Russia ‘turning wave of food crises into tsunami’ by blocking grain exports

theguardian.com:

Russia has transformed an existing life-threatening wave of food crises into a tsunami by blocking the export of 25m tonnes of grain from Ukraine’s ports, the Germany’s foreign minister has said.

Speaking at the start of an inter-ministerial food conference in Berlin, a precursor to the G7 meeting in Germany starting this weekend where aid groups will demand a big financial commitment to help Africa, Annalena Baerbock said 345 million people worldwide were currently threatened by food shortages.

She said the hunger crisis was building “like a life-threatening wave before us” but it was Russia’s war that had “made a tsunami out of this wave”, and she said Russia was using hunger as a weapon of war.

In an international blame game playing out across Africa, Russia claims it is western sanctions that are slowing the flow of Russian food.

As many as 25 African countries, including many of the least developed, import more than one-third of their wheat from Ukraine and Russia, and 15 of them more than half.

Her remarks led Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and prime minister, to make a reference to the German starvation tactics in the second world war. He said: “German officials are accusing Russia of using hunger like a weapon. It is amazing to hear this from officials whose country kept Leningrad in blockade for 900 days, where almost 700 thousand people died of starvation.”

But Baerbock’s criticism of Russia was backed by Arif Husain, the chief economist at the UN World Food Programme, who said it was not sanctions that were causing the food crisis but war. “We tend to address the symptoms and forget the root cause, and the root cause is war,” he said.

He said more than 40 countries were now facing food inflation of