Dutch farmer Kees Huizinga in Ukraine. His men work in two shifts and harvest from early morning to late evening. “In the coming weeks it will be all or nothing for the world food supply”, Huizinga says

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  1. [source](https://www.trouw.nl/buitenland/nederlandse-boer-in-oekraine-als-je-die-combines-ziet-rijden-vergeet-je-de-oorlog-een-beetje~b2ad3cb2f/)

    ^Translation:

    The first ship full of agricultural products has now set sail from Odessa: on to the world food market. For the Dutch farmer in Ukraine Kees Huizinga, the worries have not gone away. If the Russians fire one missile at Odessa everything will grind to a halt.

    The dust swirls high, the engines roar. Row after row, Kees Huizinga’s combines skim the wheat branches. The yield disappears through a trunk into a trailer behind the tractor. Storks look on from the sidelines – eager for mice, not for a piece of the pie. “This is the best time to be here,” beams the Dutch farmer. His men work in two shifts on the harvest, from early morning to late evening. “Seeing those combines driving around here like this makes you forget about the war a little.”

    On Monday, a first ship carrying agricultural products left the port of Odessa. Its contents, 26,000 tons of corn, were left over from last season’s harvest. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, supplies have been piling up: Ukraine has placed mines in the sea, and Russian warships patrol along shipping lanes. “It’s a first step, but I don’t trust the Russians one bit,” Huizinga says of the grain agreement that Russia and Ukraine signed on July 22, with intervention from Turkey and the UN, to revive exports.

    In two decades, the Dutchman transformed a number of former collective Soviet farms near Oeman into a thriving mega-farm. On his 15,000 acres of land, he grows vegetables, corn, sunflowers, rapeseed – and grain, the 4,000 acres of which will be harvested this week. “When all of a sudden there were missiles flying around, I didn’t know what to expect,” says the farmer. In early spring, numerous refugees spent the night on his property; Huizinga also supports the military, shipping used pickup trucks to Ukraine. “The Russians are destroying a lot, but not making much progress anymore,” he now knows.

    Fuel shortage remains problem
    Huizinga was lucky, he tells himself. When the invasion began, his storage was already mostly empty; prices were favorable enough to sell, he had thought. His neighbor waited, and therefore has a big problem: a full store, including last season’s wheat.

    For himself, the fuel shortage remains a headache: while Huizinga’s company consumes 1.5 to 2 million liters of diesel annually, oil was in limited supply until last month – a result of Russia’s bombing of oil storage facilities and lack of imports through its ports. Although Ukraine is now importing fuel from Europe on a large scale, the concern remains. “This is just the beginning of the harvest,” says Huizinga. “The grain may be almost gone, but look: the corn has yet to mature,” he points to the waxing plumes along the road.

    In recent months, Kees Huizinga has toured The Hague and Brussels to sound the alarm about the lack of exports. “My concern was first and foremost about our company, but with that about all Ukrainian farmers, and the effect on grain supplies around the world.” His gaze wanders back to his combines, which mow a dozen soccer fields smoothly in no time: “This is what makes Ukraine so efficient,” he says. “Ukraine is such a big player. If exports go away because the port is blocked, it’s just over.” Ukraine consumes a quarter of its own production, the farmer explains. Three-quarters is export. And that, as before Huizinga’s products, goes through the port of Odessa.

    The departure of the first ship, last Monday, does not make the Dutch farmer optimistic. “I don’t believe the Russians. Because they are shooting down Ukraine, and well, they say something different every day.” Huizinga himself therefore developed an alternative for next year. If fifty trucks all make one trip a week, he calculates that in fifty weeks he will export his entire production to Romania. Still, there is no alternative to the port, he stresses. “We are a big company, speak English and have contacts. The neighbor doesn’t have that.” According to his estimates, Ukraine exports a maximum of 30 percent of its revenue by train and truck, Huizinga thinks, no more.

    So in the coming weeks it will be “all or nothing” for the world’s food supply, Huizinga thinks. “If the Russians fire one missile at Odessa everything comes to a halt again. No insurer is going to pay anymore, no ship owner is going to send his ship here.” Only pressure on Russia will work; and it may be that the Russians, too, realize that they have an interest in normalizing food shipments. “If all the people in Africa soon have nothing to eat, everyone will know that Russia is the culprit.”

    Despite everything, the Dutchman is already preparing for the new sowing season. An empty field cannot exist for Kees Huizinga. “We continue to grow our crops. If we were to stop doing that, everything would be over.”

  4. I still don’t quite understand how one country’s agriculture can destroy the worldwide food market like this. As far as I understand, many European countries have massive surpluses of agricultural production, how does that not balance it out?

    (I know nothing about economics)

  7. [Context](https://decorrespondent.nl/13202/oekraine-is-de-graanschuur-van-de-wereld-en-dat-weet-poetin-maar-al-te-goed/1057736054760-2f7944cf
    ) (translated from Dutch):

    —

    What connects the recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia with the Arab Spring, the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian empire of Catherine the Great, the Roman Empire, and ancient Greece?

    Grain. From Ukraine, to be specific.

