Ukraine lost “a quarter of its cultivable land” due to the Russian invasion

ARK News... The Ukrainian Ministry of Agriculture announced on Monday that Ukraine has lost a quarter of its cultivable land due to the Russian occupation of certain regions in the south and east, without this posing a "threat to food security" to the country.

"Despite the loss of 25 percent of cultivable land, the crops planted this year are more than enough to ensure consumption" of the Ukrainian population, Deputy Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotsky said at a press conference, according to France Press Agency. He pointed out that "consumption has also decreased due to the mass exodus (of the population) and migratory movements" outside the country.

Despite the significant loss of land now under Russian control, Vysotsky assured the press that "the current structure of cultivated land (...) does not pose a threat to food security in Ukraine...Ukrainian farmers were able to prepare relatively well for cultivation before the start of the war."

However, the Russian occupation of many Ukrainian regions and the blockade of grain by the Russian Black Sea Fleet forced Ukrainian farmers to “adjust what they were cultivating and how much,” Vysotsky said.

Pre-war Ukraine had more than thirty million hectares of cultivable land, according to the Global Data Center for Ukraine, an international NGO.

If the consequences of the Russian invasion on the Ukrainian internal market seem limited to Vysotsky, the impossibility of exporting the produced grain abroad raises fears of famine in the coming months, according to the United Nations.

Russia and Ukraine together account for 30 percent of global wheat exports. This caused a sharp rise in the prices of grains and oils, reaching the level they reached during the Arab Spring revolution in 2011.

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