As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine batters the global food supply and Canada scrambles to figure out how to assist, it leads to a bigger, more fundamental question: What role can we play in fixing a global food system that increasingly looks to be broken?
In the clinical language of emergency food relief, the desperate day-to-day reality of hunger is reduced to numbers on a scale of one to five.
Among the devastating effects of Russia’s invasion has been the destruction that it’s dealt to the global food supply. With Ukraine and Russia – both major food producers – suddenly severed from global markets, large swaths of the world’s population are being cut off from staple food products. Prices for food around the world have skyrocketed.
Exacerbating the crisis is that many of the countries most dependent on Ukraine and Russia for food are among the world’s poorest. Between them, Ukraine and Russia produce about a quarter of the world’s exports of wheat, and are major suppliers of other staple grains and oils. About 50 countries – many of them in the Middle East and Africa – rely on the region for food.
Organizations including the CFB have already felt its impact. In Syria and Lebanon, they’ve seen their purchasing power dramatically reduced, with prices rising up to 35 per cent over the past two months. In Ethiopia, a food basket that cost $38 three years ago now costs $60. “Since then, there hasn’t been a moment our food system hasn’t been in crisis,” said Prof. Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at University of the Fraser Valley. And with each crisis, she said, global food systems have sputtered, then collapsed.
“We have to at least start to consider that the age of globalization is in retreat, at least in terms of food,” she said. For the past several months, Evan Fraser has been using images from political unrest in the Middle East a decade ago to illustrate the role inequality plays in the current crisis – and the potential consequences of ignoring such inequalities.
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