During his speech to the Maltese Parliament yesterday, President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky emphasized the difficulties that Ukraine is having with food exports following Russia’s embargo in the Black Sea.
The European Commission has responded to this situation by announcing a proposal on Wednesday to greatly expand the quantity of food that Ukraine can distribute to vulnerable countries across the world via EU roads and railroads.
This is intended to help combat a problem raised by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who raged that the blockade of the port of Odesa was likely something that had not “happened since World War II” and that dozens of countries were now facing shortages as a result of Russian aggression.
At the opening of a U.N. food agency meeting in his native Poland, EU farm commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski announced the “plan of action,” saying the bloc must expand export channels to counterbalance Russia’s deliberate destruction of Ukraine’s agriculture and resist Moscow’s efforts to portray itself as a humanitarian actor feeding the world in a worsening food crisis.
“It’s necessary to organize alternative corridors for export, especially for wheat, corn because Ukraine has a lot of stocks,” Wojciechowski told POLITICO. “We want to ensure supply chains for food for Europe and the rest of the world,” he earlier told a room of diplomats from 53 European and Central Asian countries, at a biennial regional conference of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
Ukraine and Russia are both major food exporters to import-dependent countries in Africa and the Middle East, but Russia’s land and sea attack has trapped millions of tonnes of Ukrainian grain in silos, unable to leave in ships bound for the Black Sea, which has traditionally accounted for at least 80% of Ukraine’s food exports.
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