Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and critical agrarian studies

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews analyses of the implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the global food system and food security. Key critical agrarian studies-affiliated accounts, like mainstream ones, conceptualize Russia’s war primarily as a ‘shock’, and the paper shows how accounts name, describe, explain the origins and causal impacts of, and assign responsibility for that shock. While CAS studies make essential contributions, the literature treats Russia’s invasion as exogenous to the global food system in ways that should be questioned. CAS studies should apply other established CAS framings – geopolitics, imperialism and colonialism, and land/resource grabbing – to Russia.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• Ukraine
• war
• food crisis
• imperialism
• land grab

Introduction

Since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, international institutions, think tanks, NGOs, journalists, activists, scholars and others have rapidly created a large literature that seeks to understand and respond to the war’s implications for the global food system and food security. This body of work has been written in real time in response to rapidly changing conditions, and has appeared in formats including reports, briefing notes, blog posts, academic journals, online panel discussions and more. It displays wide agreement on certain basic aspects of what has happened, including the disruption of food exports from Ukraine and Russia and the rapid rise in food (especially wheat and maize) prices that took place in the war’s first weeks. The literature is also, however, marked by extensive disagreement over questions of causality, the war’s importance relative to other factors in explaining the current global food crisis, and appropriate responses. As I write in mid-September 2022 there is, to my knowledge, no general review of this literature (for a partial one see Monsalve Suárez and Dreger 2022, 19–21).

In this paper I make a start on such a review by focusing on the ways in which interventions by authors and institutions associated with critical agrarian studies (CAS) have analyzed the war’s impact on the global food system. I focus primarily on three reports published by CAS-affiliated organizations: IPES-Food (2022), Our Bread Our Freedom Campaign and Navdanya International (2022), and FIAN International (Monsalve Suárez and Dreger 2022). I supplement this focus by also considering other interventions by critical scholars and activists and, for comparative purposes, some more mainstream reports (FAO et al. 2022; UN GCRG 2022; UNCTAD 2022). The three reports written from CAS perspectives make crucial analytical and policy contributions, and I agree with much of what they have to say. My goal here is not to provide an overall evaluation of their arguments but rather to think through some specific aspects of the approaches they (and other contributors to the literature) have taken, highlight some elements that are mostly implicit or taken for granted, and make a case for important CAS perspectives that have not been mobilized in the works reviewed but that will need to be incorporated as the debate expands. My overarching argument is that a number of aspects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine make it a challenging topic for contemporary critical agrarian studies perspectives to grapple with, and that as a result some core themes and policy/political positions that one might expect to be prominent in CAS work on the war have so far been downplayed or ignored.

The body of the paper has three parts. In the first, I discuss CAS (and, to some extent, mainstream) accounts in terms of their own primary goal: to understand the war’s impacts on the global food system and food security (as distinct from its impact on Ukraine itself) and to recommend responses. I argue that CAS and more mainstream works share a conceptualization of the war’s consequences primarily as a ‘shock’ to the global food system. I briefly discuss the work this concept does in food system analyses to create comparability between otherwise disparate events, and then ask a series of descriptive questions about the specific ways it has been used to analyze Russia’s invasion: (1) what the ‘shock’ is called and how it is described (its components), (2) what its causes are said to be, (3) what causal impacts it is said to have had, and (4) how the reports respond to it in ethical, political and policy-recommendation terms. Two especially interesting aspects of the CAS-affiliated literature emerge from this review. First, while these works construct complex and multifaceted models of the global food system with respect to causal dynamics and points of policy intervention, they implicitly treat the Russian government’s actions as external to the system on both scores. They contain no explanation of Russia’s invasion, and amidst long lists of recommended responses to the ‘shock’ only the FIAN report calls on the Russian government to cease its war against Ukraine. Second, there is substantial disagreement about the war’s causal impact on global food security in critical studies. I identify three main positions: a mostly ‘mainstream’ one that, while developing a complex, multicausal analysis, attributes a large causal role to the war and seeks to quantify it; a critical one that also sees the war as causally significant but argues that that significance is itself a consequence of enormous structural problems with the global food system; and a distinct critical position that downplays or rejects claims about the war’s importance.

The paper’s second section makes the case that the critical literature has to date neglected some central analytical themes and perspectives in CAS that are essential to a full understanding of the current crisis. None of the reports takes up Russia’s invasion in terms of the interrelated themes of geopolitics, foreign policy, imperialism and colonialism, nor do any of them conceptualize Russia’s violent seizure of vast areas of Ukrainian farmland and of water and mineral resources as a ‘land and resource grab’. I argue that the first absence likely results in good part from a general failure in critical social scientific theories of imperialism and colonialism to consider Russia’s history as an imperial power and a more specific dearth of CAS analyses of Russian goals, capabilities and agency in the twenty-first century food system (the contrast with China on the latter point is stark). The absence of ‘land grab’ framings of the invasion in CAS writing, meanwhile, likely relates to a lack of fit with prevailing conceptions of what a ‘land grab’ is. Both absences, finally, relate to an issue I take up in the third, concluding section: the difficulty our understandings of imperialism and colonialism have in conceptualizing Ukraine, a European nation and state, as a past and present victim of colonialism and imperialism. I end with a call for solidarity with Ukraine motivated not just by concerns over human rights but by anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-grabbing principles.

One initial point of clarification: the primary goal of the literature (mainstream and critical) that I assess is, again, understanding the current global food crisis and the extent to which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has worsened it. While the critical reports reviewed here present vital information on the war’s implications for Ukrainian food security and agriculture, documenting these impacts is not their core project and I do not critique them for choosing to focus on global rather than national impacts of the war. I do argue in the conclusion, however, that a lack of consideration of what the war is doing to Ukraine in some critical texts other than the three main reports is troubling on political and ethical grounds.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a ‘shock’ to the global food system

