UN aid trucks are prohibited from entering the territories held by Russia.
Risto Mattila,
Ilmari Reunamäki
Miraculously, in war-torn Ukraine, it has managed to maintain significant agricultural production.
Of course, everything is much more difficult than in peacetime. The harvests will also remain small, but the problem in Ukraine has been above all the lack of food storage facilities, says the country director of the UN Food Program in Ukraine Matthew Hollingworth.
– A large part of the food stocks is in the eastern part of the country. More crops could have been harvested, but there was no safe place to store them, he says in a video interview with .
The harvest was about half compared to the harvest before the war. This year’s harvest is predicted to be about 20–30 percent smaller than in peacetime conditions.
The food aid run by Hollingworth mainly buys food from local entrepreneurs.
– We buy as much food as possible from Ukraine and this way we support the locals, and we take it to places where there is not enough food.
Huge quantities of food are also delivered to the front line. During the past six months, the UN food program has helped three million Ukrainians, mostly on the front line. In addition to food, they are delivered everything that would normally be bought in markets, but now the markets are closed because of the war.
Taking aid to the front line is very dangerous.
– It is not easy. We need to keep both sides informed. And yet the risks are there, says Hollingworth.
Russia blocks transport
The need for help would also be great on the other side of the front line, in the Ukrainian territories held by the Russians. However, Russia cannot get UN aid transports there.
– We had some kind of access to the Kharkiv and Kherson regions in the fall and we saw the need for that help ourselves. Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, there would be a need for our help.
Hollingworth praises the Black Sea Agreement. Thanks to it, agricultural products have been able to be exported from Ukraine to the world. Up to 20 million tons of food have been shipped by sea and thus it has been possible to at least partially alleviate the global food crisis.
The increase in the prices of fertilizers and fuels due to the covid 19 virus has been poison for food safety.
Hollingworth considers it vital that the contract be extended. Farmers must be able to trust that there is a demand for their products in order for farming to be worthwhile at all.
– Every time the price of food rises by one percent, the food security of 10 million people is endangered, he quotes a calculation made by the World Bank.