Michaël Tanchum writes:

After 100 days of war in Ukraine on Europe’s eastern flank, a critical new front has opened on Europe’s southern flank with the food crisis in Africa. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has accused Moscow of weaponizing famine and using it against Africa. Already on a near-war footing to counter Moscow’s westward advances in Ukraine, Europe is now pressed to prevent a famine-driven mass migration crisis coming to its southern shores from North Africa. As Europe faces a two-front, geo-economic war of attrition with Russia, Morocco’s plan to increase its fertilizer output by nearly 70% changes the strategic equation by countering Moscow’s ability to weaponize the food-energy nexus. In so doing, Morocco has demonstrated its increasing importance as a geopolitical partner for Europe and the United States in Sub-Saharan Africa.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, he also detonated the financial equivalent of a megaton bomb within the global economic system in the form of inflation. Commodity shortages resulting from the war’s disruption of supply chains have sent consumer prices soaring worldwide. The most immediate impact has been felt in food production chains, especially in Africa’s food-insecure states on Europe’s southern borders. Already overstretched supporting a beleaguered Ukraine, the European Union’s immediate concern is that hunger-driven migration from Africa could be more than the EU can handle. Amid concerns that large numbers of migrants could attempt the perilous boat crossing from North Africa, European Commission Vice President Margaritis Schinas warned that hunger-driven migration from Africa was “not going to be so manageable,” adding, “We have a global interest in avoiding this.”

To be clear, Russia is not responsible for the global food crisis. As a prior MEI publication warned at the time, the food crisis had been metastasizing throughout 2021. In early June 2021, food inflation had already reached the same level as the immediate build-up to the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings that rocked North Africa. Back then, soaring food prices kept people on the streets with chants of “bread, freedom, and social justice” until long-standing regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya fell in quick succession. During the latter six months of 2021, food inflation continued to rise well above those Arab Spring levels. In Q3 2021, the price of soft wheat used in bread manufacture stood at $271 per ton, a 22% increase over the previous year. The price in the fourth quarter of 2021 shot up even further, and as of March 3, 2022, just one week into Russia’s Ukraine invasion, it stood at nearly $389 per ton. Moscow has simply pushed on the vulnerable points in an already fragile global food system and that system started collapsing from its own weaknesses.

In Africa, the state of food security was already stark: It has the highest proportion of its population, 21%, experiencing severe hunger of any region in the world. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2021 report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World warned that there were an estimated 282 million undernourished people in Africa, equivalent to 85% of the United States’ total population. While Russia may have poured gasoline on the flames of the food crisis, it did not start the fire. [Continue reading…]