    There is a reason why the flag of Ukraine symbolizes a blue sky above golden wheat fields. For five thousand years, Ukrainian wheat has fed countless people, from Sweden to China. The ancient Greeks and Romans fed their cities and armies with it, and Russian prosperity peaked in the eighteenth century thanks to grain exports. The Soviet Union fell because it could not import enough grain, and the Arab Spring also ignited because of high bread prices.

    History teaches: you amass a global empire by seizing control of the grain – the fertile lands where it grows, or the trade routes through which it travels.

    This makes sense of why the war in Ukraine is having enormous effects on grain prices and global food security. And perhaps more importantly, it helps explain why Vladimir Putin is so eager to take control of Ukraine.

    Putin likes to mirror today’s Russia to the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great. He likes to emphasize what the eighteenth-century tsarina meant to Ukraine, such as founding the port city of Odessa and building shipyards (both built partly for grain exports). And like her, he calls Ukraine “little Russia.

    Putin’s dabbling with Catherine the Great is more than heinous, misplaced romanticism, argues American historian Scott Reynolds Nelson. In his new book Oceans of Grain he describes how the grain from what is now Ukraine played an essential role in the rise and fall of almost all the great empires in Europe. ‘Catherine the Great understood that she could not be a world power without Ukraine. Putin understands that too.’

    Since the Russian invasion, grain prices have been skyrocketing – wheat has become one and a half times more expensive in two weeks. This is not only because grain now remains in storage warehouses at Ukraine’s ports, but also because the sowing season is beginning. If Ukrainian farmers don’t start sowing en masse now – and given the violence of the war, the chances of that are huge – there will be no harvest after the summer.

    Many countries depend on cheap grain for food security. This means that in addition to the thousands of deaths in Ukraine due to the war violence, millions more may follow in other parts of the world.

    Even in rich countries, cheap food is no longer a guarantee. The European Commission is very concerned about the affordability of food. Bread is becoming much more expensive in the Netherlands, and without sunflower oil from Ukraine, food manufacturers like Unilever cannot produce much processed food.

    Our dependence on grain cannot be underestimated. Milk and meat are luxuries, zucchini and tomatoes can be grown in the backyard if need be. But that doesn’t apply to the hundred pounds of grain (especially wheat, rice, and corn) that each person eats each year. Of all the calories people eat, over two-thirds come from staple foods, especially grain. For the poorest people, that’s even more.

    The importance of Ukrainian grain fields to global food supplies is reflected in the country’s export figures. Until recently, one-eighth of all wheat on the world market was expected to come from Ukraine by 2022. And also 17 percent of corn, 18 percent of barley, 19 percent of rapeseed, and as much as half of all sunflower oil.

    But how is it that Ukraine, slightly larger in area than France, actually grows so much grain? The answer to that question has been the same for five thousand years: chernozem.

    Chernozem, literally “black earth,” is the most fertile type of soil in the world, and a quarter of it is in Ukraine.

    What makes this soil type so fertile? It starts with good sand: loess. This fine sand was deposited roughly fifteen thousand years ago north of the Black Sea by the wind, in the extremely dry period during the last Ice Age. A few thousand years later the climate there became wetter again – still too dry for trees, but wet enough for grass. Lots and lots of grass. In other words: steppe.

    Grass can grow very fast, both above and below ground. And because leaves and roots are constantly growing and dying off, an enormous amount of dead plant material soon became available on the steppe – food for bacteria, fungi, worms and other soil animals. These soil animals eat, defecate and dig incessantly. In addition, they are food for other animals, including mice, who dig corridors to get at them.

    Soon, the entire soil consisted largely of worm poop – manure – which is continually churned up by worms and mice. Also, the ash left behind after fires on the steppe, probably also lit by the first farmers, brought more fertility.

    So roughly, over many thousands of years, a thick layer of the world’s best earth formed. Airy, so that plant roots can penetrate it well and it holds a lot of water. And extremely fertile, also because loess retains minerals such as calcium, potassium and phosphorus well. Exactly what plants need.

    And then there is Ukraine, which is largely flat and veined with generous rivers. Moreover, summers are often long and sunny. That makes Ukrainian soil worth its weight in gold to any ruler who has to feed a large population.

    Even in classical antiquity, rulers knew all too well the importance of fertile land and power over existing trade routes, writes Scott Reynolds Nelson. The word “empire” comes from the Greek emporion, meaning port of call. The ancient Greeks, Romans and Byzantine Empire depended entirely on importing grain – first bread, then play.

    The Greeks had stone trading posts along the Black Sea as early as the eighth century BC – where Odessa and the other Ukrainian cities with major export ports now lie, which Putin is trying to seize. And the milestones the Romans placed everywhere measured not the distance to the throne – as later rulers did – but to Roman granaries. These warehouses were largely filled with Ukrainian grain, delivered via the Black Sea.

    The first empire to grow large through the foreign trade in grain from what is now Ukraine was Russia under Czarina Catherine the Great. After many previous attempts by Russian rulers, she succeeded in annexing what is now Ukraine in the eighteenth century. Instead of feeding her own population with the additional grain, she decided to export it to Europe. The proceeds made the Russian elite unprecedentedly prosperous.

    Oil, gas and coal are for the time being Russia’s main source of income, but wheat comes right after that. Historian Scott Reynolds Nelson believes that in the long term wheat may become the most important resource. Because of the climate crisis, fertile land with a favorable climate will become scarcer, and food will become more expensive.

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