Somalia’s hungry are the unexpected casualties of Russia-Ukraine war

Study finds the impact of the conflict, which limited grain exports, was felt particularly hard in Africa

A woman pours tea in a displacement camp in Baidoa, Somalia. Getty Images

The continuing war in Ukraine is causing hunger thousands of miles from the battlefields, most notably in African countries such as Somalia, according to a study released today.

Countries far from Ukraine were disproportionately affected, facing higher costs and fewer options to secure food supplies, the report found. Among these, lower-income nations in Africa, such as Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia – and Montenegro, Albania and Belarus in Europe, bore the brunt of the crisis, as they lacked the resources to adapt to soaring prices or find alternative suppliers.

Added to the growing death toll and damage to critical infrastructure across Ukraine after three years of war, the country has been unable to produce the crops once so abundant it became known as the “breadbasket of the world”.

Combined with export bans from other countries for Russian produce, ripple effects resonated through global trade and upended food supply systems.

Using satellite images to quantify the loss of cropland, and studying the trade networks, researchers at Michigan State University’s Centre for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS) aimed to understand how far those disruptions reached, who suffered and who gained.

The work was published in Nature’s Communication Earth & Environment journal.

“The most striking aspect of our research is its ability to connect a regional conflict to its far-reaching impacts on global food accessibility,” said Nan Jia, a PhD student and lead author.

The authors said analysis allowed them to understand “how changes in one part of the system can ripple through the entire network, affecting everything from production to distribution to consumption and enabled them to identify which countries and regions are most vulnerable".

Russia and Ukraine play critical roles in the global staple food supply.

A number of countries, including some with vulnerable food availability, heavily rely on imports from these two countries. For instance, the shares of wheat imported from Ukraine by Egypt and Lebanon are 85 per cent and 81 per cent of their total wheat imports.

International cereals’ prices increased by 20 per cent within the first three months after the start of the invasion.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation models suggest that 13 million more people were undernourished in 2022 due to the Russia-Ukraine war. Ukraine's lost production of three winter cereals in 2021 could have met the caloric needs of 76 million adults for a year, it calculated.

The Michigan study revealed that regarding wheat, barley, and oats, the war has had a much greater impact on distant countries than on countries next to Ukraine and disproportionately harms poor countries.

Before the war, about a third of global wheat exports passed through the Black Sea.

“It’s remarkable how interconnected our world is – an event in one part of the globe can lead to food insecurity thousands of kilometres away,” wrote Jianguo Liu and senior author Rachel Carson. “We were able to reveal the unequal impact of the war, highlighting how distant and low-income nations are often left more vulnerable in times of crisis.”

However, the study also revealed how major exporting countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia stepped up, partially filling the gaps left by Ukraine. But these changes can compromise biodiversity in these exporting countries, the authors said.

“By revealing the hidden vulnerabilities in global food systems, our study emphasises the need for international co-operation to ensure food security,” Jia said. “Policymakers and global organisations can use these insights to build more resilient food networks, invest in local production in vulnerable countries, and create strategies to mitigate the impacts of future crises.”

The WFP warned in 2022 that the Ukraine war had added to the threat of famine impacts in Somalia.

It was named the hungriest country in the world in the 2024 Global Hunger Index, after previously holding this rank in 2021. Some 4.4 million people in Somalia are expected to face high levels of acute food insecurity at the end of 2024.

Before the Ukraine conflict, Somalia imported 90 per cent of its grain from Ukraine and Russia. Once those supplies dried up, Somalia was hit by a food crisis, as it combined with a drought in the Horn of Africa. Floods have since swept the country which is suffered the extremes of climate change.

Concern Somalia pointed out that the country was also hit by inflation driven by the war’s effects on global food and fuel trade. Its director Abdi-Rashid Haji Nur said at the time: “Although you have food in the market, the ability of people in those areas to buy or get access to that food is very limited.”