APA – Dakar (Senegal) – With the non-renewal of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, many observers around the world are suggesting, without justification, that Africa is the main beneficiary of Ukrainian grain.
By Oumar Dembélé
As the Russia-Ukraine war rumbles on, President Vladimir Putin has decided to use the agreement on Ukrainian grain exports to make his voice heard among Western countries backing Kiev.
On Monday, July 17, Moscow decided to suspend the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which was signed by the two warring sides in July 2022 after mediation by the United Nations and Turkey, in order to pressure its adversaries into accepting, among other things, a clause that would also facilitate the export of Russian fertilizers and agricultural products.
The Ukrainian grain export agreement has so far allowed Kiev to export 33 million tons of grain (wheat, corn, etc.) to the rest of the world and, to a lesser extent, to Africa. Its goal is to avert a global food crisis by allowing Ukrainian agricultural products to be safely exported via the Black Sea, despite the conflict between the two former members of the Soviet Union.
This unilateral decision by the Kremlin has already provoked a strong reaction from the international community, with some observers calling for “good will on the part of the Russian president, especially towards African countries that depend on Ukrainian grain supplies”. Others, such as Christiane Hoffmann, deputy spokeswoman for the German government, are urging Moscow “not to pass on the consequences of this conflict to the world’s poorest people,” who are obviously on the African continent.
Africa behind China
But these players seem to forget that Africa is not the main beneficiary of Ukrainian grain. According to figures published last August by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the continent had received only 3.97 million tons of agricultural products from Ukraine as of June 26. Corn (1.79 million tons), wheat (1.7 million tons), barley (210,081 tons) and oilseeds (264,263 tons) are the main grains imported from Kiev since then.
At the same time, China, the main destination for these products, received 7.7 million tons, almost double the amount destined for the African continent. The European Union (EU), for its part, “has bought back 50% of Ukraine’s grain shipments since the beginning of the conflict,” says Olia Tayeb Cherif, research director at the Farm Foundation, a think tank on global agricultural issues.
What’s more, the distribution of these grains across the continent shows even regional disparities. North Africa, for example, was the main beneficiary with 3.12 million tons, or nearly 79% of the total shipments destined for the continent. Egypt was the best served country, receiving 1.5 million metric tons of food, making it the fifth largest recipient in the world.
Sub-Saharan Africa received only 850,000 tons of Ukrainian grain products, and this share was mainly absorbed by the eastern part of the continent. This situation is explained by the fact that the World Food Program (WFP) is implementing several aid operations in favor of communities threatened by famine and drought in the Horn of Africa, especially in countries such as Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan.
What role for Africa?
However, Moscow’s “blackmail” of the Black Sea Grain Initiative may not cause a food crisis at the moment because “the world is not short of wheat”. But what needs to be understood, according to Damien Vercambre of Inter-Courtage, is that “the bulk of exportable wheat is in Russia, with around 12.5 million tons in stock, and it’s the cheapest wheat in the world”.
Africa will certainly have something to say about this, in an attempt to bring Moscow and its Ukrainian and Western adversaries to their senses. In June 2022, four months into the conflict, the visit of President Macky Sall, then chair of the African Union (AU), to Vladimir Putin was one of the decisive factors in the release of grain stocks blocked in Ukraine.
A year later, the Senegalese leader sojourned to Russia again, this time with African counterparts, to mediate and push Kiev and Moscow into peaceful negotiations that could benefit the rest of the world, especially in terms of food supplies.
Although this mediation was unsuccessful, the African authorities are not giving up and will speak again with Moscow at the second Russia-Africa summit scheduled for the end of July in St. Petersburg, northern Russia.
ODL/ac/lb/as/APA