Klaus Pichler

“Grain As A Weapon”

photography series

 

Klaus Pichler, born in 1977, is a photographer from Vienna, Austria. An original landscape architect, he focuses on themes at the intersection of ecology, society, science and discourse, driven by curiosity about how people and their environments interact. His projects have been exhibited internationally and he has published several of them as photo books, such as “Golden Days Before the End” (Edition Patrick Frey, 2016), “This will change your life forever” (self-published, 2017), “The Petunia Carnage (self-published, 2021) or “Fear guards the lemon grove” (Fw:books, 2024).

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"In mid-September 2023, I received a package from Ukraine, sent by a Ukrainian dock worker who answered my call. The contents: around 5kg of burnt grain - wheat and barley - that was destroyed in a Russian drone attack on the Ukrainian Danube port of Izmail in summer 2023. The attack on this grain warehouse is just one of a long list of targeted Russian attacks on Ukrainian agricultural, grain and port infrastructure that have occurred since Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine began on February 24, 2022.

 

Ukraine, also called the “breadbasket of Europe”, is an important player in global agricultural markets: with an export volume of 33.5 million tons, Ukraine was the fourth most important exporter of agricultural products worldwide in 2021. An area of 43 million hectares, or 71.3% of the country's area, was designated as agricultural land before the war. It is estimated that before the Russian invasion, Ukraine accounted for 8 to 10% of global wheat exports and 10 to 12% of corn and barley exports, and around 400 million people worldwide were dependent on Ukrainian exports.

 

With the war against Ukraine, the targeted Russian destruction of Ukrainian agriculture by the Russian invaders began - fields were burned and mined, grain stores were bombed, crops were destroyed or plundered, agricultural machinery was destroyed, Ukrainian export ports on the Black Sea were blocked and their access roads were made impassable with sea mines . As a result of this export blockade, huge quantities of Ukrainian grain were stuck in the ports and thus withdrawn from the world market. At the same time, large quantities of grain were stolen by the Russian attackers in the occupied Ukrainian territories, transported away and relabelled as Russian goods using 'grain laundering'. The consequences of the Russian attacks are immense: the Kiyv School of Economics estimated direct damage to the agricultural sector in the first year of the war at $8.7 billion and indirect losses such as reduced crop production, logistics disruptions and higher production costs at an additional $31.5 billion -Dollar. At the end of 2023, it was estimated that the amount of grain produced in Ukraine had decreased by 29% since the Russian invasion began.

 

The Russian war of aggression on Ukraine is not only a war for territory, but also a war for resources - including iron ore, coal, natural gas, metals and grain. The attack on Ukrainian grain exports also has a global dimension, the effects of which are above all affect countries in the global south. Or, as former Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev so cynically put it in April 2022: “It so happened that the food security of many countries depends on our supplies. It turns out our food is our silent weapon. “Silent but mighty”. This “weaponization of food” is not only an attack on Ukraine itself and a violation of the Geneva Conventions Protocols, but a deliberate attempt to exacerbate global food insecurity.

 

The use of grain as a weapon to serve the strategic goals of a belligerent country is concerning. This is especially true when you consider that the targeted blocking of access to food can have devastating consequences for the innocent residents of the attacked country and, through blocked exports, also for people far away from the war zone. The intention behind this fits into the Russian concept of hybrid warfare, as the former German ambassador to Moscow, Rüdiger von Fritsch, notes: “Putin's calculation is that after the collapse of grain deliveries, the starving people from the regions in the Middle East and will flee in Africa and try to get to Europe. In doing so, he wants to destabilize Europe and build up political pressure so that Western states give up their tough stance against Russia.” At the same time, Russia, the world's most important wheat exporter, is positioning itself to compensate for the forced Ukrainian export losses in the countries of the Middle East and Africa and to drive the states that were previously supplied by Ukraine into Russian dependence.

