UMD Experts Predict That Poorer Nations Will Suffer Most as Chaos Grips Agriculture in Black Sea Region
A worker fills a truck with wheat in a village in southwestern Ukraine last week. The food security of tens of millions of people around the world depends on the nation's crops, currently threatened by a Russian invasion that began more than a month ago.
Image Credit: Photo by Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images
Talks this week in Istanbul are raising hopes for a negotiated end to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, but should they fail, the pain of the conflict could soon spill beyond the borders of a country where cities are still being destroyed and civilians slaughtered.
Wheat prices in various markets spiked about 70% soon after last month’s outbreak of war in the region, a key supplier of grains and other commodities to the international market, and now are running 40% or more above February prices. A supply slowdown that might only bump up inflation in wealthy nations could create catastrophic outcomes in poorer ones, ranging from political unrest to deadly famines for areas that depend on Ukrainian and Russian crop imports.
Maryland Today spoke to several University of Maryland experts on the region’s agriculture and global grain markets: geographical sciences and College of Information Studies Assistant Professor Sergii Skakun, a native of Ukraine who works on several satellite-based remote sensing projects directed at the country, including NASA Harvest, NASA’s food security and agriculture program led by UMD; Inbal Becker Reshef, NASA Harvest’s program director and research professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences; and economist and agricultural markets expert James MacDonald, research professor in the Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics.
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James MacDonald is currently teaching AREC 210, The Food Chain: What Happens As Your Food Goes From Farm to Table. This fall, he will teach AREC 427, Commodity Pricing and Markets. The course will focus on how commodity prices vary with current demand and production, and how prices are linked over time, across space, and across grades, as well as the role played by contractual arrangements, cooperative marketing, vertical integration, and governmental policies in commodity marketing strategies.
