Russia, Ukraine and the coming global food crisis

The war in Ukraine has disrupted food and fertiliser exports, pushing up prices and threatening a global calamity.

Combine harvester
Ukraine’s wheat has become “unreachable”
(Image credit: © Sergii Petruk / Alamy)

Wheat and other grain prices have surged since the Russian invasion of Ukraine due to fears of a supply crunch that threatens to send global food prices soaring and fuel food insecurity around the world. The issue is that Russia and Ukraine are both major producers and exporters of wheat (and other cereals), and still have crops from last year to ship. That’s currently impossible due to Ukraine’s wartime ban on grain exports and the closure of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.

Meanwhile, paying for Russian exports that do make it out via other routes has been complicated by Western sanctions. While Ukraine is “unreachable”, Russia is “untouchable”, says Michael Magdovitz of Rabobank. And a prolonged war would mean lasting disruption to this year’s crops too.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.