Russia’s war against Ukraine began in response to the Maidan Revolution of 2014 with the occupation and annexation of Crimea and what became a de facto occupation of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. Eight years of fighting between the Ukrainian government and Russian-backed separatists led to 14,000 deaths and displaced millions of people, and Russian forces carried out a significant incursion into eastern Ukraine in August 2014 (for a history see D’Anieri 2020). On 24 February 2022 the Russian government turned this relatively limited war into a full-scale invasion by a nuclear-armed great power of a much poorer neighbouring country of over 40 million people. Russia’s invasion was deplored by a 141–5 vote of the UN General Assembly (with 35 abstentions) that demanded Russia’s immediate, complete and unconditional withdrawal from Ukraine (Borger 2022b). As of mid-September Russian forces had occupied all of Kherson and Luhansk and much of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts, and had been pushed out of much previously-occupied territory in other parts of the country by the Ukrainian armed forces. The war has displaced close to a third of Ukraine’s population (UNHCR 2022). Large numbers of settlements and whole Ukrainian cities have been destroyed by the Russian military, and Russian shelling and missile strikes have taken an enormous toll on civilian facilities including residential districts, hospitals, universities, schools, shopping centres, refineries and power plants (including nuclear plants), and museums across the country. Rapes, torture, forced relocations and executions of civilians by Russian troops have been extensively documented, as has looting on an industrial scale. Russian forces have at the very least committed large-scale crimes against humanity, and the expressed war aims and tactics of the Russian government likely meet the definition of genocide (Borger 2022a; Hook 2022).

The Russian invasion has had terrible direct and indirect consequences for Ukrainian farmers, agriculture and food. Russian forces have targeted (HLPE 2022, 5) farms and storage and transportation facilities for agricultural products, murdered and forcibly deported farmers, and stolen farm equipment (Lister and Fylyppov 2022). Ukraine’s Black Sea export ports were blockaded at the start of the war, and Mariupol, Berdiansk and Kherson have been occupied. Roughly 27 million tons of grain were trapped in Ukrainian silos by the war (Mykhaylov 2022), though limited shipments of Ukrainian grain to other countries continued through rail lines and ports in the southwest of the country and through Russian theft of grain in occupied territory. As of late August 2022, exports from Odesa and some other Black Sea ports have restarted as a result of an agreement brokered by Turkey and the UN. Planting and harvesting of 2022 crops in unoccupied and occupied areas faces enormous challenges, including mining and burning of fields; ongoing fighting; difficulties accessing inputs, labour, and machinery; destruction of storage and transportation infrastructure; and uncertain final markets. Ukrainian farmers in occupied areas have also faced other threats discussed below.

How should the implications of a catastrophe such as this be analyzed in accounts of the current global food crisis and the dynamics of the global food system? The primary conceptualization of Russia’s war against Ukraine in both mainstream and critical reports is as a ‘shock’ (FAO et al. 2022, 20, 22; IPES-Food 2022, 3, 10; Monsalve Suárez and Dreger 2022, 11; UNCTAD 2022; UN GCRG 2022, 5; see also Kaiser 2022; Hellegers 2022).¹ This term is mostly used in a taken-for-granted way in the sources reviewed (though the glossary of FAO et al. 2022 defines both ‘climate shocks’ and ‘economic shocks’ – 200–201), but it seems reasonable to define it loosely as a relatively sudden event that has a significant impact on the supply/availability and/or the price of food, energy, fertilizers, and other inputs relevant to food security (FAO et al. 2022, 48; HLPE 2022, 10; IPES-Food 2022, 4, 6; UN GCRG 2022, 5). ‘Shock’ in these accounts plays the crucial analytical role of establishing similarity or comparability between what are otherwise quite different kinds of events. The reports refer frequently in characterizing the recent history of the global food system to ‘multiple shocks’, and more specifically to shocks deriving from the economy (FAO et al. 2022, 2), droughts, floods, and climate change (A Growing Culture and IPES-Food 2022b, 5; FAO et al. 2022, 81, 116; IPES-Food 2022, 16), conflicts (FAO et al. 2022, 81), and the COVID-19 pandemic (Monsalve Suárez and Dreger 2022, 11). William Moseley invokes this comparability without using the term ‘shock’ when he writes of ‘a world where supply chain disruptions and energy price fluctuations are inevitable’ and that ‘Like a bad rain year, the Russia-Ukraine War is neither the first nor the last such disruption’ (Moseley 2022).

How do the reports analyze this ‘shock’? A first question is what they call it and how they describe it. The primary names used are variations on ‘Russia’s invasion of/aggression against Ukraine’, ‘the war in/on Ukraine’, ‘the Ukraine conflict’ (or ‘the conflict’), ‘the Ukraine crisis’ (or ‘the crisis’), and, in the title of a panel organized by A Growing Culture and IPES-Food and the report on it, simply ‘Ukraine’. The reports by the UN organizations UNCTAD, FAO et al. and UN GCRC all take the same odd approach to nomenclature. They primarily call what’s happening ‘the war in Ukraine’, a phrasing that is more pointed than ‘conflict’ or ‘crisis’ (and that could get you 15 years in prison if you used it in Russia). They do not mention even once, however, that Russia is a belligerent (let alone the aggressor) in that war. The challenge of writing about the war without saying who is fighting it shows through from time to time in the FAO et al. report. One sentence grotesquely describes the war as a ‘conflict affecting’ Russia and Ukraine (2022, 20), and a grammatical short-circuit on the first page can be seen as symptomatic:

Furthermore, the war in Ukraine, two of the biggest producers in agriculture and staple cereals globally [sic], is disrupting supply chains and further affecting global grain, fertilizer and energy prices, leading to shortages and fuelling even higher food price inflation.

The IPES-Food, FIAN, and OBOFC/Navdanya reports, on the other hand, all call Russia’s war an ‘invasion’ of Ukraine, and the FIAN report (5, 20) and an April 2022 Issues Paper written by the High Level Panel of Experts of the FAO’s Committee on World Food Security (p.6) refer to Russian ‘aggression’ against Ukraine.

