IFPRI: Continuing problems in Ukraine raise concerns about next year’s crop (The Fence Post) 

The Fence Post published an article on an IFPRI event where two senior economists said that six months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the continuing uncertainties in the Black Sea region led to questions about next year’s crop sizes. The Black Sea agreement that allows the grain to leave Ukraine “has always been tenuous,” Joseph Glauber, a senior research fellow in the Markets Trade, and Institutions Division (MTID( said, and it is still “fraught with tension” because Russia has been critical of it. Russia has said that a lot of the Ukrainian grain has ended up in western Europe rather than the developing countries, but Glauber said that’s partly because grain that was scheduled to go to European countries and China before the law is leaving late. David Laborde, a senior research fellow also in MTID, said that there is a theory in agricultural economics that the remedy for high prices is high prices because they lead farmers to plant more. But in the current situation, input costs have gone up, so the real question is profitability. Glauber said that humanitarian organizations such as the United Nations World Food Program are able to find food to distribute, but their costs are much higher. “It is important for donor countries to increase their contributions to WFP under these circumstances.” Republished in Hortidaily.