https://www.dhakatribune.com/op-ed/2022/03/25/the-bread-wars-of-2022
4000 kilometres south from the legendarily rich agricultural plains that spill between Russia and Ukraine, ancient neighbourhoods in Cairo are unexpectedly resonating with anxiety about pita bread. Egypt’s staple food for millennia – the iconic *aish baladi *– is made from wheat, which the country is used to importing in great quantities. Last year alone, Egyptians consumed an astonishing $1.37 billion of wheat from Ukraine, with another sizable amount coming from Russia. Now they find themselves just one of many populations around the world suddenly confronted with the most basic conundrums of food security, as the spectre of mass hunger rises stealthily in the background. “It is true that Russia and Ukraine were our main sources of wheat,” said Egyptian prime minister Mustafa Madbouly a few days ago, but “I assure all Egyptians that we won't have any crisis at all or be compelled to buy from the international market until the end of this year.” Madbouly’s declarations about “the citizens’ basic needs concerning the bread loaf” were intended to comfort his people that they won’t experience any rude shocks due to rapidly spiking global prices for the essential grain commodity. But the fact is those price hikes are going to happen. The spill-over effects of Putin’s war have already disrupted supply systems with devastating implications for billions of vulnerable people. “The likely disruptions to agricultural activities of these two major exporters of staple commodities could seriously escalate food insecurity,” says Qu Dongyu, director-general of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. In an extensive statement on the Ukraine war, he warned that “food prices, already on the rise since the second half of 2020, reached an all-time high in February 2022 due to high demand, input and transportation costs, and port disruptions. Global prices of wheat and barley, for example, rose 31% over the course of 2021. Rapeseed oil and sunflower oil prices rose more than 60%.” Much worse looms, because “Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, and Ukraine is the fifth largest. Together, they provide 19% of the world’s barley supply, 14% of wheat, and 4% of maize, making up more than one-third of global cereal exports. They are also lead suppliers of rapeseed and account for 52% of the world’s sunflower oil export market.” Absent these two giant producers, and vast swathes of the world are plunged into instant calamity. Dongyu says “this is especially true for some fifty countries that depend on Russia and Ukraine for 30% or more of their wheat supply. Many of them are least developed countries or low-income, food-deficit countries in Northern Africa, Asia and the Near East.” Embedded in that roster of most affected is, of course, Bangladesh, which has been importing over 60% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, just like Egypt, Turkey and Iran, and to a marginally lesser extent, Pakistan, Lebanon, Tunisia and Libya. Just think of what dramatically decreased grain supplies – and severe shortages of bread –are going to wreak in all those societies. What is more, anything that we can imagine now is almost certainly going to play out unthinkably worse, because history teaches us to tread extremely cautiously when any populace is put under pressure to procure essential food supplies. It was Lenin who is said to have first coined the line “every society is three meals away from chaos” but even more pinpoint is the British secret service MI5’s longstanding maxim that the UK itself is always only “four meals from anarchy” because any society is going to fall apart that fast when people start to believe that their families might be at risk from starvation. This is why food riots have an essential engine of history on innumerable occasions, from the protests over the price of bread that eventually triggered the French Revolution in 1789 right to the spectacular “Arab Spring” uprising between 2008-11 that was initially sparked by angry outbursts over rising bread costs in Tunisia and Egypt. Now it seems inevitable there’s more of the same on the way in 2022. Is there any way to escape this plight? Most likely not, but the FAO’s Dongyu has some recommendations that might mitigate the circumstances for at least some of us. In short order, they are the following: find new suppliers immediately, keep trade strictly open, support the vulnerable first, strengthen market transparency, and avoid ad hoc policy reactions that might serve the needs of an individual country but prove deleterious to global welfare. Simple and straightforward? Yes, but one cannot escape the fact these guidelines are very similar to what was recommended – but not pursued – when it came to the global vaccination strategy for Covid-19. If the world fails on anything like the same scale once again, we are doomed to suffer an especially dark period of human history.