Determining what the reports take the ‘shock’ to consist of is complicated. None of them (mainstream or critical) provides a consolidated description of the shock’s components, and there is some (understandable) ambiguity with respect both to differentiating between the shock and responses to it and to the extent to which certain dynamics are seen as resulting from the war as opposed to other ongoing crises like the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change. The most detailed discussions of the challenges thrown up by the war can be found in the IPES-Food, FAO et al. (20–21) and UN Global Crisis Response Group (GCRG) reports. I construct here a ‘maximalist’ description of the shock that draws together components identified in at least one of the reviewed pieces. Most basically and centrally, the war is said to have created ‘supply shocks’ as a result of ‘disruptions’ to exports of food (especially wheat, maize, and sunflower oil), energy and fertilizer from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, each of which is a major exporter of at least one of the three. These supply shocks derive from many factors, including present and likely future reductions in agricultural production in Ukraine, damage to Ukrainian infrastructure, and broader disruptions to trade routes resulting from fighting, security concerns, airspace closures, difficulties in obtaining insurance for cargoes in a combat zone, sanctions on Russia and Belarus, and efforts by many countries to reduce their oil and natural gas purchases from Russia. Moving beyond these immediate ‘supply shocks’, the restrictions on food exports imposed by many countries not involved in the war can be seen as part of the response to the ‘shock’, but from a global perspective can also be seen as aspects of it. All these things together contributed to rapidly rising prices (‘price shocks’) for food, energy and fertilizer, and for countries in the Middle East and North Africa that are especially reliant on food imports from Ukraine or Russia they may also have created problems of actual access to (supply of) food. Finally, the global macroeconomic components of the ‘shock’ noted in at least one report include slowing growth, rising inflation, and tightening financial conditions.

A second question is how the reports treat the causes of the ‘shock’ – why Russia invaded Ukraine. None of them – mainstream or critical – says anything direct on this point. This is hardly surprising for the UNCTAD, FAO et al. and GCRG reports; works that omit any reference to Russia’s involvement in ‘the war in Ukraine’ obviously cannot even try to explain the war’s origins. The absence is more striking in critical studies, and paying attention to it raises questions about the implicit drawing of boundaries around the global food system in the CAS analyses of causality and (as discussed below) formulations of policy recommendations. These accounts present a complex picture of the global food system as made up of farmers, corporations, states, international organizations, civil society, conflicts, weather/climate, technology, law, consumers, financial institutions and markets, and more. In doing so they draw on the long history of critical analyses of the origins of other ‘shocks' to the global food system, including the global financial crisis, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic, in which those origins are treated as at least partly internal or endogenous to the system, as both causes and effects of systemic change (on COVID-19 see for instance Austin 2021). The FIAN and IPES-Food reports emphasize circular relationships between hunger, conflicts and other challenges, with Sofía Monsalve Suárez and Charlotte Dreger stating that ‘It is time for the international community to look into the structural drivers that are fuelling war, armed conflicts and widespread violence’ (2022, 20, 8; see also IPES-Food 2022, 15–17).

Despite these analytical approaches and goals, all the reports reviewed effectively treat the origins of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as exogenous to the global food system. It is tempting to say that this treatment resonates with Moseley’s case that ‘the Russia-Ukraine War’ is ‘like a bad rain year’ – presumably, something outside of human control that can only be responded to through the building of ‘less vulnerable and more resilient’ food systems. In fact, however, CAS analyses of the global food system commonly treat the weather as partially endogenous as a result of human impact on the climate, much of which originates in emissions from and land clearance in the agricultural sector itself (see Monsalve Suárez and Dreger 2022, 16). A better comparison would be to a major asteroid strike. Such a highly disruptive event would, of course, have causes, but those causes would clearly be entirely external to the global food system and analyzing them would be of no real help. FIAN and IPES-Food, again, point towards a different approach by emphasizing the need to grapple with the causes of war and conflict and the way they interact with other aspects of food security and the global food system. In practice, however, the case study of Ukraine in the FIAN report’s section on war and conflict says nothing about why Russia invaded, and the focus on hunger as a key driver of conflict is not promising as an explanation (see further below).

The third issue is the impact the analyses see the ‘shock’ as having on global food security and the global food system. I identify three main positions on this question, the first of which appears in the more ‘mainstream’ reports by FAO et al., GCRG and UNCTAD. While some critical authors have made claims about ‘mainstream narratives’ that place all blame for the current food crisis or commodity price rises on the war (Russell 2022), none of these reports does this. The FAO et al. and GCRG reports in particular present complex causal models that recognize the dire conditions that the pandemic, climate change, and other problems had already created by February 2022. In these reports the war has both ‘direct and indirect’ (FAO et al. 2022, 9; see also UN GCRG 2022, 2) impacts on food, fertilizer and energy availability, food prices, and other aspects of the global food system, and vicious cycles between these factors can arise. These analyses do, however, emphasize the war’s direct and major impact, and seek to quantify it through simulations. FAO et al. ran several different ‘shock scenarios’ and calculated that the war would increase the global number of undernourished people by 7.6 million to 19 million (FAO et al. 2022, 20–21; for World Bank and World Food Programme scenarios see UN GCRG 2022, 10). The GCRG combines the direct shock of the war with the conditions in which it is unfolding by writing that ‘A shock of this magnitude would have been a significant challenge no matter the timing; now, it is of historic, century-defining proportions’ (UN GCRG 2022, 5). It is worth noting that the war’s large and direct impact in what was already a difficult context is also highlighted in a short April issues paper by the High Level Panel of Experts of the Committee on World Food Security, though that analysis does not include simulations of the war’s impact (HLPE 2022, 5–6).

A second analysis, developed in the IPES-Food and FIAN reports, overlaps with but is distinct from the first. These pieces also see the war/crisis as having a substantial impact on the global food system, but argue that that impact is itself a consequence of the way the system is structured. This position is developed in most detail in the IPES-Food report. Its causal story begins with, again, ‘disruptions’ in the supply of exports of food (especially grain), fuel and fertilizer from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus caused by the war itself, sanctions applied in response to it, and the export restrictions other countries adopted in response to the war’s effects. These ‘supply shocks’ are a particular problem for countries that are highly dependent on Russia and/or Ukraine for their wheat imports, and also set off rapid price rises in the wheat market that spilled over into markets for other food commodities and ‘are exacerbating hunger in many of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable regions’. The report presents ‘the Ukraine crisis’ as having ‘major impacts on global agri-food markets’ and as ‘sparking major disruptions in global agri-food markets and threatening access to food for millions of people’ (2, 4). This clear causal impact, however, was not an ‘inevitable’ result of the war, but rather a consequence of the ways the existing structure of the world food system has amplified (p.4) the shock. The report presents this structure in lucid and compelling detail, emphasizing factors ranging from the erosion of traditional diets, high levels of food import dependency (including the dependency of many countries on a small number of exporters), and indebtedness in many poor countries to regional export crop specialization, biofuels production and speculation on commodity futures markets. It thus invites us to consider a counterfactual and better-structured global food system in which the war’s impact on countries other than Ukraine would have been much less severe.

