Russia and Ukraine are world leaders in the production of wheat, which therefore becomes one of the main ways to understand how much this conflict weighs on the world balance. By digging into the word wheat, its geopolitical substance is identified, that is, hunger, the lever that transforms food into a weapon. The whole world is hungry, the whole world has to eat. The more wheat you own, the more hungry you have for allies and rivals. Whoever owns the grain has power.
The grain game did not arise with this war, which "limited" itself to accelerating dynamics. The most capable communities manage to bend them in their favor. This is what Russia is trying to do, which would seem to want to transform a policy of food sovereignty into one of a grain empire. An empire with a Russian heart and two legs, Ukrainian and Kazakh, on which for different reasons it does not stand, but stumbles and does not take off.
The grain game is played on land, yes, but also on the stock exchange, triggering a price dynamic that affects the other subjects. Today we are faced more with a crisis in the distribution of wheat and a crisis in prices, caused by speculation and uncertainty, than a crisis in production itself. The world average annual production of wheat is around 750 million tons. Similar figures were expected for this year, had it not been for the blockade of Ukrainian wheat. That there is a risk of hunger in some areas can be understood by underlining that the World Food Program buys 50% of the wheat and 20% of the maize needed for poor countries in Ukraine. As many as 45 African countries import 1/3 of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine, 18 of them at least 50%. Among these are Syria, Egypt, Libya… all the countries whose Arab springs of 2011 were literally triggered by bread.
Added to this is global warming, which has been going on since the end of the XNUMXth century. L'Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations Department of Climate Change, reports that, even if the temperature rise is kept below two degrees by 2100, 8% of the world's arable land will no longer be arable, while fish will migrate every decade of 59 km towards colder waters to the north.
For Russia it means that they will also migrate to “its” Pacific Ocean. Warming also means thawing, which would open up new agricultural horizons in Russian regions. Climate change therefore offers some advantages, but which require a supporting geopolitical project. Tsarist Russia was already an agricultural power, but it had to contend with cyclical droughts and freezing lands. The First World War, the Civil War, collectivization and in Ukraine theHolodomorartificial hunger made subsequent Soviet agricultural production weak. Putinian Russia instead starts a process of reconstruction of production, to the point of returning to tsarist levels.
In 34.5, the annual quantity of Russian wheat was 2009 million tons, but already in 61.7 it was 2010. However, the sector alone did not guarantee total food sovereignty, which Moscow was aiming for. In 2014, Russia therefore launched the Food Safety Doctrine (still in force), but until 2013 it remains a precarious project (in 40 Russia still depends 75% on food imports). Only the post-annexation sanctions of Crimea increase and justify this path, forcing the creation of local alternatives. Today Russia produces wheat on average equal to 85/50 million tons per year, of which about half for exports. Russia's capacity in this sector also lies in the fact that it is the world's leading producer of fertilizers, with approximately XNUMX million tons per year. Precisely in response to Western sanctions, Moscow has decreed the block until April of the export of fertilizers, depriving the European Union, but in particular South America, since this is the home garden of the United States and an agricultural alternative, at least of emergency, to Russian wheat, if it were not chronically dependent on fertilizers to produce world quantities. Hitting this continent then means hitting the United States, externally because it attacks their ability to "help" the world, and internally because, while not importing many fertilizers, with the blocks they see prices soar, inducing US farmers to sow less. Russia is strong, however, not only because it produces fertilizers, but also because it has numerous lands, where it is not so necessary to use them. It is one of the few geographic areas in the world in possession of the so-called black lands, the Chernozem. Extremely fertile lands in central and southern Russia. It is precisely on the possession of these that a Russian wheat empire can be born and consolidated.
Speaking of black earth, we start talking about Ukraine, which alone owns 25% of the total, and speaking of Ukraine we understand the limits of Russian production and therefore one of the reasons that could have pushed the invasion. In Russia, despite all the progress, there are problems such as drought, which for the second year in a row has hit fragile areas of the Russian home front, such as Tatarstan. In the Central Federal District the grain yield fell by 24% and in the Volga by as much as 45%. That being the case, Russia wants to keep Ukraine's fertile foreign country in its field, not because it serves it for consumption, but as a global lever. A "western" Ukraine risks depriving Moscow of a fundamental basin for the management of world wheat, given the risk of a decline in its production. Furthermore, the continued absorption of Ukrainian cereal quotas by the Chinese constitutes an equally risky imbalance in the partnership with China.
So let's begin to understand how important is Ukraine, which in 2021 had one of the best agricultural years ever, with a production of about 106 million tons of cereals (of which 32 million only of wheat), legumes, oil seeds. Ukraine alone is able to guarantee the European Union imports of 57% of corn, 42% of rapeseed and 47% of sunflower seeds.
All of the following data are worldwide. Ukraine exports 12% of its wheat and 16% of its maize, while alone produces 50% of the sunflower oil. The weight of Ukraine added to that of Russia makes the idea even more so. Together they produce 80% of sunflower oil and make up 80% of its imports into the EU. They account for 29% of wheat exports and 20% of corn exports.
However, the Russian invasion is not going to plan. The estimate of the Ukrainian crops for 2022 has burnt and the ports on the Black Sea and therefore exports are blocked. The second phase of the Russian invasion, aimed at concentrating in the east of Ukraine, would however allow to completely annex regions, which alone cover almost all the production of Ukrainian sunflower oil and which, if it also included the entire Black Sea belt , would acquire 62% of Ukraine's arable land. Assuming that Russia is revising the conquest downwards, this would not apply to wheat and other crops, confirming their strategic value.
