"The Bread Basket Goes Dark"
What happens when 30% of the world's wheat supply gets cut off overnight? Welcome to the very first episode of Farms and Frontlines, the podcast where food security meets global conflict.
Hosts Max Terzano and Major Jessica Ruto (history professor at West Point) kick things off with the conflict that put food security on the world's radar: Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But before they get to the grain, they walk you through three decades of history that made this moment inevitable — from the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, to the Orange Revolution, to the Euromaidan protests, to the moment Russia seized Crimea in under a week while the world wagged its finger and moved on.
Then comes the food. Within days of the February 2022 invasion, Russia's Black Sea blockade trapped two-thirds of the world's shipping fleet in port. The UN declared it the worst food crisis in history. Famine spread across the Horn of Africa. Grocery prices spiked everywhere else. And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, Turkey brokered one of the strangest diplomatic deals of the decade: the Black Sea Grain Initiative.
It sounds like a win. It kind of was. But with only 11 inspectors managing six million tons of monthly exports, the grain that did get out went almost entirely to Spain and China — while people in Somalia and Ethiopia were starving. And when Russia finally walked away from the deal in July 2023, they thought they had Ukraine cornered.
They were wrong.
Tune in for Part 2 to find out what happened next... including a teaser involving something called "sea babies."
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