A third set of contributions differs from the first two by downplaying or dismissing the war’s causal consequences. Two subsets of this position can be identified. The first makes similar arguments about the negative features of the food system and current crisis to those made by IPES-Food and FIAN but puts even more weight on structure and less on the war than they do. While the OBOFC/Navdanya report does not specifically deny that Russia’s invasion significantly affected global food prices and food security, it does not clearly argue that it did do so, and it presents the claim that ‘the current invasion is putting pressure on both global supply and global food prices of staple goods’ as an ‘official narrative’ that it critiques on the grounds that global food supply is more than adequate (Our Bread Our Freedom Campaign and Navdanya International 2022, 3). For OBOFC/Navdanya, ‘The current price crisis and incoming hunger crisis is not a symptom of war, but a symptom of a system gone too far’ (4, 30). Given this argument, it is not surprising that, as noted in footnote 1 above, this report does not use ‘shock’ to describe the war’s impact on the global food system.

Another example of this position can be found in a GRAIN editorial on the food crisis that similarly finds that the crisis’ causes ‘are more structural than the war in Ukraine’. It points out a variety of serious dysfunctions in ‘our increasingly industrialised food systems’, questions the importance of Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian grain, oilseeds and fertilizer exports and drops in Russia’s own exports, argues that the biggest rise in hunger has been in countries affected by local conflict (not including Ukraine), and quotes Malian peasant leader Ibrahima Coulibaly’s statement ‘Stop spreading fake news, Africa doesn’t need Ukraine’s wheat’ (GRAIN 2022). A third example is the analysis presented in a panel presented by A Growing Culture and IPES-Food titled ‘Beyond Ukraine: The Untold Story of the Food Crisis’ which gave essentially no causal weight to the war, emphasizing rather the importance of (other) conflicts, chemical input dependence, Covid, climate change and capitalism (A Growing Culture and IPES-Food 2022a, 2022b).

The second subset consists of critical pieces published after the return of grain and energy prices to below pre-February 24 levels which stand in stark contrast to the other contributions reviewed here. Pettifor (2022) and Russell (2022) take a much simpler approach to explaining the food price crisis: they blame it entirely on financial speculation. It could be argued that that statement is too extreme; Pettifor claims that the food price crisis was not ‘directly’ caused by Russia’s invasion, and Russell’s title makes the case that ‘Wall Street, not the Kremlin, is primarily to blame for rising commodity prices’ (my emphasis). The details of their arguments, however, show that both authors assign full causal responsibility to speculators. They posit that the fact that world grain supplies were ample when the invasion occurred, together with the recent fall in grain prices despite continued fighting (and before the grain export deal was agreed), shows that the February–March price spikes were caused by speculation, not ‘fundamentals’ (Russell) or ‘simplistic supply and demand’ (Pettifor). For Russell, ‘The source of the chaos is not “over there” in Donbas but “over here” in the West’. While Pettifor and Russell agree on most points, their assessments of why speculators drove up prices differ dramatically. Russell posits that markets ‘made a mistake’ by buying into a ‘narrative’ emphasizing ‘crippling sanctions, embargoed oil, stranded wheat rotting in silos, blocked Russian ports, and Black Sea blockades’ that led them to miss the continued adequacy of global grain supplies. Pettifor, however, sees speculators as having been engaged in ‘the deliberate inflation of food prices’ through ‘deceptions’ and ‘lies’.

The fourth and final characteristic of the ‘shock’ conceptualization of the war I inquire into is what the pieces reviewed say about the Russian government’s moral and political responsibility for the food crisis. The two questions I ask are whether the reports under review criticize or condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and whether any of their policy/action recommendations are directed specifically at the Russian government. The first question presents the analytical challenge of distinguishing between statements that are only descriptive/causal and those that are (also) critical. Taken literally, the first line of the HLPE issues paper quoted above is a value-neutral description, but it is also easy to read it as a criticism of Russia. Raj Patel’s (2022) reference to ‘The malnutrition caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine’ in an article titled ‘Our global food system was already in crisis. Russia’s war will make it worse’ would be harder, though not impossible, to read as a simple statement of fact and not a condemnation.

While determining whether the reports under review criticize/condemn Russia for invading Ukraine thus requires some tolerance for ambiguity, it is perfectly easy to see whether or not they call for Russia to change its behaviour in any way. FIAN’s report stands out as the only one unambiguously to condemn Russia’s war on Ukraine and to call for it to end. Monsalve Suárez and Dreger write that ‘It is urgent to reverse the dramatic erosion of the principle in the UN Charter to refrain from use of force’, list Russia’s ‘aggression’ against Ukraine as a breach of this principle alongside those committed by the Saudi-UAE-led coalition in Yemen and the US against Iraq, and call for ‘an end to military invasion and hostilities in Ukraine, Yemen and all conflict-affected countries’ (Monsalve Suárez and Dreger 2022, 20). While most of the other reports and contributions describe the terrible consequences of Russia’s war for Ukraine and other countries, and while all of them directly criticize aspects of the current global food system and present long lists of recommendations for its transformation, none of them directly criticizes Russia for waging the war, calls for the war to end, or directs a single policy recommendation specifically at Russia. For the UNCTAD, FAO et al. and GCRC reports these absences are, again, necessary consequences of the inability to name Russia as a belligerent. Reading through the extended lists of policy recommendations in the IPES-Food and OBOFC/Navdanya reports and in other critical pieces referenced above, however, it is hard not to be struck by the absence even of calls for Russia’s military attacks on farms and agricultural infrastructure to end or for the blockade of Ukrainian ports to be lifted. In the IPES-Food recommendations, too, this absence contrasts with a call for food systems to be shielded from the impacts of sanctions implemented in response to the war (p.21).

It should also be noted that when the possibility of assigning blame to Russia for what is happening is raised in some of these pieces, it is solely for purposes of critique. One AGC/IPES-Food panelist, for instance, identified a corporate interest in focusing on the war and ignoring structural problems ‘because if we just blame Russia, as long as the war ends everything will be OK’ (A Growing Culture and IPES Food 2022a, at 1:04:40). GRAIN’s editorial (2022) states that ‘Many political leaders are blaming Russia for rising hunger, for ideological purposes’. The OBOFC/Navdanya report, meanwhile, criticizes the Ukrainian government over its agricultural policies and lack of support for small-scale farmers (p.16), but has no criticisms of Russia.

