UN warns of global food catastrophe, world famine due to Russia's blocking Ukrainian ports in Black Sea
United Nations (UN) World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley said that blocking Ukraine's southern ports in the Black Sea could trigger a global food disaster that would lead to famine, mass migration and political instability, the New York Times reported.
Beasley said Ukrainian farmers can still reap the harvest that will help feed the world's hungry if the war ends now, but not if southern ports and Black Sea shipping lanes remain closed.
Beasley urged G7 leaders and other governments to return unused farmland to production to make up for possible loss of Ukrainian and Russian food supplies, but warned that global food shortages and a further spike in food prices could spell disaster for the poor countries.
"You will have acute shortages, death and starvation. You will have destabilization of several nations and you will have mass migration," he said.
The UN emphasizes that storage facilities in Ukraine are overflowing with grain, which in a normal year can feed 400 million people around the world, but the supply chain has been disrupted by the war, and the ports cannot operate normally near the center of the war zone.
Beasley noted that the challenge for global food supplies is to keep southern ports open: Odesa, Chornomorsk, Pivdenny and Mykolaiv on the Black Sea coast, which are in Ukraine, but are threatened by the expected Russian offensive.
"This is where the international community should intervene and make very serious decisions about protecting ports for humanitarian purposes and opening ports to the whole world, because the whole world will pay a price if we do not open ports," the official said.
According to him, operating expenses for the UN food program increased by $71 million per month. That means we'll be feeding four to five million fewer people a year just because of the cost increase, Beasley said.
The short-term problem, he says, is financial: rich countries and the world's billionaires need to step up to fill a financing gap of about $8 billion. A more worrisome threat is a long-term challenge to global food markets.
