As the entire world edges toward a period of serious food instability, Russian armed forces have been actively targetting wheat stocks in Ukraine for destruction, an EU official has claimed.
Russian military assets have been actively targeting and destroying stocks of wheat in Ukraine — one of the world’s largest producers of grains — during a period when the world needs it most, an EU official has claimed.
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s Foreign Affairs Tsar, made the claim shortly after a meeting of foreign ministers from across the bloc partially aimed at implementing even more sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
According to a report by Euronews, Borrell said that the Russian forces had not only been blockading Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea, preventing food exports from the invaded country, which is responsible for a vast amount of the world’s wheat supply, but are also going so far as to actively target and destroy stockpiles of the much-needed resource.
“They are bombing Ukrainian cities and provoking hunger in the world,” Borrell is reported as saying.
“They are provoking hunger in the world by blocking the exports of wheat and by destroying the storage of wheat in Ukraine,” the foreign affairs chief continued.
The senior EU bureaucrat was also keen to emphasise that food shortages facing many Europeans were not the result of EU level sanctions against Moscow, but directly caused by Russian disruption of supply chains via blockades and military strikes.
While Borrell’s suggestion that Russia is actively targeting wheat stocks in Ukraine is largely innovative, he is far from the first person to suggest that Russia’s actions in the region will cause a global food crisis.
“Zero [grain] is currently being exported from the ports of Ukraine — nothing is leaving the country at all,” noted Jörg-Simon Immerz — who leads a grain trading company — regarding alleged Russian blockades of Ukrainian ports.
Immerz also noted that supplies coming out of Russia — another traditionally major player in the global wheat market — had also significantly fallen, while one senior Russian official has since threatened to cut off the supply of food companies from all but so-called “friendly” countries.
As a result of factors such as these, a number of experts fear that an extreme global food crisis is imminent, with one UN official saying that the West, in particular, should be bracing for a ‘Hell on Earth‘ migrant crisis if it does not commit more resources to fight hunger in the most vulnerable parts of the world.
“Failure to provide this year a few extra billion dollars [in food aid] means you’re going to have famine, destabilization, and mass migration,” warned EU official and former Republican South Carolina governor David Beasley last month.
“If you think we’ve got Hell on Earth now, you just get ready,” he continued. ““If we neglect northern Africa, northern Africa’s coming to Europe. If we neglect the Middle East, [the] Middle East is coming to Europe.”
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