The unknowns of the <x0 wheat war”

This is the latest form of geopolitical confrontation, which is affecting not only Ukraine's fate but also the food safety of Mediterranean and North African countries, already heavily tested by pandemic, drought months and rising prices.

As already known, Russia and Ukraine together represent about 1/3 of the volume of global wheat trade. Mediterranean and African countries, including important strategic players for Italy like Libya and Egypt, cover 75 percent of their food needs with imports they receive from Kiev.

And there are currently not many alternatives, at a time when large agricultural producers, like India, are reducing exports to cope with crops related to climate change. So we're in front of a perfect <x0storm, which, as the World Food Programme warns at the UN, is preparing to cause a global food emergency.

Hunger will be a serious problem for tens of millions of people currently suffering from shocking levels of malnutrition. For Russia, the impact of the world's <x0-year-old”, Ukraine means destroying its resources and morals: Kiev is beginning to remember the great hunger (Holdomor) caused by Stalin politics in the 1930 ' s.

But using wheat as a weapon of its neo-perandom strategy, Russia is also taking responsibility for causing a food crisis that has already begun to be observed in southern Europe. Italy, as the 2011 precedent shows, will be directly affected by this crisis.

Is an international intervention possible to avoid calamity? To answer that question, it is good to analyze what is currently at stake for Moscow, which is trying to compensate for the difficulties of the earthly war with the control of the Azov Sea and Black Sea ports.

The major failures in land war, Russia is trying to re-balancing through naval war. While in already occupied territories, Moscow's soldiers are destroying or stealing Ukrainian wheat by partially giving it to the ally in Syria, Bashar Al-Assad the Russian blockade of Odessa, becomes a “=x1> of Western sanctions.

Moscow's thesis is this: until they are removed, Russian ships will not allow export of any amount of wheat from the ports of Ukraine. So finding a co-ordinated solution with Moscow seems very difficult. But in that form, it is a imposed solution.

First of all, the waters around Black Sea ports have been mined by Kiev to prevent a possible Russian Navy landing. And an old military saying explains that placing a mine in the sea is much easier than removing it from there.

US Admiral James Stavridis proposes launching a NATO operation to escort 80 commercial ships blocked across the Bosphorus at the ports of Ukraine. There is a precedent for this situation: the mission through which the U.S. Navy protected the oil tankers in the Persian Gulf in 1987-1988 during the war between Iraq and Iran.

But a NATO intervention in the Black Sea would sound like a direct provocation against Moscow -- the same or worse than the multi-debated idea of creating a <x0)) stop-flutting” on Ukraine. The United States is moving indirectly, giving Ukrainians additional weapons to crack Moscow's blockade.

So, after sinking the Russian warship “London is doing the same. An alternative solution runs through land routes: creating a corridor that transports Ukrainian wheat to Romania's borders, to the port of Constanta, or to the Baltic.

It can function in part, but cannot avoid the risks associated with Russian bombings on transport infrastructure, and this movement is so late that the food disaster cannot be avoided.

In theory, opening a sea corridor for wheat export would require fulfilling 3 conditions: Kiev's government should accept the demining of the area, and “will provide” an international mission to its territorial waters; that Turkey, using the Montro Convention

In 1936, to close access to the Black Sea for all military ships and to have a coalition of countries, including European sea-skilled countries, build an international humanitarian security mission to escort commercial ships.

We hope in the political support of the southern countries most affected by the food crisis. Moscow must decide how to respond to this offer, balancing the global urgency of hunger with its war goals in Ukraine.

For the Kremlin, the control of Odessa, means the privation of Ukraine from sea access, reducing it to a very weakened state. But blocking that port, which Babel's stories have made immortal, Russia also risks losing itself and the little that remains of its international image.