The Russian blockade of Ukraine’s big ports on the Black and Azov Seas – Odesa, Mykolaiv and Mariupol – shut the routes through which the world’s fourth-biggest exporter of grains usually ships out 90 per cent of the corn, wheat and barley that it sells abroad.
Farmers have been selling at knockdown prices just to empty silos, or pay for the next season’s seeds or for diesel and other essentials that inflation is making costlier; Ukrainian banks, meanwhile, are reluctant to lend during wartime without the kind of government guarantee that does not extend to foreign firms like Clibborn’s Norbilc Agri.
Mistyuk hoped the Russians might pass by his village of Balochky, an out-of-the-way place where only about 100 people live, which is about 120km from government-held Zaporizhzhia city and a similar distance from occupied Mariupol, now a place of carnage. Ihor Mistyuk, whose home village and family farm in Zaporizhzhia region in eastern Ukraine have been occupied by Russian forces. He is now working with Irish farmer Jonathan Clibborn in western Ukraine. Photograph courtesy Ihor Nistyuk
“‘Why so little?’ the farmer asked, and the Chechen punched him. ‘Why are you hitting me,’ he said, and they told him ‘We haven’t even started hitting you yet.’” “We’re looking at forecasts of GDP contraction of 45 per cent in 2022. It’s killing the economy … and also creating global food security problems and putting millions of lives at risk,” he adds, warning that many farmers may not sow crops later this year if storage silos are still full.
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