Termination of the “grain deal” as a telling outcome of Western duplicitous policy

Jul 15, 2023

Following a month after Russia’s suspension of the Black Sea Initiative, the Western propaganda mouthpieces continue their loud talk about alleged great risks our country’s step is posing to the global food security. They paint terrible consequences, but, like before, they are still missing the very fact of package nature of the documents reached on 22 July 2022. Back then Istanbul hosted the signing of two interrelated agreements – the Black Sea Initiative on Ukrainian food and Russian fertilizers exports and the MoU between Russia and the UN Secretariat on promoting Russian food products and fertilizers to the world markets. While the Ukrainian part indeed started to be fulfilled just a week after its signing, the Russian one has never really worked.

The collective West is talking hypocritically about the Global South’s needs, saying that its unilateral and illegitimate sanctions against our country are not applied to food and fertilizers exports. But in fact Washington, Brussels and London continues to roll out restrictions. Since the initiative’s announcement, only two shipments have been made out of the total of Russia’s 262,000 tonnes blocked in Latvia, Estonia, Belgium and the Netherlands (all the EU members by the way). Even those shipments that Russia agreed to supply for free were blocked. Rosselkhozbank has not been reconnected to the SWIFT system. Spare part and equipment imports for the production of farm products and fertilizers in Russia are banned as imports of so-called “dual-purpose” goods. The part about Russian ammonia supply, never fulfilled, saw its telling end on 5 June 2023, when Kiev blasted the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline. The West as usual ignored this terrorist attack, like it obstinately overlooked the Kiev-unleashed punitive war against Donbass following the Ukrainian coup in 2014.

And what about the Ukraine part? Out of total 32,8 million tonnes of cargo exported from Ukraine, over 70% were shipped to countries with high and higher than average income, including the EU. Meanwhile, vulnerable states in need got less than 3%. The purported humanitarian concerns just covered Europeans’ commercialization of the Initiative, when the Ukrainian food was bought at below market prices and after processing at their own factories resold with high added value abroad. Its termination limits Europe’s ability to replenish own coffers and strips the EU of a plausible pretext to do so. In the meantime, Kiev regime used the humanitarian sea corridor and shipping to perpetrated numerous terrorist attacks against Russian civilians and provocations against military sites.

The West’s duplicitous treatment of the Istanbul packet documents is revealing at the UN framework. In July and November 2022, the US, Britain and France blocked the adoption of all UN Security Council documents that mentioned the Russia-UN Memorandum of Understanding. Welcoming or even mentioning that document remains unacceptable to them. Nevertheless, our country has repeatedly reaffirmed its readiness to return to the Istanbul agreements as soon as the West fulfills all the obligations to Russia set out in the “package”.

In the meantime, the developments are fraught with tangible consequences for the EU’s own food security, especially against the backdrop of the well-known adverse impact of unilateral anti-Russian restrictions for European internal market, along with unfavorable climate and phytosanitary factors in some regions. There are risks of political instability in the countries bordering Ukraine, where local farmers are on the verge of ruin, given the sale of the Ukrainian agricultural products at dumping prices.

The EU concern for global food security is nothing more than another attempt to justify the disastrous consequences of its own sanctions policy. Meanwhile, the international experts openly name the global economy perturbations, major Western powers’ systematic mistakes in the macroeconomy, energy and food policies as the root causes of the inflation in the food markets. With fertilizers affordability plummeted to the rates of 2008, agrarians are facing the risk of its deficit, decline in crops yield, global shortfall in agricultural production. The dangerous situation in agro sphere is looming due to ill-considered approach of the West, with reverberation of the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-Russian restrictions aggravating it more.

H.E. Anatoly Borovik, Ambassador of Russia to Cambodia

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