What explains these approaches to Russia’s responsibility and what to do about it? I suggest three possible answers here, and raise a fourth in the conclusion. First, political sensitivities in the UN system no doubt explain the conceptualization of ‘the war in Ukraine’ in the UNCTAD, FAO et al. and UN GCRC reports, and may also be at work in the HLPE issues paper. Second, the naturalization of Russia’s invasion identified above – its treatment as an effectively causeless ‘shock’ from outside the system – may contribute to thinking of Russia’s actions as unchangeable facts that can only be adapted to (through greater ‘resilience’) rather than as products of human agency that could be changed and thus should be the target of policy recommendations. It is not obvious, however, why the report writers would see deeply entrenched structural features of the global food system (from financial speculation to fertilizer dependence) as potentially changeable while Russian foreign policy is not. The contrast is especially striking because unlike the other ‘shocks’ discussed in the reports, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, whatever its extended causes (see below), was the immediate result of the agency not only of a single government but of a single man (who, incidentally, is not named in any of the reports reviewed here). It might be, for instance, that if the African governments Moseley encourages to think of the invasion of Ukraine as ‘like a bad rain year’ were to unite in condemning Russia’s war and its impacts on their food security and economic prospects, that opposition would have a real effect on Russian policy. Some of those governments might, of course, see such condemnation as against their interests, but the critical reports in particular are full of recommendations and demands for structural change in the global food system that go against the stated interests of many governments; again, there is no obvious reason that critiques of Russia should be off limits on these grounds.

Third, something more specific may help to explain why the non-FIAN critical reports’ response to the ‘shock’ of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not to call for Russia to halt its assault on Ukraine’s agriculture, stop its blockade of Ukraine’s ports, and withdraw from the country, but rather to recommend that other countries reduce their food import requirements and otherwise make their food systems more resilient. The critical studies all have as their core goal a restructuring of the global food system that would tackle its many deep-seated problems, make it more equal and sustainable, and reduce its vulnerability to shocks. One of the core vulnerabilities these and other critical pieces identify is what the IPES-Food report (p.25) calls ‘harmful dependencies’ resulting from very high levels of concentration of export food production, dependencies that the war has starkly revealed for countries that source much of their grain and food oil imports from Russia and Ukraine. From this perspective, the prewar success of Ukraine’s large-scale, export-oriented agricultural production is itself a problem, and the prospect of restarting grain exports may appear as a return to an undesirable status quo rather than part of a genuine solution to the current crisis. It can be noted in this context that while the FIAN, IPES-Food, and OBOFC/Navdanya reports all celebrate the heroism of Ukraine’s small farmers in keeping the country fed during a war, none of them refers to the work Ukrainians are doing to keep grain exports flowing (see Vanderklippe 2022).

Expanding the analysis: geopolitics, imperialism, and land grabbing

The framing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a ‘shock’ to the global food system has enabled the reports reviewed here to develop essential analyses and policy proposals, and nothing I have said in the previous section should be interpreted as a rejection of ‘shock’ analyses. While the reports’ uses of the framing do have some drawbacks, most notably the treatment of the Russian government’s actions as exogenous to the system with respect to both the causes of and potential responses to the war, these issues are not inherent to the framing and could be changed. I argue in this section, however, that a full critical agrarian studies analysis of the war, its implications, and responses to it will require that other CAS framings and approaches also be incorporated into our work. There is much to be learned, in particular, from reconceptualizing Russia’s war on Ukraine in terms of geopolitics and imperialism and of land and resource grabbing.

Geopolitics and imperialism

The centrality of geopolitics and imperialism to the study of the global food system has long been a core element of critical agrarian studies. Harriet Friedmann’s germinal 1982 analysis explored the interconnections between the post-World War II American-led international order and state-state relations, US Cold War and domestic policy, and the restructuring of agriculture in importing countries in the South, showing that for the US ‘grain surpluses came to be not simply an economic burden but also a resource in international relations’ through food aid. Friedmann also argued that the 1973 Soviet-US grain deal helped precipitate the postwar food order’s end (Friedmann 1982, S249–S251). Friedmann and Philip McMichael’s influential ‘food regime’ analysis highlighted the role of British hegemony and imperialism, formal colonialism, and settler states in structuring the first food regime (1870–1930s) and the place of flows of food aid ‘from the United States to its informal empire of postcolonial states on strategic perimeters of the Cold War’ in the second (1950s–1970s) (Friedmann and McMichael 1989; McMichael 2009, 141). More broadly, the ongoing impacts of colonialism and imperialism and the reconstruction of neocolonial relations under neoliberalism are common themes in CAS writing, including studies reviewed here (GRAIN 2022; Monsalve Suárez and Dreger 2022, 11; Our Bread Our Freedom Campaign and Navdanya International 2022, 10).

Analyses of geopolitics and imperialism need to be brought in to CAS studies of the role of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the current food crisis for several reasons. First, they provide frameworks for explaining (and, perhaps, partially ‘endogenizing’) the war’s outbreak. The huge and diverse literature on Russia’s war with Ukraine that has emerged since 2014 has sought to explain events and Russia’s turn to full-scale invasion in 2022 mostly through different combinations of emphases on relations between Russia and NATO/the US (especially concerning NATO expansion), Russian responses to western involvement (including military support) in Ukraine, Ukrainian domestic politics, and Russian ideology and the characteristics of the Putin regime (for a non-random sample see Artiukh 2022a; Bilous 2022; Edelman 2022; Ishchenko 2022; Matveev 2022; Meek 2022; Popova and Shevel 2022; Wood 2022). CAS scholars will of course need to make their own decisions about which arguments they find most convincing (and perhaps add others), and I do not claim that a single CAS analysis of the invasion’s geopolitics and causes would or should emerge. The literature does show, however, that the valuable approaches to understanding conflicts and their role in the global food system discussed (but not applied to Russia’s invasion) in the FIAN and IPES-Food reports will not work in this case. Russia did not invade Ukraine as a result of ‘vicious cycles of climate change, conflict, poverty, and food insecurity’ (IPES-Food 2022, 20) or ‘a circular relationship between hunger and conflicts’ (Monsalve Suárez and Dreger 2022, 8). This war is also a major counter-example to the trends in interstate war over territory that I have identified and tried to explain in previous work (Hall 2013, 32–43).

