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Russia has exported at least 400,000 tons of grain from occupied Ukrainian territories, Ukrinform reported a Ukrainian agriculture minister as saying.
The claim was made by Ukraine's first deputy minister for agrarian and food policy, Taras Vysotskyi, to RFE/RL's “Crimean Realities” project, according to the June 26 report.
“At the time of the current occupation, there were about 1.5 million tons of grain in these areas, according to elevator records. We have received information from Ukrainians who remained in these territories about the fact of export. If we add up all these cases, this is about 400,000 tons,” he said.
According to the Center for Food and Land Use Research at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE Institute), Ukrainian agricultural losses from the large-scale invasion have already reached US$1.4 billion, Vysotskyi added.
“Russia is deliberately destroying agricultural infrastructure,” he said.
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In this context, the German foreign minister said that Russia has turned a wave of food crises into a “tsunami” by blocking 25 million tons of grain exports from Ukraine ports, The Guardian reported.
Speaking at the start of an inter-ministerial conference on food in Berlin ahead of the June 26-28 G7 meeting in Germany, Annalena Baerbock said 345 million people worldwide were currently facing food shortages, according to the June 24 report.
Russia was using famine as a weapon of war, Baerbock said.
In response to Baerbock's comments, former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said: "It is incredible to hear this from officials who kept Leningrad under blockade for 900 days, where almost 700,000 people died of starvation."
However, Baerbock’s criticism of Russia was backed by Arif Husain, the chief economist at the United Nations World Food Programme, who said it was not sanctions that were causing the food crisis but war. “We tend to address the symptoms and forget the root cause, and the root cause is war,” he said.
More than 40 countries were now facing food inflation exceeding 15%, Husain said, and more than 30 economies had seen their currency depreciate by more than 25%.
Translated with the free version of the translator – www.DeepL.com/Translator
