Erdogan announces Russia will send free grain to poor African countries

Russia will send free grain to poor African countries such as Sudan, Somalia and Djibouti, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on Friday, commenting on talks he held with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to revive the Ukrainian grain export agreement.

"We must support low-income countries, the poorest. When we spoke the day before yesterday, Putin told me: 'We should send this grain for free to countries like Djibouti, Somalia and Sudan'," Erdogan said in a speech broadcast live on Turkish public broadcaster TRT.

"I agreed and we said we will talk about this extensively at the G20," he added, referring to the summit of the group of 20 industrialised countries, scheduled for the middle of this month in Indonesia.

"This is what we agreed. It's the step we have to take, it's the right thing to do. We will talk about it when we meet on the 13th and 14th of this month in Bali," Erdogan said.

In the same speech, which he gave at the opening of a business fair in Istanbul, the Turkish president mentioned that he had spoken to UN Secretary General António Guterres yesterday to ask him to discuss at the G20 summit the fate of food exported from Ukraine under the agreement signed last July between Kiev and Moscow.

 
"Do we send these grains and fertilisers to rich countries or to low-income, poor, dispossessed countries? We have to take steps on this," Erdogan said.

Of the nearly 10 million tonnes of agricultural products exported since August from Ukraine under the agreement, almost half have gone to Western European ports, more than a third to the Asia-Pacific region, mainly China, and 1.3 million tonnes to Africa, mainly Egypt.