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Russia invaded Ukraine in order to disrupt the global food supply. Destabilization will be done by securing the best agricultural land in the region to offset the future nutritional shortages.
Plenty of people (including me) are wringing their hands over the carbon consequences of warfare — especially an entrenched, prolonged war spanning years and continents. Not only would fossil fuels go into the gas tanks of combat vehicles, but also into every land and sea transport vehicle used to move troops and equipment. And then there’s the petroleum used to make everything from the weapons themselves to the uniforms and day-to-day supplies. Just a nasty thought, how a large scale multi-country war will make keeping global temperatures below 1.5ºC above pre-industrial revolution levels an exercise in futility and insanity.
It’s a bit heartless to think about a hypothetical climate disaster made worse by real war in which real human being are being turned into hamburgers in the present. I’d expect that response from rational people. Problem is, our belief that we’d recognize cool rationality when we saw it is what got us into the climate crisis in the first place. The hippies in the ’60s and ’70s with their “Love Your Mother” bumperstickers were the reactionaries. Unrealistic tree-huggers who just couldn’t learn to love or trust the march of scientific, industrial progress. All but the most hardened, conservative, corporate-captured, brainwashed chuds now realize the dire state of the Earth. Today, if you look rationally, scientifically at the data being generated by climate studies just about daily, you realize that, while millions of people are at risk of death, dismemberment, or displacement as a direct consequence of the Ukraine’s war against invading Russia, the numbers of potential victims of the climate apocalypse are a couple orders of magnitude greater.
The World Health Organization estimates that as many as 700 million people are at-risk of being displaced as a result of drought by 2030. According to a paper by, 1.4 billion people could become climate refugees from sea level rise by 2060. Charles Geisler, Cornell professor. He then extrapolated this number to 2 billion in 2100. One-fifth of the world’s population. If no solutions are found, tens, if not hundreds, of millions, will die early and miserable deaths over the next century. They will die from extreme weather, disease, and likely the hostile actions of the occupants adjacent to the refugees’ former home regions, now made unlivable by fires and floods. They will die most often from a perpetual, shifting famine that never ends, never stops, and which shifts in longitude and latitude every year. As famine continues, nations will respond in predictable ways to the demands from their starving population.
What do I mean by saying that the Ukraine crisis is a symptom (or extension) of the climate crisis? This war is logically fueled by oil. That’s what’s fueled some of the deadliest and most enduring conflicts in our lifetime, and there is a fossil fuel component to this conflagration. There’s a Russian pipeline that means a lot to a lot of billionaires and European citizens who’ve gotten used to on-demand hEat and hot water over the last couple centuries. But here’s the thing about oil: you can’t drink it. You can sell it, but you can’t eatThe notes that corporations and governments will give you to pay for it.
Another factor that could be a catalyst for this humanitarian disaster, some people would like you to believe is that Russian President Putin has just gone mad. Bats in the fucking Belfry. I mean, anything’s possible, I suppose. He’s been at these power games a long, long time, which could certainly cause a guy to fray along the edges of cogency. But I think that if Putin’s crazy, it’s crazy like a fox.
As soon as it was looking like Russia wasn’t playing around, I started asking, but…what do you actually Get when you conquer Ukraine? I was an ignorant American and assumed that Ukraine was a desolate, windswept land, maybe visible in greyscale. There are squat Brutalist structures in the distance in the middle a barren prairie.
It wasn’t until I found out that the very national flag — blue, unbroken band above a yellow unbroken band — symbolizes endless fields of grain under a clear, huge sky, that I started thinking I should look into how agriculture might fit into the story of this seemingly unexpected war. I remember somewhere back in my aged memory hearing that Ukraine was fertile, but did not know that the country is known as the world’s “other breadbasket.”
Vox reports that Ukraine produces 18% of the world’s sunflower seed, safflower or cottonseed oil exports; 13% of corn production; 12% of global barley exports; and 8% of wheat and meslin. According to Diario AS, “China buys more corn from Ukraine than from any other country and many nations in southeast Asia are hugely reliant on Ukrainian crops to feed their populations.” The list of nations either dependent or who extensively source their populations’ nutrition on the productivity of Ukraine’s agriculture is staggering. We’re talking millions and millions and millions of rumbling bellies.
American grain farmers who saw the connection between the war in Ukraine, and the risk to the global supply of food, long before mainstream media, feel the immense responsibility to produce a bumper harvest this year. According to Farming is a success. But supply chain disruptions, among other factors, can make it difficult.Reports Modern Farmer fertilizer prices have tripled or even quadrupled in price in the last year. In an effort to provide a complete picture about how the Russia/Ukraine war will affect agriculture in the United States and has already affected it, Farm Progress has already compiled A detailed report.
My view of the hostilities is, however, far more troubling than my direct experience with the fact that global food supplies are being threatened by violence. Russia invaded Ukraine in an attempt to disrupt the global food supply. And securing the best arable land in the region for itself in order to mitigate the nutritional shortages to come will do a fine job of destabilization.
