Northern Kenya
Claims that Vladimir Putin is stoking famine in Africa is a compelling red herring, which also exposes inconvenient truths about why people are going hungry in the world’s poorest continent yet again. For sure, the Russians are holding up 22 million tons of Ukrainian wheat, have bombarded grain terminals, blockaded shipping and disrupted farming. But that’s still a tiny percentage of global harvests and, though the challenges are great, crops like winter wheat are growing and there are other routes to export via Ukraine’s neighbours.
When the African Union’s chairman Macky Sall met Putin in Sochi last week, he urged the lifting of western sanctions on Russia’s own grain and fertiliser exports – apparently unaware that such sanctions do not exist. Putin grinned impishly, presumably because headlines crediting him with weaponising global food supplies inflate fears of his power.
The world has enough food. African countries, many of which normally buy a lot of their wheat, cooking oils and fertiliser from Ukraine or Russia, must look further afield. Some regions have been hit by bad weather, but Australia and the UK will have bumper harvests and global wheat production is only slightly off all-time highs. The agencies distributing relief are allowed to access markets where exports have been banned. Yet Sall still told Putin that Africans were ‘victims’ of the Ukraine conflict.
Supposedly, numbers too great to imagine are facing starvation across Africa. Oxfam and Save the Children have just launched a campaign saying that ‘one person is likely dying of hunger every 48 seconds in drought-ravaged Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia’. Oxfam could not give me any evidence for the claim, and admitted reaching this figure via a computer model in Washington rather than from data on the ground.
