Putin’s Grain War Angers Some of Russia’s Allies

Russia will make a major push to win support across Africa this week, even as its actions in Ukraine threaten to spread misery in some of the continent’s poorest nations. 

A two-day summit in St. Petersburg, due to kick off on Thursday, will see Russia’s President Vladimir Putin court leaders from several African countries as he seeks to counter Western efforts to isolate Moscow on the world stage. 

For more than a year, many of these countries have sided with Russia despite Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Russian assaults on civilians. Now Putin has taken aim at Ukraine’s - and the world’s - supply of basic food, and that is hitting home in countries that have been in Russia’s corner. 

Putin’s decision to pull out of a United Nations deal to allow the shipment of Ukrainian grain has already cast a shadow over the summit, coming just a month after several African leaders, including South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, made a direct appeal to the Russian leader not to abandon the accord. And it hasn’t helped that Russia has followed that decision with a series of attacks on Ukrainian grain storage facilities on the Black Sea and Danube River. On Tuesday Britain’s U.N. ambassador said Putin was using his military to “weaponize global food supplies.”

Russia’s attacks and withdrawal from the grain deal have already driven up the cost of food on world markets—making essentials costlier for countries that are already struggling to feed their populations. 

As a senior Kenyan official told the Financial Times, Putin’s withdrawal from the grain deal was a “stab in the back...that disproportionately impacts countries in the Horn of Africa already impacted by drought.” Mozambique’s ambassador to the U.N. warned that its suspension was “certain to amplify global socioeconomic stresses.” 

All of which means Putin may get an earful at his African summit. 

“It will be important for African countries to speak directly to Russia about the pressures and problems they are facing as a result of the war,” Patrick Muthengi Maluki, an international affairs expert at the University of Nairobi, told The Messenger. 

“The summit will be an opportunity to tell Russia how African countries are being hurt by the war.” 

Russia’s pitch—and why it’s wrong

Putin has tried to sell a different - if flawed - narrative to nations in Africa: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was necessary to counter “Nazis” in that country and NATO’s expansion; and the grain deal was flawed because the West took the lion’s share of supplies. 

“This ‘deal,’” Putin said Monday, “while it was publicly advertised by the West as a gesture of goodwill that benefited Africa, has in fact been shamelessly used solely for the enrichment of large U.S. and European businesses that exported and resold grain from Ukraine.” 

Putin argued that under the grain deal the majority of shipments leaving Ukraine have ended up in rich or middle-income countries - and he also promised to boost Russian grain shipments to Africa. 

But Putin’s argument hasn’t convinced African leaders — who have been pleading with the Kremlin to rejoin the agreement. That’s because of what Russia’s war on Ukrainian grain is doing to the price of food. 

Since Russia pulled out of the grain deal, wheat prices, for example, have already hit their highest levels since February. And even with Russia’s new gift of grain to Africa, the continent will still need to import tens of millions more tons of grain at those higher prices.

It’s a problem that’s likely to get worse. Putin is effectively forcing global markets to factor in the absence of Ukrainian grain—and that has the effect of driving up prices.

For the African leaders pressing Putin to rejoin the deal, this means a likely repeat of what happened last year, when Russia attacked Ukraine: food prices hit an all-time high. The grain deal, by freeing up Ukrainian supplies and allowing them to come onto the world markets, has helped bring the cost of key staples such as wheat and corn down by more than 20 per cent since then.

“The need for renewal (of the grain deal) cannot be overstated,” Stanley Kakubo, the foreign minister of Zambia, another country that is sending a delegation to the St Petersburg summit this week, said. The agreement, he added, was nothing less than a “linchpin in the global grain market.”

As Martin Griffiths, the U.N.’s top aid official, told the Security Council last week, Russia’s suspension of the deal means that “some will go hungry, some will starve, many may die as a result of these decisions.”