Russia can turn food into a weapon in future crises

One of Russia’s greatest strategic weaknesses has recently turned into an advantage. Climate change may tilt the balance further in Moscow’s favour.
Farm production — traditionally an area in which Russia has underperformed due to the low quality of its frigid, drought-prone agricultural land — has boomed over the past decade. That’s important, because food exports have long been a crucial contributor to security and diplomacy, and one in which the amply fed US and European Union have an inbuilt advantage. Even if President Vladimir Putin is found to have overplayed a weak hand in his invasion of Ukraine, food is one area where Russia’s sway is set to increase rather than deteriorate in the coming decades.
The Soviet Union rose and fell because of grain. The collapse in farm production during World War One, as conscription turned more than 10 million peasants from food producers into consumers, led to years of food riots culminating in the revolutions of 1917.
Collectivisation and the brutal famine that killed around 4 million Ukrainians in the the 1930s saw agricultural output stagnate, to the point where, by the 1970s, the USSR was importing an unprecedented amount of grain. Moscow’s inability to pay for its cereal purchases when the mid-1980s oil price collapse reduced the value of its petroleum exports was a major factor in the fall of Soviet communism, amid rationing and renewed fears of starvation.
That situation has dramatically reversed in recent years. Since the 2014 invasion of Crimea, Russia has turned itself from one of the world’s major food importers to an exporter on a grand scale.
Shipments of wheat overtook those from the European Union, US and Canada in 2017 to return the country to its Tsarist-era status as the world’s biggest exporter of that grain. Chicago wheat futures on Friday hit their highest levels since 2008.
Meat imports, which overtook those of grain in the post-Soviet era as the biggest food drain on the current account, have withered away almost to nothing. Sales of seafood from the warming seas of the north Pacific to the increasingly affluent markets of South Korea and China have surged. Even dairy products — one area in which Russia is still in a deficit — are less of an issue than they may appear, since the imbalance is overwhelmingly with Moscow’s close ally in Belarus. The country is fully self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs, Putin declared triumphantly in 2020, before announcing caps on the price of products such as sugar and oil as costs surged later in the year.

—Bloomberg