Thread by @NewStatesman

"As Russian forces unleash terror on Ukraine, fragile economies in the Middle East – many battered by war – face a new backlash from the Russian president’s adventurism: a push into even deeper food insecurity." | Writes @cheesemanab
newstatesman.com/world/2022/03/…

In many Arab economies, bread makes up the majority of calories consumed; its cost is a political issue.

Globally, food prices are at their highest since 2011, when a surge in the cost of living helped trigger the Arab Spring.

In Egypt, the biggest wheat importer in the world – 80 per cent of which comes from Ukraine and Russia – bread has been heavily subsidised for decades.

For the staple baladi flat bread, the consumer pays about a tenth of the production price, keeping it affordable for the one third of the nation that lives under the poverty line.

If Egypt and its neighbours cannot afford to maintain this subsidy in the face of rapidly rising costs (wheat is already 50 per cent more expensive than before the invasion of Ukraine), the political results could be explosive.

“Yemen can no longer feed itself, so when you have a shock like this to the market… it is desperately worrying,” said Oxfam’s Richard Stanforth, adding that according to his sources, between December 2021 and March 2022, 42 per cent of Yemen’s grain came from Ukraine.

Lebanon, already in the grips of one of history’s biggest economic meltdowns, imports up to 90 per cent of its wheat and cooking oil from Ukraine and Russia. In the face of predicted shortages, it has, at most, just a month of wheat reserves remaining.

Even if ministers’ pleas to the US to help pay for emergency reserves come through, there is nowhere to store any more wheat after the main grain silos were ripped apart in the 2020 Beirut port explosion.

As global oil prices soar, both Lebanon and Yemen are facing a compounding and severe deterioration in the value of their local currencies: purchasing power is through the floor as the price of necessary commodities skyrocket. It’s the perfect storm.

Pockets of famine-like conditions are returning to Yemen for the first time in two years; 90 per cent of Syrian refugees in Lebanon live in abject poverty; and over 12 million Syrians face food insecurity 11 years into the war.

Ukraine’s crisis has unleashed a deepening humanitarian catastrophe on the Middle East.

Read @cheesemanab's full analysis here: newstatesman.com/world/2022/03/…