Russia’s War on Ukraine Compounds Food Crisis in West Africa

The number of people going hungry in West Africa has reached its highest level in decades, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exacerbating a food crisis that was already threatening millions of people and straining fragile, coronavirus-ravaged economies. 

“The number of hungry people has quadrupled between 2019 and 2022,” Ollo Sib, the World Food Programme’s regional adviser for research, assessment and monitoring, said at a media briefing in Geneva on Friday. “We’re facing an unprecedented and complex hunger crisis in West Africa with multiple structural vulnerabilities and shocks.”

Some 43 million people are food insecure in West Africa and the Central African Republic, and six million children in the Sahel region are undernourished, according to the WFP. It warned that farmers in the region who were already struggling to feed their families due to the impact of a 2021 drought, border closures because of the coronavirus pandemic and recent coups in Mali and Burkina Faso now also face surging food prices.

“The conflict in Ukraine is violently disrupting the global trade of food, fertilizers and oil products and driving up food and fuel prices across the globe,” the UN agency said in a statement.

The war and sweeping sanctions imposed on Russia have upended Black Sea supplies at a time when global stockpiles are already tight. Ukraine and Russia ship more than a quarter of the world’s wheat, and the fighting has closed ports and halted transport. Food prices have surged at the fastest pace ever due to the invasion, rising another 13% last month, the U.N.’s index of world costs shows.

Oxfam and other aid agencies warned earlier this week that another 11 million people in West Africa could be confronting hunger in the next three months. More than 27 million people across the region already don’t have enough to eat, according to the U.K.-based NGO.

The WFP estimates that food stocks won’t be sufficient to cover West Africa’s s needs until the next harvest around September.

The east of the continent is also confronting food shortages. In the Horn of Africa, another 13 million people could soon face hunger as the region contends with its worst drought in four decades. Its reliance on imports from the Black Sea countries such as Ukraine will worsen the situation by inflating prices, the WFP said earlier this week.