The Power of Food

A cease-fire is likely in Ukraine. But ask yourself why?

For three years, actually for 6 years since Russia invaded and recaptured the Crimea from Ukraine, India and all the sub-Sahara nations have been suffering food shortages. Shipping of Ukraine’s vital supplies of wheat and safflower oil have been disrupted, transshipped via three or more countries, blockaded from Odessa port, and price-hiked by more than 50%. Of course this penalty for Ukraine’s farmers has been horrible on top of bombs falling. But what has also happened is that people in Africa starved to death who could not afford the higher prices of life-dependent food and cooking oil.

Now, you may think safflower oil is not a big deal — but in a largely vegetarian country like India that is the world's largest consumer of safflower oil, a price hike of over 150% thanks to the Russians invading your principal grower and supplier can, and quite simply does, kill people, especially those on the lowest income levels.

India and the African Union — a large voting bloc in the United Nations General Assembly — are fed up with Russia’s onslaught against their food supplier. Recently, in the past year, they have been voting against Russia or at least not voting with them — abstaining — and Russian needs their support in a myriad of matters, especially now that China had recently been showing trends of not supporting Russia either in the UN Security Council. In short, Russia’s traditional supporters are waning — and Joe Biden’s team worked really hard to increase that pressure.

What pressure? India, for example, was buying Russian arms and planes for decades, but two years ago began to purchase or negotiate to purchase U.S. war planes instead. That’s a massive blow to Russia. And the sub-Saharan countries, traditionally using Russian mercenaries to help stabilize their government forces, have begun to work with our Africa Command in Germany. Our Africa Command helps finance troops from, for example, the Uganda People’s Defence Force, to keep the peace in many conflict areas. The US labels this support as capacity-building programs, security assistance, military equipment sales, military education and linked-purpose hospitals — U.S. boots without U.S. feet. The Russian mercenaries, clearly under Putin’s control, are being phased out. And with them go access to industrial resources — ore and chemicals.

In short, Putin wants to stop fighting if he can, and seem to be the savior supplier of grain and safflower oil to countries with whom Russia had built up multi-decade positive relationships with. He will claim he is not a colonizer like Americas is, but he’s lost control of his dependent nations and, what’s worse, at a local politics level, Russia is seen as the reason for raised prices, lack of affordable fertilizer and staple food stuffs — despite propaganda from Moscow claiming it is all the West’s fault. Safflower oil and wheat are to India and sub-Saharan African nations as bread and milk are to you and me. Vital, staple, irreplaceable.

Putin may claim he’s the savior of the coming cease-fire, but in truth he’s got little option. It is what the previous administration was working toward and this administration will claim credit for. But the truth can be seen in the UN General Assembly votes for the past two-plus years as Putin lost supporters at a fast pace.

Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, lives in Gila, New Mexico.