With Russia’s withdrawal from the 2022 Black Sea Grain Deal, the relationship between political-economy and the world market, on the one hand, and the vicissitudes of warfare, on the other, have become a problem that Russia (and its allies) and Ukraine (and its allies) are forced to confront. Prior to the war, Russia and Ukraine “accounted for about one-quarter of the world’s wheat and barley exports and a large share of its cooking oil, particularly sunflower oil, and Russia was the largest supplier of fertilizer,” and the fallout surrounding the Grain Deal’s collapse is already being felt. According to the UN’s World Food Program (WFP), the WFP now finds itself without a reliable flow of grain exports amidst the organizations desire to push further into Sudan in order to reach those most in need as the ongoing war between the country’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has extended beyond its 100th day. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “16 African countries rely strongly on the agricultural produce of Russia and Ukraine. The invasion triggered a shortage of at least 30 million tonnes of food globally, impacting countries like the Horn of Africa, where climate change, conflict, and bad governance have sparked a food security crisis affecting about 50 million people.”
Black Sea Grain Deal
The Black Sea Grain Deal was negotiated in July 2022 by the UN and Russia as a means of ensuring the export of grain from Ukraine’s southern ports, and brokered by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan given his close ties with Putin and Türkiye’s sovereign right to oversee maritime traffic in both the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits as per the 1936 Montreux Convention. The central achievement of the Grain Deal was its allowance for commercial food and fertilizer exports from three Ukrainian ports — Odessa, Chornomorsk, and Pivdennyi — with the agreement that ships were to be inspected by teams composed of Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and UN inspectors.
Russia, however, began slowing down inspections in October 2022, claiming that Ukraine and its allies have failed to uphold the latter half of the deal, which allowed for a greater number of Russian agricultural exports than Russia claims were being shipped at the time. According to the UN, while it retains the capacity of inspecting upwards of 40 ships per day, in October 2022, 10 inspections were completed per day and, by May 2023, the number of completed daily inspections fell to two. As reported by The Guardian, 33 million tonnes of grain were exported via the Grain Deal, with 61% of exports destined for lower-/middle-income countries while 750,000 tonnes of grain were purchased by the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) and shipped to countries such as Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan. Moreover, the grain deal contributed to stabilizing the price of grain at $800/tonne (down from its pre-deal peak at $1360/tonne).
While Russia announced its withdrawal from the grain deal last Monday (17 July), two days later (19 July) Russia’s Defense Ministry announced that any ship sailing “around Ukrainian ports” will be considered a legitimate “military target.” For this three day period alone, the economic effects of Russia’s actions could be seen in the rise of the price of grain on the global market. As seen in Figure 1 (above), while the global price of grain was listed as $670/bushel on 18 July, Figure 2 (below) indicates that, by the very next day, the global price of grain rose to $727/bushel (at the time of this article’s writing, the global price of grain is listed as $738.87/bushel). It is entirely likely that Russia’s progressive slow down of inspections forms part of the country’s larger geopolitical strategy. What is more, Russia may even welcome the rise in global grain prices resulting from the dissolution of the grain deal. According to recent economic projections by the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), Refinitiv, “Russia is forecast to be the world’s largest exporter of wheat in 2023/24 for the fourth year in a row, with exports increasing by 1 million tons to a record 45.5 million, according to the US Department of Agriculture.” And to mark the start of the two-day ‘Russia-Africa Summit’ (27-28 July) in St. Petersburg was Putin’s promise “to provide Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, the Central African Republic and Eritrea with 25,000-50,000 tonnes of grain free of charge” — a promise that is as much a statement of intent as it is a statement of Russia’s inflexible candor on issues of national interest and security.
In the week since Russia’s withdrawal, Ukrainian ports and its nearby areas have been subjected to nightly missile strikes, killing and wounding civilians. During one of Russia’s recent missile strikes, The New York Times reported that Russian bombs destroyed “60,000 tons of grain waiting to be loaded onto ships in Chornomorsk” — one of the three ports originally approved for grain and fertilizer export under the Grain Deal — and which, according to the World Food Program (WFP), is “enough to feed more than 270,000 people for a year.” And, on the morning of 21 July, Russian missile strikes “destroyed 100 tons of peas and 20 tons of barley at the port of Odessa,” according to Ukraine’s head of regional military administration. Regarding the two-fold response from Ukraine’s allies, and in addition to the possibility of a 20 billion euro EU military defense fund to support Ukraine’s counter-offensive, the European Commission recently proposed a 50 billion euro economic aid package for the fiscal years of 2024-2027. The European Commission’s proposal comes in light of Ukraine’s request for upwards of $40 billion from the EU in order to fund what Ukrainian President, Vladimir Zelensky, has termed the “Green Marshall Plan” — a plan for both short-/long-term funding to address the exigencies of the ongoing war while laying the foundations for “long-term reconstruction” efforts.