Second, an engagement with the literature on Russia’s war against Ukraine shows the need to expand CAS (and other critical) conceptualizations of imperialism to incorporate analyses of the Russian variant (Kassymbekova and Marat 2022; Matveev 2022; Mälksoo 2022; Snyder 2022). Given the centrality of colonialism and imperialism in contemporary critical social science, it is remarkable that none of the CAS studies reviewed here presents Russia’s invasion as an effort by a former colonizer to conquer and occupy a former colony. They do not acknowledge the history of colonialism and repression of the Ukrainian language in the parts of what is now Ukraine that were incorporated into the Russian Empire, or the 1930s Soviet genocide directed to a large degree against peasants and farmers – the Holodomor – that killed 4 million Ukrainians (Himka 2022). Ukraine voted overwhelmingly for independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, with 84% of the citizens of Donetsk and Luhansk voting ‘yes’ (D’Anieri 2020, 34). Russia’s effort forcefully to subjugate and recolonize parts of Ukraine began in 2014 with the occupation and formal annexation of Crimea and the de facto occupation of, and Russian military interventions in, separatist ‘people’s republics’ in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. The full-scale invasion Russia launched on 24 February has deployed classic techniques of colonialism, including massacres, terrorization, torture, imprisonment and forcible deportation of civilians, the imposition of Russian administration in occupied territories, erasure of the Ukrainian language and destruction of books, museums, and other cultural repositories, and plunder on a massive scale. This war of conquest is justified by imperialist and often genocidal (Borger 2022a) rhetoric in Russia, with Ukraine’s existence as a nation and sovereignty as a state frequently denied, and Putin has compared his campaign to ‘return’ ‘Russian lands’ to eighteenth century Russian wars against Sweden under Peter the Great (Roth 2022). Efforts to understand the role of imperialism and colonialism in the contemporary global food system should not ignore past Russian histories of settler colonialism in Ukraine and elsewhere or the resurgence in openly imperialist actions and discourse in contemporary Russia.

Third, conceptualizing Russia’s invasion in geopolitical terms also provides a framework for going beyond the ‘shock’ of the war and its impacts to asking what strategies Russia is employing with respect to food and agriculture’s role in its war aims and broader diplomacy, and how other states are responding to them. One key point is that the war has not only ‘disrupted’ Ukrainian agriculture and food exports. The Russian military has systematically targeted farms, farmers and storage and distribution infrastructure (Feffer 2022; Hall 2022; HLPE 2022, 5; Monsalve Suárez and Dreger 2022, 8–9), and attacks on Ukrainian food security and farming are a clear Russian tool in the war.

More generally, CAS analyses should ask whether Russia is trying to use its own food exports and control over Ukraine’s export options in the way the US used food aid in the Cold War – as part of its broader international diplomacy and a ‘geo-political weapon’ (McMichael 2009, 140; see also Friedmann 1982, S280; Wu 2022; Zielinski and Gilpin 2022). The idea that Russia may be seeking to use its growing clout as a food exporter as a foreign policy tool was raised in a mostly speculative way in some pieces published before 2022 (Astrasheuskaya 2021; Summers and Goodman 2020), and arguments about the country ‘weaponizing’ both its own exports and its blockade of Ukraine’s have been widespread since the war began. Western politicians have accused Russia of trying to create a food crisis that will put pressure on the ‘international community’, and the head of Russia’s Security Council has argued that the world is facing ‘an unprecedented food crisis’ that will prompt millions of people from Africa and the Middle East to flee to Europe – though he blames the West for this, not Russia (Azarieva, Brudny, and Finkel 2022, 111; Belton 2022). High-level Russian politicians and state-owned media outlets have referred to food sales as a ‘weapon’, with former President and current deputy chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev writing in April that Russia should sell food only to ‘friendly countries’ (Azarieva, Brudny, and Finkel 2022, 111). One especially disturbing statement was made by the editor-in-chief of state-owned TV network RT while sharing a stage with Vladimir Putin:

There is a very cynical joke – not even a joke, just an outcry – in Moscow. I’ve heard it several times from different people. It goes like this: ‘All our hope is on the famine’. Here’s what it means: It means the famine will start now, and they will lift the sanctions and be friends with us because they will realize it’s impossible not to be friends with us. (Mackinnon 2022)

All these points suggest that the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the global food system may not be just a causal ‘shock’ but also to at least some degree an aspect of Russian geopolitical strategy. One report finds, for instance, that Russia was able to gain concessions regarding western sanctions in exchange for its late-July agreement to unblock grain exports from Ukraine’s ports (Prokopenko 2022). One of the limitations of thinking of the invasion as a ‘shock’ is that most other kinds of shocks do not have foreign ministers who can tour Africa arguing that they are not responsible for food price increases and looking for diplomatic support (Pilling and Schipani 2022). There are also suggestions that worries about the diplomatic fallout of Russia’s disruption of food imports to the Middle East and Africa played a role in Russia’s agreement on Ukraine’s grain exports (Prokopenko 2022). If true, this indicates that contrary to the omission of policy recommendations directed at the Russian government in the reports reviewed above, international pressure from food import-dependent countries might have some effect on Russian behaviour.

A bigger argument suggested by the points made so far in this section is that while an enormous amount of work has been done by CAS scholars this century to understand the rise of Chinese agency, goals, strategies and capabilities in the global food system (see for instance Böhme 2021; Brautigam 2015; Gaudreau 2019; Goetz 2015; McMichael 2020; Oliveira 2019), comparable work on Russia (as a fellow BRIC) is mostly lacking. Repairing this gap should be a priority for the field.

Fourth and finally, a geopolitical approach to locating Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would also allow critical agrarian studies approaches to develop a more detailed analysis of the sanctions that so many states have imposed on Russia and Belarus, the strategies behind them, and their likely implications. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not only been a shock to the global food system; it is also one of the biggest geopolitical crises since the end of World War II. It has dramatically intensified a crisis in relations between Russia and what I call for simplicity’s sake ‘the west’, with massive and diverse implications for international relations and the global economy. The west’s own weaponization of so many aspects of international economic relations, from finance to semiconductors to airplane parts and service (Sonnenfeld et al. 2022), has gone far beyond what most observers would have anticipated, and Russia has clearly weaponized energy exports in return. The implications of these broad shifts for the global food system and relationships within it will be multifaceted. Intensifying geopolitical conflict also needs to be considered by authors proposing responses to the food crisis that (like those made in all the reports reviewed here) are premised on global cooperation that may be in increasingly short supply in coming years.

