Articles Tagged with ''ukraine''

The war rages on, but Ukraine is already looking ahead to the task of rebuilding the country, and a new estimate from the Kyiv School of Economics indicates the agriculture sector has already suffered $27.6 billion in damages.

The Biden administration on Thursday pledged to help repair Ukraine’s agriculture sector from the damages of the Russian invasion even as the war rages on and farmers struggle to bring in crops.

Ukraine’s farmers are preparing to begin this year’s problematic summer harvest on the 75% of fields not under Russian occupation, but producers, analysts and political leaders are preoccupied with the broader question of where the grain will be stored as efforts falter to reopen exports through Black Sea ports.

The Philippines, citing the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on world grain supplies and prices, has reduced its tariff on corn imports from 35% down to 5% and that has opened new opportunities for U.S. corn farmers.

The Biden administration wants to make more farmers eligible for insurance when they grow wheat and soybeans in the same crop year, but some industry experts doubt the plan will do as much as the White House hopes in scaling up wheat production.

The war in Ukraine has laid bare the fact that agriculture is the key to national security. It’s a lesson that world leaders are taking to heart as they scramble to lessen global reliance on key sources of food and fertilizer, but it’s unclear if it will be too late to stop the slide from food crises to famine in some of the poorest and least developed countries.

An agreement to ban food export restrictions could be in reach for the World Trade Organization after years of failing to produce a major achievement.

Russia is doing whatever it can to stop Ukraine from supplying some of the poorest nations with its wheat, corn and sunflower seed oil, effectively using “hunger as a weapon of war,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said during his participation at the G7 summit this weekend in Germany.

Ag ministers for the Group of Seven nations this weekend pledged action to counter the rising cost and scarcity of fertilizer, said U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who was at the meeting in Germany.