Ukraine Drought, Conflict To Raise Food Prices, Magazine Warns

Last Friday, as speculation that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine mounted, ABC News reported that “the specter of a military confrontation” was “pumping fresh life into the debate over whether president Joe Biden’s climate agenda is brushing up against difficult geopolitical realities,” Mark Hertsgaard reported for The Nation magazine.

Photo Insert: Ukraine is a major grain exporter.

The story, which was produced by the network’s newly formed climate unit and ABC’s investigative team, was perhaps the first in the US media to examine the climate angle of the Ukraine conflict. It should not be the last.

There has been abundant coverage of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which runs between Russia and Germany and could double the former’s gas exports to Europe, and which Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Schulz have pledged to block if Russia does invade Ukraine. However, such coverage has rarely explored the climate issues at hand.

ABC’s February 11 story by Lucien Bruggeman admirably pulled together both the energy and climate dimensions of the Ukraine conflict. Bruggeman briefly touched on recent arguments from “oil interests and Republican lawmakers,” including an American Petroleum Institute spokesman and US Senator Lisa Murkowski, that President Biden had inadvertently strengthened Russia’s hand in the Ukraine conflict by cutting US fossil-fuel production in the name of combating climate change, but it then brought in comments from experts across the ideological spectrum to call out that red herring.

Erin Sikorsky, a former intelligence official who directs the Center for Climate and Security, advised administration critics and conflict spectators not to conflate “the short-term crisis and the long-term strategy.”

The global economy is increasingly leaving fossil fuels behind in favor of renewable energy. The US should hasten that transition, experts reasoned, precisely to avoid the dependence on imported gas that makes Europe vulnerable to Russian pressure in the current crisis.

Ukraine, a major grain exporter, has also been walloped by droughts in recent years—another climate story with international consequences that has been relatively under-covered. The country has long ranked among the most productive agricultural areas on Earth—under the old Soviet Union, it was the nation’s breadbasket—but climate change is dramatically decreasing output and, by extension, threatening the stability of food prices around the world.

A report from the Atlantic Council last year emphasized the impacts of drought on Ukraine’s grain exports, noting that they had “fallen sharply year-on-year during the current season due to smaller harvests caused by severe drought conditions.”

When an agricultural power as important as Ukraine suddenly starts producing and exporting much less food, it is a recipe for social dislocation, human suffering, and political unrest, both inside the country and beyond.

Less production translates into higher prices. The price of food is something people everywhere care about, which makes it something journalists need to be talking about.

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