Charred wheat on Ukrainian fertile agricultural land
A wheat field is one of the Ukrainian symbols. Ears of wheat have long carried the energy of fertility and wealth. Almost 60 percent of the territory of Ukraine is covered with fields on which grain crops are grown. The quality and fertility of Ukrainian black soil (chernozemic soil) were once ‘confirmed’ by the Germans, who transported it in wagons from Ukraine during the Second World War.
Currently in the Ukrainian regions of Zaporizhzhya, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Kherson and Donetsk the wheat fields are burning due to the explosions or the red-hot fragments of artillery shrapnel. With shelling Russia deliberately set wheat fields on fire, severely damaging crops.
The widespread destruction of the Ukrainian wheat fields that is under way now remains the Holodomor—the man-made famine orchestrated by Josef Stalin in the early 1930s to crush Ukrainian resistance to farm collectivisation. Stalin ordered the Soviet army to strip Ukrainian peasants of whatever food stores they had—even their pets. An estimated 3.9 million people died.
“The Russians are blowing up grain elevators. They are hitting cold storage facilities. There are even reports of them destroying farm equipment. There’s a very targeted approach to what they are doing.”
“Some people can’t fertilise their crop because the Russians are shooting everything that moves . There are reports of them mining the fields, the roads to the fields, not to mention a lot of unexploded ordinance and bodies in the fields. I think wheat yields will be on the floor—maybe a third or a quarter of what they’d normally be.” - Jonathan Clibborn, an Irish immigrant moved to Ukraine 15 years ago with just the shirt on his back, and now farms 3,000 hectares in the region west of Lviv, near the Polish border.
“Ukraine will not be able to plant corn. The winter wheat in the ground will not be fertilised, and the harvest sharply reduced. That’s a real danger. They are a country of 40 million people, but they produce food for 400 million. That’s the reality of a globalised world. We are all in this together.” - Arif Husain, chief economist at the UN World Food Programme.
Both Russia and Ukraine are crucial to global wheat flows, and African and Asian importers are among the biggest buyers. Costlier wheat and the risk of shortages will further raise bread costs, exacerbating a global hunger crisis.