 

The Russian war of aggression exposes the vulnerability of global food export cycles and clearly shows the consequences for world nutrition. When Russia blocked Ukrainian ports at the beginning of the war, this led to a huge increase in grain prices on world markets; wheat prices on European futures markets rose by over 30% at one point. Since mid-2022, world market prices for agricultural products have fallen again, but they remain volatile due to the uncertain situation.

According to the UN World Food Program, 783 million people suffer from chronic hunger and 333 million people are at the mercy of acute food insecurity. Even before the war in Ukraine, the number of people affected by hunger worldwide was increasing, and the effects of the war are making the situation even more difficult. Mathias Mogge, board member of Welthungerhilfe, blames this on a “polycrisis”: “The increasing effects of climate change, conflicts, economic shocks, the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war have not only exacerbated social and economic inequalities, but also the “The progress made in reducing hunger in many countries has slowed down or even reversed.”

 

Back to the Russian war of aggression: The history of the war in Ukraine is the tragedy of a nation threatened in its existence with countless victims and great destruction. At the same time, it is also a story of Ukraine's impressive handling of Russian aggression, a story of fierce military and civil resistance and ongoing attempts to deal with the consequences of the attacks. This also applies to the Ukrainian agricultural sector, whether family farms or large agro-industry companies: every effort has been and is being made to continue cultivating the fields, often after the fields have been cleared of mines, and with helmets and flak jackets. In this respect, the chronology of Russian attacks on the agricultural sector is also a chronology of the Ukrainian search for and implementation of measures and agreements with international allies in order to be able to continue producing and exporting grain despite the war.

 

In May 2022, the Government of Ukraine and the European Commission presented the “Solidarity Lanes”, an initiative to facilitate food exports from Ukraine via EU road, rail and sea routes. Further agreements between Ukraine and the EU, such as the temporary suspension of export tariffs and tariff quotas on Ukrainian agricultural and food products or the facilitation of formalities in goods trade, should expand export opportunities across the borders of Ukraine and the EU. In November 2022, the “Grain from Ukraine” initiative was presented, under which Ukraine, partner countries and private donors deliver Ukrainian grain to countries in Africa and Asia suffering from malnutrition and extreme hunger. On July 22, 2022, the most important agreement to date, the “Black Sea Grain Initiative” (also called the “Grain Deal”), came into force, a UN-brokered and Turkish-administered agreement between Ukraine and Russia on the safe export of Ukrainian grains Grain against unhindered export of Russian fertilizers and raw materials. A shipping route was established between the Ukrainian ports of Odessa, Chornomorsk and Pivdennyi, and the port in Istanbul, on which around 33 million tons of grain and foodstuffs could be exported to a total of 45 countries in over 1,000 trips by 722 ships.

 

On July 23, 2023, after months of deliberately slowing down the processing of ships in Istanbul, Russia unilaterally canceled the Grain Deal without giving reasons. In response, Ukraine organized a “humanitarian corridor” together with the EU from August 10, 2023, which leads along the southwestern Black Sea coast in Romanian waters towards Istanbul. At the same time, the search for alternatives to the Black Sea route began, with the ports along the Danube on the Ukrainian-Romanian border being used in particular to load the grain onto trucks and transport it overland.

 

With the withdrawal from the Grain Deal, Russia began targeted bombing of Ukrainian grain warehouses and port infrastructure in the Black Sea ports and the ports on the Danube along the Ukrainian-Romanian border. In the period between July and October 2023 alone, an estimated 130 grain infrastructure facilities and 300,000 tons of grain were destroyed in Russian attacks. There is currently no end in sight.

This new phase of Russian aggression against Ukrainian grain production finally brings us back to the destroyed grain from the port in Izmail mentioned above. It is not just a relic of war, a tiny fraction of an elusive amount of grain that was wantonly destroyed. The charred grains also contain a report on how global commodity cycles work, on food exports, globalized trade, international inequalities and dependencies, and, above all: proof of the vulnerability of the world's food supply. The burned grain is therefore not only a metaphor for the senselessness of this war of aggression, it is also an appeal to the obligation of global society to take decisive action against any attack on the world's food supply."

 

Klaus Pichler, December 2023