Recognizing these points also suggests that even the ‘maximalist’ conception of the ‘shock’ of the war constructed above is likely too narrow. In February and March in particular the world was reacting not only to disruptions to food, fertilizer and energy markets but to a full-scale war of conquest in Europe and a rapidly escalating geopolitical crisis with terrifying potential implications. Efforts to explain the immediate response of commodity markets to the ‘shock’ should bear this in mind.

Land and resource grabbing

The lack of analysis of Russian geopolitical strategy, imperialism and colonialism in the critical reports may to some degree be a result of limited overlap between participants in debates in international relations, foreign policy studies, and Eastern European studies on those topics and specialists on critical agrarian studies and the global food system (for an important exception see Edelman 2022). The absence of another potential CAS framing of the war – as a land and resource grab – in the critical interventions is more surprising. The Financial Times reported on 22 July that Russia has occupied up to a quarter of Ukraine’s 33 million hectares of arable land since February (Brower 2022). This vast farmland seizure has been accompanied by the theft of Ukrainian grain (Paris et al. 2022) and Russian assertion of control over resources and water. In May it was reported that large numbers of farm holdings in Kherson were being targeted for expropriation and ‘nationalisation’ by pro-Russian officials appointed by occupying forces (Hall 2022). Monsalve Suárez and Dreger also note that mandatory contracts have been imposed on peasants in occupied areas requiring that their production be sent to Russia (2022, 8).

The term ‘land grab’ has frequently been applied to Russia’s annexation of Crimea (see Mankoff 2014), and has been widely used to describe Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 (see Hook 2022). The study of land and resource grabbing is, of course, a central theme of contemporary CAS (Schoenberger, Hall, and Vandergeest 2017), and important work has been done on land grabbing in Ukraine and Russia (Mamonova 2015; Visser and Spoor 2011; Visser, Mamonova, and Spoor 2012). Some analysts from outside CAS have argued that the desire to seize control over Ukraine’s land and resources is a motivation behind Russia’s war (Muggah and Dryganov 2022). None of the critical pieces cited here, however, use the ‘land grab’ framing to conceptualize the invasion. Similarly, GRAIN, the organization that called the world’s attention to (and coined the phrase) ‘the global land grab’ (GRAIN 2008), said nothing about Russia’s land and resource seizures in Ukraine in its above-cited editorial (GRAIN 2022), and as far as I can tell has posted no other substantial responses to the war on its website. Even more strikingly, while the news repository farmlandgrab.org posted 33 stories tagged ‘Ukraine’ in the two years to 24 February 2022 (more than one a month), between 24 February and 25 August 2022 it posted only three: a Wall Street Journal piece on Chinese land investments in Ukraine, an update from a foreign company about its agricultural projects there, and a debunking of an online claim that Ukraine has sold off massive amounts of land to foreign corporations (Agrogeneration 2022; Braw 2022; Williams 2022). The two pieces tagged ‘Russia’ posted in that period cover a proposal for Russia to provide 100,000 hectares of agricultural land to Iran for ‘trans-territorial cultivation’ (eghtesadnews 2022) and a US Senate bill that proposes banning investment in US agribusinesses and farmland from China, Russia, North Korea and Iran (Dwivedi 2022); neither mentions the war. In early September farmlandgrab.org posted three more pieces dealing in different ways with the war, one of which – a review of the film The Grab from the entertainment site Variety – does argue that the desire to control Ukraine’s wheat exports and water motivated Russia’s invasion (Debruge 2022). The Land Matrix database, meanwhile, updated or posted information about roughly 120 land ‘deals’ in Ukraine between 24 February and 28 July 2022, but does not have entries quantifying the scope of Russia’s military occupation (https://landmatrix.org/list/deals). The Land Matrix website has, however, posted a number of news items about the war and its implications for Ukraine’s agriculture and land politics by Ukrainian civil society groups (see for instance Amosov 2022; Fedorova, Kubitza, and Pedra 2022).

This apparent lack of interest in applying the ‘land and resource grabbing’ framework in critical agrarian studies-linked analyses of the implications of Russia’s invasion presumably has various causes (see the conclusion), but one is likely that the main analytical approaches to studying ‘grabbing’ are not designed to deal with interstate war. The Land Matrix database, for instance, records information on ‘land deals’, and defines such ‘deals’ in part as involving ‘a transfer of rights to use, control, or ownership of land through sale, lease, or concession’ (https://landmatrix.org/faq/#what-is-a-land-deal); military occupation and straight seizures of land do not fit that criterion. This and other definitions of ‘large-scale land acquisitions’, ‘land deals’, and ‘land grabs’ also implicitly exclude situations in which direct control over land has not necessarily changed but the land comes under the military occupation of another state, and may be framed in ways that are hard to square with accounts of the reasons for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Borras et al.’s influential conceptualization, for instance, states that

In short, contemporary land grabbing is the capturing of control of relatively vast tracts of land and other natural resources through a variety of mechanisms and forms that involve large-scale capital that often shifts resource use orientation into extractive character, whether for international or domestic purposes, as capital’s response to the convergence of food, energy and financial crises, climate change mitigation imperatives, and demands for resources from newer hubs of global capital. (Borras et al. 2012, 851)

Conclusions

In this article I have asked how critical agrarian studies scholars should analyze and respond to the implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the global food system. CAS-affiliated reports and other interventions published in the war’s first months make wide-ranging contributions to this project, and key reports’ conceptualization of the war primarily as a ‘shock’ that has interacted in complex ways with other elements of the global food system is very fruitful. I have also argued, however, that their specific deployments of the ‘shock’ framing have some problems, with the most significant relating to the various ways in which they ‘exogenize’ the agency of the Russian state and thus (with the exception of the FIAN report) treat Russia’s war as a fact to which the ‘international community’ can only adapt. My analysis suggests that while the ‘shock’ framing is essential, CAS and food systems analysis would benefit from taking some critical distance from it, and should consider the benefits and drawbacks of the analytical comparability it creates between very different kinds of events with respect to causality and response. The ‘shock’ framing also, like any analytical framework, encourages the foregrounding of certain things and the downplaying or missing of others, and I have argued that adding CAS and other perspectives on geopolitics, imperialism, colonialism, and land and resource grabbing to these initial accounts promises to generate a fuller and more multifaceted CAS response to the war.

