Will Ukraine become the breadbasket of China?

By Wolodymyr Derzko

Late January, Timothy Snyder - a Yale University history professor - packed auditoria and lecture halls at St. Vladimir Institute in Toronto and the University of Toronto and spoke to an evenly distributed crowd from the Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish communities about his recent book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Kudos’ to the organizers.

Prof. Snyder starts his lecture with the shocking finding that 17 million were killed between 1933 and World War II, with a concentration of 14 million in the “bloodlands” - Ukraine, Poland and Belarus. Both Hitler and Stalin viewed Ukraine as a strategic asset; an eastern pastoral paradise, which Hitler even called “the Garden of Eden”. Nazi Germany was not self-sufficient in food. Hitler’s plan for the destruction of the Soviet Union would bring Ukraine’s breadbasket under German control, making Germany unassailable. Equally for Stalin, mastery of Ukraine was a precondition and proof of the triumph of his version of socialism.

Germany concluded that Ukraine was “agriculturally and industrially the most important part of the Soviet Union.” After all, it produced 90% of all the food.  According to Germany’s long term colonial plan, the western Soviet Union would become an agrarian colony dominated by Germans. This required the murder, displacement, assimilation or enslavement of 40 million people. Hitler believed that Germany would secure Ukrainian food and Caucasian oil in a matter of weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union. When the War dragged on and the Soviet Union didn’t collapse, Jews in Ukraine were blamed for the Nazi failure and the Nazi extermination process started.

I even had the chance to ask Prof. Snyder a question after his talk. What lessons can we learn from your book about preventing a similar deliberate, policy-triggered famine today, since historians are fond of saying that history is important to study so that we don’t repeat past mistakes? Without missing a beat, Snyder referred to his recent article in The New Republic on October 28, 2010, which was called: The Coming Age of Slaughter: Will Global Warming Unleash Genocide?

The recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland had food security as the main topic. While the figure of 17 million deaths in the “bloodlands” is hard to comprehend, today, over 50 times that number, or 925 million people mostly in South Asia are at risk of famine and starvation, says the UN. 

One troubling scenario involves China, the most populous country on earth that has just half of the world average of fertile cropland per capita and one quarter the world average of potable water per capita. China has bought every hectare of available arable farmland in Africa and is exporting food back to feed hungry Chinese, who are suffering from the worst persistent droughts in six decades, in the northern wheat-growing provinces. These exports have led to food shortages, price spikes and famine in some African countries. Much of China’s potable water comes from Himalayan glaciers, which are now melting and shrinking.

To solve its food and water scarcity problem, it is quite plausible the China could soon invade Siberian Russia to secure precious water and cropland, becoming the next geopolitical conflict hotspot.

Grains are becoming scarce around the world too due to climate change, after floods in the Prairies in Canada, and droughts in America, floods in Australia and Pakistan and last summer’s fires in Russia. Over 30 countries are now at risk of food shortages and famine including Egypt and Tunisia, whose government regimes are crumbling after massive street protests. But, if you thought Ukraine is safe, you’d be wrong. According to the Nomura Food Vulnerability Index (NFVI), Ukraine is in 20^th spot out of 80 countries at risk of a food crisis, due to high food inflation and the high percent of household wages going to purchase food – over 61%.

After recent trade talks, China along with Egypt, Libya and the United Arab Emirates are secretly eyeing the Ukrainian breadbasket, just like Hitler and Stalin did seven decades ago, not just for imports of grains, but to buy or lease land directly to ship crops back to feed their hungry people - sidelining the Ukrainian farmer.

While Ukraine is self-sufficient in grain production and exports today – it’s number ten in the world in grain exports, and its food exports total only 0.9 percent of GDP. So far, Ukraine has exported 5.9 million tonnes of grain since the beginning of this marketing year - July 2010.

It’s plausible that the Party of Regions, desperate for revenues, will arrange secret loans-for-land swaps. Watchdog groups in Ukraine should monitor for changes in the constitution, land privatization and visa-free travel of Chinese farm labourers, which would benefit China and threaten Ukraine’s food security.

 Walter (Wolodymyr) Derzko is a Senior Fellow at the Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab), and a lecturer in the MA program in Strategic Foresight and Innovation, Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) University in Toronto.