We gave them the idea. As early as 2004, when a secret report commissioned by Pentagon defense adviser Andrew Marshall was leaked to the press, the public has been warned that climate change “could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies,” reported The Guardian at the time. The intelligence community continued to predict possible outcomes in an increasingly unstable climate for many years. In 2012, the New York Times Report on a C.I.A.-commissioned study and other intelligence agencies which revealed that “clusters of apparently unrelated events exacerbated by a warming climate will create more frequent but unpredictable crises in water supplies, food markets, energy supply chains and public health systems.”
The following article explains the Times noted that Republicans in Congress objected to the idea that the C.I.A. They tried to defund the climate research efforts. While conservatives failed initially in 2010, they were able to kill two important programs in summer 2015. They did this by defunding the Center on Climate Change in 2015 and Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis in 2012. The Atlantic quoted Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, who was particularly critical of the intelligence agency’s environmental work, as saying that the C.I.A. “should be focused on monitoring terrorists in caves, not polar bears on icebergs.”
But the intelligence community, thankfully, employs people who are not as fucking stupid as John Barrasso, and climate awareness increased in the regular course of spook-craft. The 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment, prepared by the Director of National Intelligence. Inside Climate NewsThe climate crisis would have an impact on security and peace, as we could only guess.
“Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security,” said the report.
Most recently, under the Biden administration all 18 US intelligence agencies authored the first ever National Intelligence Estimate on Climate Change, which looks at the impact of climate on national security through to 2040. Scientists and intelligence and defense experts examined everything from the dangers posed by poorly thought-out geoengineering to climate refugee crises. USA Today reported that, “[m]ore broadly, the estimate concluded, the increasing physical effects of climate change are likely to intensify cross-border geopolitical flashpoints as states take steps to secure their interests at the expense of others.”
These flashpoints should not be taken as manifestations of Climate competition
So, if you could remove the fact that Ukraine is an absolute powerhouse of agriculture, that it’s one of the most fertile places on the planet, you might be able to squint your eyes and see that it’s just Putin’s lunatic visions of a restored Russian Empire for the hell of it. But, see, you CAN’T separate Ukraine from its food production. It’s what they do. According to the International Trade Administration, large agricultural enterprises produce “55 % of gross output and consists of 45,000 enterprises. More than 4 million families own small farms, which average 1.23 ha. [3 acres]Each parcel of land generates almost 45 % gross agricultural output. That’s a massive proportion of the population devoted to growing food.
“With 41.5 million hectares of agricultural land covering 70 % of the country and about 25 % of the world’s reserves of black soil, agriculture is Ukraine’s largest export industry,” notes the ITA.
Black soil… And then it hits me. Yale professor Timothy Snyder saw the climate crisis through historical eyes and foresaw tensions as food competition became the most primitive, visceral response. He even wrote a book on the subject.
Black Earth: The Holocaust, History and Warning I was fortunate enough to grab him for an interview just after that title dropped. Please listen to My conversation with him. His foresight (based on hindsight — he is a history prof after all…) is deeply unsettling.
What’s happening in Ukraine right now should be the least surprising thing that happens on the world StageThis year. Russia’s claims about the Ukrainian people belonging to Russia, about the glory of a new Czarist empire, even about feeling threatened by NATO — all bullshit. Putin is thinking about the droughts that his country has suffered over the last decade and more. He’s thinking about the five million Russians who starved to death during the Povolzhye famine of 1921-22. He’s thinking about the famine of 1932-33 when another eight million people in the Soviet Union died of hunger. He’s probably also thinking of how, as described by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic:
“A cordon was drawn around the Ukrainian republic to prevent escape. The result was a catastrophe: Nearly 5 million people died of hunger across the Soviet Union. Among them were nearly 4 million Ukrainians who died not because of neglect or crop failure, but because they had been deliberately deprived of food.”
Putin and his intelligence chiefs don’t think so. They may be mad as rabid dogs, but they’re not traditionally crazy. They just need to read the warnings from the United States about international strife, including food shortages, and then do the math. It’s not hard at all to see what the fate is going to be for any of Russia’s neighbors who have natural resources it can use either to feed its own people or to hold other nations hostage to their own hungers.
On February 28, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest doomsaying report in the series. Within the study’s 3,675 pages was little reason for optimism. Upon its release, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres intoned, “Delay means death.”
Reuters News service stated that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine overshadowed the release of the report and drove the sole Ukrainian author to leave the proceedings to take shelter, although a government representative did attend its final approval by nearly 200 nations.” To anyone who’s really paying attention and putting the pieces together, the invasion overshadowed nothing. Russia’s attempted conquest underlines, in heavy black marker, the barbaric potential of the human reaction to an Earth damaged too badly to sustain us all.
Jason Velázquez is editor and publisher of the Greylock GlassWilliamstown, Mass.
