 Hello, you're watching People's Dispatch and today we're going to be talking about an issue which we ideally should not be talking about, considering the progress humankind has made over all these centuries. But the fact remains that hunger and food insecurity are an issue which affect millions of people across the world. Just a couple of days ago, the Global Report on Food Security revealed that in 2021, 193 million people faced various levels of food insecurity. And this situation is said to get worse with the war in Ukraine. To talk more about this, we have with us John Ross. John is a member of the Organizing Committee of the No Cold War Platform. They've recently released a report talking about world hunger and the impact the Ukraine war is going to have on it. Thank you so much, John, for joining us. So my first question was really regarding just a follow-up of what we're talking about. Like, we saw the 2021 numbers which are really bad and the estimates are that 2022 is going to be equally bad. Like, you're right in the briefing, the fact that senior officials have already said that the Ukraine war is going to make an already bad situation worse. So could you first maybe tell us some of the ways in which this is likely to play out? Well, the most important is going to be a huge wave of global inflation. If we look at this, if we look at, for example, commodity prices, if you take a compared to a year ago, wheat prices are up by 44%, oil prices up by 67%, and other things are up even more, culls up over 200%, for example. So you're going to have an enormous inflationary shock, which will go through the world. And secondly, you're going, this is going to get worse due to two factors. One is the very inflationary policies which have been pursued by the United States. And the second is the shortages. If you take food, the particular thing we're dealing with, the UN Secretary General was very blunt. He said it is impossible to restore the world food situation without resuming supplies from Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine and Russia between them account for 30% of world wheat exports. And the Ukraine is an enormous supplier of food. And also, incidentally, Russia is the world's largest supplier of fertilizer. So we're not even going to be able to compensate for the shortages of exports from Ukraine and Russia by stimulating local production, which could sometimes occur, because there's not going to be the fertilizer in order to increase the yields. So therefore, I think that the UN Secretary General is exactly right. It's quite impossible to overcome this situation without restoring Ukraine and Russia into the world food supply. In this context, of course, one of the things the briefing also focuses on is how the global South is especially going to be hit by this crisis. So could you talk a bit about that as well? Well, of course, because the inflationary effect is going to be worse in global South countries. For example, Brazil. Brazil is not a country which is being hit by, for example, sanctions or a debt crisis, which is a major situation in other countries. Inflation in Brazil is already 11%, and it's rising. In some other countries, it's much worse where you have supplementary factors. For example, in Argentina, it's 55%. So therefore, you're going to have a huge inflationary shock. And then what is, as I say, to the fertilizer situation, what can sometimes happen if you have a big increase in food prices is that this could be good for local farmers. In many countries in the global South, you can't possibly compensate for the shortages of exports cut off from the Ukraine and Russia. For example, Egypt is entirely dependent upon imports of wheat, and there's no possibility whatever to increase the local food supply enough. But even in countries which are not dependent upon imports, the fertilizer shortage is going to cut the yields. And therefore, the local farmers are not going to be able to increase the situation. Now, of course, in the global North, you have a shock absorber against this due to the higher standard of living. So there's not going to be a problem of hunger in the global North. There will be problems that people will have to cut back on their expenditure. There will be problems of increase in poverty, but there's not going to be a problem of poverty above hunger. Whereas in the global South, as was indicated, you're looking at a situation where hundreds of millions of people are going to be looking at the situation of hunger. Oxfam put it very simply. They said, this is the worst economic and social shock globally. There's occurred since World War II. We have, of course, had disastrous famines in individual countries since World War II. But this is the biggest global shock on food, for example, that's occurred since World War II, and they're absolutely correct about it. Right. John, in this context, of course, despite the nature of the crisis, which was pretty much evident from months ago, the fact is that the United States and its allies have continued with the policy of sanctions. The numbers are quite huge by now. So how do you see these sanctions also worsening this crisis? A commodity trader in Afghanistan who said that the United States thinks it's sanctioned Russian banks, but actually it's sanctioned the entire world. Because what has actually happened is, if Russia and Ukraine can't export, and also incidentally, it's not really that they can't export due to the sanctions, importing countries are concerned because they may be hit, importing companies in countries, their worries that they may be hit by U.S. sanctions. Therefore, they're worried about importing. Under those circumstances, he's quite right, the United States has unilaterally sanctioned the entire world. Now, in the United States, the situation is going to be very unpleasant due to US standards. Due to the very high inflation, US real wages have fallen by 2.7% in the last year. Now, in a country like the United States, that's an extraordinary fall in income. But, of course, by global South standards, that's not so serious. Whereas in the global South, this is going to translate into extraordinarily squeezed living standards for hundreds of millions of people. Or maybe if it continues this, we may even be talking about the situation of billions of people, but certainly hundreds of millions of people. And for some hundreds of millions of this, this is going to turn into a life-threatening situation. So the United States is therefore attacking, literally attacking, as was said, sanctioning the whole world, is attacking the living standards of hundreds of millions of people at a minimum throughout the entire world. I think this is one reason, in addition to the politics, why most of the global South has refused to join in the sanctions against Russia. But on the other hand, the United States is in a very, we may say, reckless and unilateral mode. So we don't exactly know what they're going to do against other countries. And this is making a number of companies, for example, very jumpy in the situation. So basically, the United States is imposing the cost of the war onto the population of most of the world. Absolutely. And John, finally, of course, you've written extensively and the No Cold War platform is also written extensively on this new Cold War, which you've been sort of observing over the past many years, the US attempts to encircle China, to apply pressure on Russia, of course, and any of their allies. So how do you see the politics of food itself playing into this issue? Well, in two ways. One, it's obviously going to be a social crisis in a whole series of countries. I mean, this is just bound to the case. I mean, the root cause, for example, the Arab Spring was the increase in world food prices. So that will play out in some individual countries. Secondly, however, I think it's going to cause some problem, some resistance to the policies of the United States, because I think in the global south, a lot of people don't want to support sanctions anyway, because they think that they're hypocritical for the US. When were the sanctions against the US when it invaded Iraq? When was the sanctions against the US when it was bombing Libya, for example? So they're against it on political grounds. But this is directly hitting the living standards of, say, hundreds of millions. And well, actually, from the point of the overall effect of living standards will affect billions of people because of the, because everybody in the whole world has to eat. And the food price of food for absolutely everybody in the whole world, and that's billions is going up and it's going to go up more. Therefore, under those circumstances, I think people will, some people begin to see that this Cold War is not in their interest. It's not merely a domestic policy carried out by the United States against China. It's against the interests of the rest of the world. That's even before we go into the indirect effects. One of the reasons for the extraordinary inflationary policies in the US is its high arms expenditure, for example, and that's making the situation worse. So this is a direct attack by the United States, not only on China and Russia, but on most of the people of the world. I hope people will increasingly see this. Thank you so much, John. We'll be tracking this issue in the coming weeks and months. And hopefully we'll talk to you again about this as well. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.