Cluster Munitions
Aside from the previous usage of cluster munitions in Ukrainian territory (e.g., Annexation of Crimea, 2014), both Russia and Ukraine have already used cluster bombs as part of their military campaigns during the current conflict (February, 2022). The controversial aspects of the U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions as part of his country’s latest shipment of military supplies to Ukraine, however, extends beyond the moral and humanitarian.
Having “long resisted calls to provide cluster munitions” that are “currently sitting in U.S. stockpiles and on the verge of expiring,” and in light of the pre-existing law from 2009 banning exports of U.S. cluster munitions with “dud rates”, or the rate at which unexploded ordinances (UXO) remain per bomb dropped, higher than 1% (i.e. virtually all of the U.S. military stockpile) there is a significant discrepancy between the Biden administration’s and U.S. Military’s report regarding the “dud rate”pertaining to the cluster bombs included in the U.S.’s most recent military package.
According to White House reports, the “dud rate” of M864 munitions, which were included in the shipment to Ukraine, was found to be 2.34%. However, reports from the U.S. Military reported a “dud rate” of 14% for the very same kind of cluster munitions. As military adviser at the Dutch nongovernmental organization PAX, Marc Garlasco, helpfully illustrates, a “dud rate” of 14% means “for every 100,000 shells dropped by Ukraine, there will be roughly 1 million unexploded clusters on the ground.” Such a “dud rate,” adds Garlasco, is not entirely surprising since cluster munitions will not explode if they strike their target at anything greater than a 45 degree angle.
Typically referred to as ‘saturation weapons’ (rather than ‘precision weapons’), the use of cluster bombs is strategically advantageous with respect to a territory populated by tanks and/or soldiers. And due to the nature of cluster munitions (wherein an M864 ‘mother bomb’ contains 72 smaller bombs), the use of cluster munitions allows a military to drop a greater number of munitions in a single strike as opposed to munitions that require multiple strikes or military aircrafts to achieve the same degree of destruction. Thus, while cluster munitions have long been known to be less effective given their rate of civilian casualty due to the number of unexploded ordinances (UXO) per bomb dropped, their continued usage is largely informed by cluster munitions’ capability of achieving the same amount of damage as other weapons but at a noticeably lower cost.
Conclusion
Given Biden’s announcement of the U.S.’s plan to ship cluster bombs to Ukraine, the war has not only entered a new phase with this escalation of tactics. For every victory of one side over the other, nature takes its revenge. Such is the truth of the political economy of war and is nowhere better seen than in what Human Rights Watch has called ‘the most bombed country in history’: Laos. Referring to the decades long effort in clearing Laos of unexploded bombs dropped by the U.S., Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent aptly writes, “if you overlay U.S. bombing records with a map of the country, the hardest hit areas — Xieng Khouang and parts of the southern border with Vietnam — remain the most economically deprived.” And according to a 2022 Congressional Research Service report prepared for the members and committees of the U.S. Congress, “the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimates that in Laos alone, 9 million to 27 million unexploded submunitions remained after the conflict, resulting in over 10,000 civilian casualties to date.” Thus, as Sera Koulabdara — one of the hundreds of thousands of Laotian refugees who fled their country during the U.S.’s “war of containment” against the spread of communism in Vietnam — poignantly reminds us: ever since the last bomb was dropped 50 years ago, “only 1% of the contaminated area has been cleared.”
Considered in light of Ukraine’s request of up to $40 billion from the EU in order to fund the country’s “Green Marshall Plan,” it remains unclear as to the extent to which the country will be capable of making good on its promise regarding a period of “green,” post-war, economic growth, insofar as the increasing use of cluster munitions historically and economically corresponds to a decrease in the ‘productivity’, or ‘value,’ of the very land that, though bombed, is projected to bear fruit. As for the economic consequences of a post-Grain Deal global economy, analysts “see an inflationary pressure on the price of grain, especially on countries that are dependent on imports — where these grains are mostly staples feeding millions of people — pushing more people into vulnerability and insecurity.” According to Debisi Araba, food policy strategist and former managing director at the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), it is already possible to predict that “the pausing of exports from that region to the rest of the world” will have “a fair degree” of an impact on both the access and price of food, “especially East Africa and the Horn of Africa.”
