and realise we’re all created equal. We’re all brothers and sisters. When one suffers in one part of the world, you going to pay for it. Let’s do what we need to do.

Gideon Rachman
You struck me as somebody who’s basically a kind of optimistic person but facing a very, very grim situation. So to try end on a note of optimism, you know, in five years' time, if things have begun to go right, what would have happened?

David Beasley
Oh, my gosh. You know, one of the hardest questions I get from friends is how do you stay optimistic, and you are one of those optimistic persons I know. But how do you stay optimistic when you’re seeing all the suffering and death and trauma and crises? And I say, well, when I’m out there in the field, whether it’s a child in war-torn Syria or the deserts of Chad, when I see that little girl, that little boy come from behind the rubble and there’s that life, that spirit of life in their eyes, it just inspires you to not give up on that child. And I do believe every human being is created in the image of God. And every human being is equal to me. And every human being is special to me. And so I’m not going to give up on those children. And here’s the fear right now. If we’re taking food from the hungry children to give to the starving children, the stunting, the wasting that’s going to take place. So if we can do what we need to do in the next two years, get through this crisis, I do believe if we can end the wars, I really do, we could end global hunger by 2030.

Gideon Rachman
And I know that you’re a great believer in the entrepreneurism of Africa, for example.

David Beasley
All you had to do is meet an African woman, (laughing) out the field. I have seen it first-hand. The spirit of entrepreneurism in African women is so inspiring, and they don’t want handouts. They will tell you, Mr Beasley, we want the tools so that we can feed ourselves, sell into the market, and enhance and increase our opportunities for our families in our villages. And when we give them those tools versus the old fashioned way of just handing out food, that does not solve long-term food insecurity. That doesn’t solve poverty. Charity is good, but it’s not the answer. You got to have private entrepreneurial spirit. You got to empower people. And that’s what in the World Food Programme we’re trying to do. I would put us out of business, and I could give you story after story after story where women have said, Mr Beasley, before you were feeding our village, we depended on you 100 per cent. Now you’ve given us the tools. We’ve put up our water well, irrigation system in our village. We’re not only feeding our village now, our families and our village, we’re selling it to the marketplace. And we’ve got leftover money. We’re buying clothes. We’re buying medicines. And I had this one woman said, I just paid for my son’s wedding. And she said, it was such pride. You’re sitting here just like, oh, my God, this is what it’s all about. How do we create that hope and opportunity for every human being on the planet? It’s true. It is do-able.

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Gideon Rachman
That was David Beasley of the World Food Programme, ending this week’s edition of The Rachman Review. There are plenty of interesting people in the corridors here in Davos who I’m busy talking to and recording some of them. So please join me again next week.