The dominant topic in print and broadcast news at the moment is the roceting price of fuel and essential foods. This cost of living crisis (because it has in the past few weeks become a crisis,) was already forming late last year. The failure of green energy policies and environmentalist virtue signalling by governments had already seen national energy grids struggling to maintain energy supply as 'sustainable' sources such as wind and solar proved they cannot sustain the steady output a large population in a technologically advanced country depends on. Governments faced with a choice of explaining blackouts to voters or angering the green lobby by cranking up the output from gas fired power stations and recomissioning coal fired generators, chose fossil fuels.
But now, as if the energy crisis was not enough for us to contend with there is another major concern for us long suffering taxpayers as the food proce inflation predicted by this blog since day one of the Ukrainian conflict is starting to bite.
The countries hardest hit in the near term will be in the middle east and North Africa. Many of these nations already face internal conflicts and have populations struggling to put food on their tables. In 2020, 80% of the wheat Lebanon imported came from Ukraine and the final figure for 2021 will be similar. Egypt, with close to 100 million population remains the world’s largest wheat importer, which places this North African country in a very delicate position because about 50 percent of its imports come from the Russian Federation, while another 30 percent come from Ukraine. Libya imports 40% of its wheat from Kiev, and Yemen gets around one third of its wheat from Ukraine, while 8% comes from Russia.
Looking further ahead, the effect will be global. 45% of Ukrainian exports are agricultural-related. It is a leading exporter of poultry, wheat, barley, and corn, and much of its wheat comes from the disputed territory in Eastern Ukrainian where most of the heavy conflict is going on.
In fact, the Black Sea area – affected by the current military operations – exports over 12 percent of the food traded globally.
It gets worse. On March 9 this year, Kiev banned exports of grains and many other food items in order to prevent domestic food shortages because of the war, thus disrupting supply chains. This is quite alarming because the planting season is to start this month.
The Russian Federation is the largest wheat supplier worldwide and one of the main producers of fertilizers but because of economic sanctions imposed by the west Russia can no longer supply western needs as its banks have been frozen out of the SWIFT international payments system so Russian exporters cannot be paid by customers in the west.
The worst consequence, though it has hardly been mentioned in mainstream media, is that this crude attempt to hamstring the Russian economy has provoked Moscow into banning fertilizer exports as a response to the heavy economic sanctions imposed on the country.
In Latin America, for example, Brazil imports 95% of its nitrogen fertilizers, Moscow being its leading supplier (21% of the amount imported by Brazil comes from there). Brazilian harvests have been much damaged by droughts since 2020. In any case, the increase in fuel prices in itself affects food transport costs, thereby affecting agricultural production cost worldwide.
There is a global energy shortage crisis today, which is caused in part by green lunacy as mentioned in the opening paragraph and partly by government responses around the world in response to a virus with a 0.2% fatality rate, and is now being exacerbated by the global supply chain crisis caused by unnecessary sanctions on Russia. The ruling elites have shot their own countries in the foot, everything western political and business leaders have done in their quest for global hegemony has made life more difficult for the people these power drunk clowns are meant to serve.
Iran has made a mockery of US sactions shipping fuel to countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Venezuela, as part of its oil diplomacy as well as selling vast amounts of oil to China which uses lots of fossil fuel in manufacturing the cheap goods we in the ewest are so addicted to. Western Europe, in its turn, had already been facing its own energy crisis since the end of last summer as green wokery, pandemic related disruptions and dependence on Russian gas combined to create a perfect storm for consumers.
It alol adds up to a potential global catastrophe.
By fuelling the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, which is a delayed result of the 2014 coup endineered by the USA, NATO and the EU, which replaced a democratically elected government with the current far right Russophobes, by encouraging its puppet regime in Kiev to provoke Russia by attacking ethnic Russian minorities in Ukraine and by sanctioning Moscow, the West is in fact punishing itself, but the truth goes beyond that: it is punishing the entire world in a futile bid to overthrow Putin and effect regime change in Moscow. This only shows that the foreign policy experts of the main western governments do not understand anything about Russia, its history or culture.
The only way to get out of this mess before it escalates is through dialogue with Moscow. Is this likely to happen? the Western Political Establishment rather than seeking dialogue with the Kremlin,have been trying to turn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into a kind of pop - star politician, spokesperson for the free world and cheerleasder for the nuclear war with Russia that demented Joe Biden and his White House team appear to be intent on starting.
Joe Biden’s visit to Poland also only added fuel to the fire and Boris Johnson's belligerent bluster about standing up to Russian bullying made things even worse.
To sum it up, Western leaders have been irresponsible in failing to pursue diplomatic solutions and instead guaranteeing that Russia will become more intransigent over its demands in any negotiations. A cease-fire must be negotiated, but for that to happen Ukraine and the West must make concessions rather than making threats they cannot back up. As things stand, World War Three is being fought on the economic from and Russia is winning.
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