In concluding I would like to develop some brief further thoughts on three aspects of the war that CAS-affiliated analyses should reflect on. First, we should recognize that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a case of a kind of event that has become unfamiliar since the end of the Cold War: a full-scale interstate war of conquest waged by a great power that is not the United States. Our theories of the global food system and the role and strategies of powerful states within it are not well-equipped to grapple with such an event. Similarly, while (neo-) imperialism and (neo-) colonialism are core CAS concepts, CAS, like most contemporary critical social science, has given little consideration to Russia’s history as an imperial power. Despite centuries of massive territorial expansion and settler colonialism by the Russian Empire and USSR, our understanding of imperialism is overwhelmingly oriented to the empires of western European countries and the United States. As noted above, too, Chinese history, agency and power are being incorporated into analyses of the global food system in a way that their Russian equivalents mostly have not been. It will not be possible fully to account for the causes of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or for its implications for the global food system without an analysis of Russian imperial goals, discourses, and strategies. There is an enormous literature to draw on for this project, and I recommend the call Ukrainian leftist Volodimir Artiukh (2022b) made in the first week of the war for the western left to recognize that ‘Russia has become an autonomous agent’ as a source of inspiration.

A second point relates to some political and ethical issues that CAS accounts of the food crisis’ causes and calls for action in response to it should do more to consider and address. The initial impetus that pushed me to write this paper was the discomfort I felt at the way that many CAS-affiliated analyses of the food crisis seemed to be directing analytical and/or policy attention away from an ongoing and brutal imperial war. With respect to the causal analyses of the impacts of the ‘shock’ in CAS interventions, the effort to relate Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the current crisis’ other causes is of course indispensable, and it may be that the most convincing studies will end up being ones that do not put much causal weight on the war. There are plenty of utterly appalling wars and genocides happening around the world that are not exacerbating the global food crisis, and perhaps what Russia is doing to Ukraine ultimately fits into that category. Our causal analyses should be separate from our politics. There are, however, different ways of going about this. Interventions that downplay the war’s impact should, at a minimum, take care to be clear (as the three main CAS-affiliated reports reviewed here are) about the destruction that Russia is causing to Ukraine, its people, and its agriculture. They should also take care not to dehumanize the country by treating it solely as a source of commodity exports (the GRAIN editorial cited above is an example of this problem).

Turning to the policy side, it is, again, striking that of all the mainstream and CAS-affiliated reports only the FIAN one makes what one might think would be the most obvious policy recommendation, one that the UN General Assembly made by a vote of 141–5: that Russia must immediately and unconditionally withdraw from Ukraine. The policy proposals most of the reports present to the ‘international community’ do not call for an end to this ‘shock’, but rather suggest ways in which its impacts can be made less severe. We want, of course, to build a more just, resilient and sustainable food system free of the pathologies that are so compellingly analyzed by CAS. There is something troubling, however, about the implicit idea in some critical analyses that, if we had such a system, Russia could have launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine without major negative consequences for food security in other parts of the world. Like climate change, economic crises and pandemics, imperial wars of conquest are ‘shocks’ that we should be trying to prevent, not just adapt to.

These arguments lead directly to a third crucial and, again, political point: solidarity with Ukraine. Ukraine is defending itself against a war of conquest carried out by the successor state of the empire that used to rule most of it, a war that is openly aimed at the obliteration of the Ukrainian nation. Ukraine is also, it should be remembered, very poor. Its per capita GNI before Russia’s full-scale invasion was almost identical to those of Indonesia and El Salvador,² and the devastation caused by the war will likely see the economy shrink by around half in 2022. Ukraine should be supported in its struggle against occupation and genocide on the grounds not only of human rights but of national self-determination and opposition to imperialism, colonialism and land grabbing. Just as our standard frameworks give little consideration to Russia’s imperial and colonial history, however, they also have difficult with the idea of a European nation as a past, present and potentially future victim of colonialism. There are, again, ample resources for challenging these tendencies, including the works of Ukrainian leftists, feminists and environment scholars (Bazdyrieva 2022; Dale 2022; Mälksoo 2022; Tsymbalyuk 2022).

I conclude with one very basic suggestion for developing this solidarity. CAS scholars (and others) should be consistent in calling the ‘shock’ what it is: a Russian invasion of Ukraine. There is a well-entrenched tendency in at least the English-speaking west to refer to wars by the name of the invaded country, one that leads us to use ‘Vietnam’, ‘Afghanistan’, ‘Iraq’, and too many other country names as shorthand for a series of US imperial wars (just as ‘Chernobyl’ and ‘Fukushima’ have become the names of disasters rather than places).³ We should do what we can to break this tendency. Terms like ‘the Ukraine conflict’ and ‘the Ukraine crisis’ have the double problem that they use anodyne and inaccurate language to refer to what is in fact a war/invasion and encourage us to think that it is Ukraine, not Russia, that is the source of the ‘shock’. It is worth asking, for instance, how the content of the panel organized by A Growing Culture and IPES-Food might have changed if it had been called ‘Beyond Russia’ rather than ‘Beyond Ukraine’.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jennifer Clapp, Tanya Richardson, and two anonymous reviewers for JPS for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Derek Hall

Derek Hall is Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University. His research focuses on the political economy of food, agriculture, land and environment in Japan and Southeast Asia, and the history and theory of capitalism. He is the author of Land (Polity, 2013) and, with Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li, of Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (NUS Press and University of Hawai’i Press, 2011).

Notes

1 Our Bread Our Freedom Campaign and Navdanya International (2022) does not use ‘shock’, but it also does not assign Russia’s invasion of Ukraine any clear causal role in creating the current food crisis (see below). An April 2022 HLPE Issues Paper does not directly call Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a ‘shock’, but its use of the term (7) clearly implies that it is one.

2 In 2021, Indonesia and El Salvador had per capita GNIs (Atlas method, current $US) of $4140; Ukraine’s was $4120. World Development Indicators, accessed 25 August 2022.

3 ‘Chernobyl’, the standard name of the town and nuclear plant in English, is a transliteration from Russian; the transliterated Ukrainian name is Chornobyl.