Huffington Post
The global food security crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would last for years even if the war ended tomorrow, Western officials have warned.
They said millions face being plunged into famine as the world experiences a food crisis on an “unprecedented scale” due to Vladimir Putin’s war.
It comes as foreign secretary Liz Truss accused Russia of “weaponising hunger” and using food security as a “callous tool of war” by blockading Ukraine’s grain.
Ukraine has been described as the “bread basket of Europe” and was one of the world’s largest exporters of wheat, corn and sunflower oil.
But the Russian invasion and Moscow’s mining of the access to the southern ports, including Odesa, has halted much of that flow and endangered world food supplies.
“Even at the best of times, if tomorrow the war was over, we are still looking at a two year crisis globally,” one official said, warning it would be wrong to believe the “global food food security crisis will be over in no time”.
“There is still going to be an impact on the world’s food supply from Ukraine for an extended period as a result of the war and as long as the war continues,” another added.
They said the war came on top of an already bad situation with conflict, climate and covid.
One expert added: “This is an unprecedented scale of global food insecurity – for its crisis in terms of speed, in terms of depth, in terms of unfortunately open-endedness because this will only get better once the war…
