Ukraine and our daily bread

If the old Chinese proverb that "the flapping of a butterfly's wings can be felt on the other side of the world" is accurate, we can easily imagine what happens when hawks - or even vultures - take flight. 

Thus, one need only look at the Maghreb countries' dependence on grain from Russia and Ukraine to conjecture quite accurately what the second-order consequences of a bloody conflict between the two former republics of the USSR would be. For example, Algeria imports more than 40 percent of the world's wheat production, a figure that roughly correlates with the volume of cereal exports from the European Union to Algeria. A lucrative business for European producers, especially the French, which in recent years has been threatened by competition from exports of Ukrainian and Russian grain, mostly harvested in the vicinity of the regions in question (Ukraine is the world's fifth largest wheat producer, with North Africa as its main market), and which has been gaining market share thanks to lower production costs mainly due to the use of off-patent domestic seeds, which allows Russians and Ukrainians to plant seeds from their own harvests, unlike European farmers, who have to buy new patented seeds for each sowing.   

It goes without saying how important cereals are in feeding the populations of North Africa, and the short-term consequences for these countries of a disruption in grain supplies that would be expected in a situation of conflagration between two of their main suppliers. The climatic conditions, and the lack of irrigation, make it unthinkable that the countries of North Africa could be self-sufficient in the short term, so that - as is the case for the European Union with gas from Russia - they would be forced to increase imports of both European and North American wheat, subjecting their economies to higher costs at a time when the financial effects of the pandemic are at a peak.   

The prospect of unaffordable prices and shortages to feed the entire population of 250 million people may become an additional destabilising factor from Cairo to Rabat, which may benefit farmers in Europe and the United States in the short term (and the military-industrial complex, as reported by the heads of General Dynamics, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin), Raytheon and Lockheed Martin to their shareholders) has the potential to trigger unsustainable social situations, conducive to the kind of revolts that professional terrorists are so good at fishing for, with consequences in terms of security, migratory pressures, and gas supplies that the European Union is far from being able to handle either east or south, while the US can afford to observe events 8,000 km away without taking risks. 8,000 km away, without taking any risks.