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bne June 2022 Eastern Europe I 63
currently in storage in Ukraine. That’s the equivalent of the annual consumption of all of the world’s least developed economies.
The crisis isn’t limited to wheat either. A programme of modernisation of Russian agriculture over the past two decades has made it a significant producer – feeding 2bn people worldwide. Russia
is the world’s biggest producer of barley and sugar beet, producing almost 15% of the global supply of both crops.
Ukraine’s fertile fields have turned it into a big agricultural supplier too. Two-thirds of its arable land is used for agriculture.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) lists Ukraine as one of the world’s largest producers of wheat, corn, sunflower seeds, barley, sugar beet, potatoes and soybeans in 2020. The total value of these crops in Ukraine in 2020 was $21.4bn. It’s also the world’s third-largest producer of potatoes and pumpkins.
Ukraine is also the biggest producer of sunflower seeds, providing over a third
of global supply. As a consequence, sunflower oil has risen in price by over 25% since the war started. Sunflower seeds and sunflower oil are an essential ingredient in many food production processes, and are among the most exported agricultural commodities.
Russia and Ukraine are also responsible for 29% of globally traded barley and 15% of maize.
The globalisation of agriculture
The most exported agricultural products nowadays include wheat,
rice, corn, barley, rapeseed, soybeans, sunflower seeds, palm oil and bananas. Some of those crops are particularly suited to specific climates. Whereas wheat is a versatile crop grown across Europe, Asia and North America, bananas are better suited to tropical regions.
Globalisation has led to some climate- specific crops being domesticated in foreign markets. Technological advances in agriculture mean that some plants can be cultivated in non-native soils, while
transportation allows other crops to be taken to far-flung markets. A study in 2016 found that more than two-thirds of agri- cultural products in the world’s national diets originated from a far-away region.
Cereals are particularly versatile crops, and can be cultivated in a range of climates. Corn is the most produced agricultural commodity globally (1.1bn tonnes of the crop were produced in 2020), followed by wheat with 760.9mn tonnes and rice (756.7mn tonnes).
Agricultural superpowers
Agriculture accounts for 4.3% of global GDP. But with the effects of climate change (such as unseasonably heavy rains during planting season in China and a heatwave in India), geopolitical crises (such as the war in Ukraine) and an apparent trend for deglobalisation and protectionism, this figure is in jeopardy. And with supply of domesticated crops set to drop, price rises risk creating mass malnutrition or starvation.
Russia is one of the world’s five biggest
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