Another fragile factor in building a Russian grain empire is Kazakhstan, with its precious spoils of black lands to the north. The Kazakh leg does not have so much value from an agricultural point of view in itself, but because the negative effects of the Russian project in Ukraine make it so weak in terms of food, which in turn negatively affects the Russian estate. Russia has in fact decided to limit, albeit temporarily, the export of wheat to the countries of the Eurasian Economic Union, including Kazakhstan, to avoid explosions of its internal prices. This has further penalized the country, which is already in difficulty at an agricultural level, with a bad harvest in 2021.
In addition, Kazakh wheat exports until the withdrawal of the Americans from Afghanistan were 2/3 directed towards this country, but with the US, which has closed access to the Taliban to the reserves of the Central Bank of Afghanistan, payments are difficult. . So for Nur-Sultan, Moscow turns off a tap to one of its pivotal partners in the Central Asian region just when the Americans had already turned off another. The same alternatives for Kazakhstan are not equal to the Afghan basin both in Central Asia and as regards Iran which, due to sanctions, maintains the same Afghan difficulties with payments.
Why is Russia doing this? It is possible that the unrest at the beginning of the year in Kazakhstan contributed to make Russia perceive the imperial agricultural project as precarious and therefore to accelerate the "war for wheat" in the already outflow of Ukraine. Finally, if it is true that it is not the wheat that takes Kazakhstan out of the Russian orbit, the posture of Kazakhstan is frustrating for Moscow. Indeed, Nur-Sultan imprints its trajectory on Russia, but also by bridging itself between East and West, between China and Europe, China and Turkey, generating the fear of a general sliding of Russian abroad.
As proof that the Kazakh attitude is multivectoral, and critical for Moscow, is the fact that the country has refused to send troops to help Moscow in Ukraine, has not recognized the Donbass Republics, has heard Zelensky by telephone and allows demonstrations against the war. In turn, Kazakhstan does all this because, with a strong Russian minority, including in the black lands, it fears Russia's imperial ethno-linguistic narrative applied in Ukraine ... Already in 2020, accusations of imitations of Nazism to the Minister of Education and Culture Ashkat Aymagambetov, guilty of wanting to replace the Kazakh for the Russian.
What about the United States and China?
To understand the value of Russian moves on world grain production, one must also know the conditions of the other great powers that Russia aspires to equal.
The United States produces about 50 million tons of wheat annually, which becomes qualitative when compared to the fact that in 1981 it was 79 million. Considering that the US population has since grown by more than 100 million inhabitants, that is to say by 1/3, while production has dropped by 1/3, we can understand how much the grain crisis affects. Not only that, the current one is the second crop in a row to be ruined by drought in the United States. So a first comparison tells us that Russia, whose population has remained more or less unchanged over the last forty years, has managed to implement a production path that is the reverse of the US one.
So if you look at the war in Ukraine from the point of view of wheat, it is possible to think that Washington has been caught unprepared for this crisis. However, the US is a serious empire, that is, not only does it have a "granary", it has several, from Canada to South America to Australia, available within certain limits to help the Western camp. That is, it is not enough that I hit in one spot to cripple a giant.
China has an average annual production of 135 million tons, but it is destined for internal consumption and is also insufficient. It too undergoes climate change. This year the rains have delayed sowing and there is a risk of a disastrous harvest. Chinese moves, starting from these conditions, make it plausible to think that China knew of the coming war. In fact, in addition to Xi Jinping's declared goal of food self-sufficiency, China is pursuing the goal of having wheat reserves at an all-time high and will have 69% of world corn, 51% of wheat and 60% of rice, implementing a purchasing policy that impoverishes the world's most exposed communities and increases prices, increasing their purchasing difficulties. In line with this policy, on February 8 Russia and China have drawn up an agreement, with which, just two weeks after the outbreak of the conflict, China authorizes the import of wheat and barley from all over Russia.
There was no extended agreement until 2021, as China was convinced that the Russian product was contaminated. Subsequently, in the wake of drought and poor harvests, Beijing authorized the wheat coming only from the Russian Far East. That things in the world order of wheat had been moving for years and that China knew it is also demonstrated by the fact that China's food self-sufficiency policy meant that, if in 2012 the entire import of cereals of the People's Republic came from USA, in the same year an agreement with Ukraine brings three million tons of corn to China. By 2021, just a year before the Russian invasion, China had already become the leading importer of Ukrainian agricultural products. Perhaps he knew and in the meantime he was also trying to snatch Ukrainian wheat from the Russians. Paradoxically, Russia may have warned China, but also accelerated precisely because the "ally" was exaggerating.
A budget
Russia has indeed pursued food sovereignty, but the extension of this project and its incorporation into an imperial figure seems to have arisen due to more tactical than strategic circumstances. Of course, it remains to be seen whether and to what extent Russia will be able to take the fields of eastern and southern Ukraine. In any case, having jeopardized Ukrainian production by 2022 constitutes a major damage to image. Russia could have satisfied (and therefore controlled) the hunger of many possible well-disposed countries, and instead risks having generated it. Part of any imperial figure is addiction, not shortage.
Russian gambling risks definitively handing over part of Ukraine and its wheat to Western availability and is helping to starve North Africa and the Middle East, it has also angered Kazakhstan and itself slips into China, without even the counterweight of a wheat empire, which offsets the Chinese preponderance in the partnership, a preponderance accentuated by a Sino-Ukrainian wheat trade that will continue to bypass it anyway, given the course of the war.
The credibility of the Russian superpower, from the point of view of wheat, risks the default.
