Salt of world hunger

Illegal sanctions against the supply of potash fertilisers from Belarus, imposed by the collective West, threaten world food security 

Experts say three things must come together to ensure food security: the environment, genetics and good management. And if climate change is difficult to manage, plus the development of genetically modified production is still quite expensive, then we can only rely on effective management. It primarily refers to the use of a sufficient amount of mineral fertilisers. And this is what can make it possible to feed 9 billion people today.

Our contribution to security 

Belarus makes a significant contribution to ensuring food security in the world, supplying foreign markets not only with high-quality agri-food products, but also with the most important resources for production, including potash fertilisers, Andrei Pilipuk, Corresponding Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Doctor of Economic Sciences, Professor, Director of the Institute for System Research in the Agroindustrial Complex of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus notes, “In this regard, sanctions and restrictions on the transit of potash fertilisers from Belarus led to a serious increase in prices for this type of resource, making it more expensive and much less affordable for most world importers.”
Of course, it is beneficial for foreign experts to underestimate the contribution of Belarus to ensuring global food security, the scientist emphasises. Belarusian potash fertilisers have a number of significant competitive advantages: the main one is affordability. And no less significant — high quality.
Experts note that our potash fertilisers are produced using modern technologies that provide higher static and dynamic strength, biological purity and safety of products that can be transported over long distances and stored for a long time without loss of quality.
Domestic producers take into account the growing demand for complex fertilisers, with a balanced ratio of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium minerals, as well as microadditives. We mastered the production of a brand of potassium chloride with a minimum content of fine fractions. Potash fertilisers are a key position in the Belarusian export basket and a strategic branch of the country’s economy. 

Africa needs Belarusian fertilisers

There are new disappointing global data. The Food Security Information Network reports that in 2022, 58 countries were in a state of food crisis, including countries in Africa, Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Syria and others. The total number of hungry and malnourished people in these countries is 258 million people (this is 34 percent more than in 2021). The role of Belarusian potash fertilisers in ensuring the agricultural production of African states is significant.
Sanctions, or unilateral coercive measures taken by countries that bypass the UN Security Council on food and fertilisers, are among the most irresponsible decisions for several reasons,
Deputy Permanent Representative of Belarus to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations Kirill Petrovsky says: 
Firstly, the global hunger situation has not improved in recent years. According to The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, prepared by FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO and published a few weeks ago, global hunger rates have remained virtually unchanged from 2021 to 2022, but are still much higher than pre-COVID-19 levels (9.2 percent of the world population in 2022 compared to 7.9 percent in 2019). In 2022, there were between 691 and 783 million hungry people in the world, and about 29.6 percent of the world’s population — 2.4 billion people — were moderately or severely food insecure.
Secondly, unilateral coercive measures on fertilisers hit hardest not the countries on which they are imposed, but the poorest countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. For example, despite the sanctions regime, the problem of hunger in Belarus does not exist at all.
According to the same report, our country maintains its position in terms of the minimum level of ‘spread of malnutrition’: less than 2.5 percent, on par with most European countries. In Kyrgyzstan, this indicator is 4.8, Georgia — 2.9 percent, etc. The share of Belarusians who cannot afford a healthy diet is one of the lowest in the world (0.5 percent), while in Sweden this figure is 0.6, Austria — 0.9, Kazakhstan — 2.3, Russia — 2, 6, Moldova — 7 percent. 
Thirdly, fertilisers sanctions have a long-term effect: by not fertilising this year, farmers in the poorest countries will have a smaller harvest next year, further exacerbating hunger.
In general, international experts, including the FAO, name several blocks of causes of world hunger: climate change, the consequences of a pandemic, conflicts and, of course, trade barriers and restrictions, the most destructive of which are precisely unilateral coercive measures against food and fertilisers. It is quite difficult to assess the share of influence of each of them separately, but one thing is clear: there are no reasons for optimism in the situation with global food security.
A heated discussion on the impact of fertilisers sanctions on hunger has been going on at the FAO site for more than a year, but so far to no avail.
“The United States and its allies generally started out by saying that there were no sanctions on fertilisers, that is, with a lie. Today, they are diligently, but usually unsuccessfully, trying to avoid discussing this very sensitive topic, especially in the presence of the most ‘affected’ states in Africa and other regions. FAO member countries, at the initiative of Belarus, formed in Rome an informal ‘anti-sanctions group’, which, among other things, develops and coordinates joint actions aimed at the speedy removal of all unilateral coercive measures against such an extremely important position for the whole world as fertilisers. We plan to continue to increase pressure on the collective West, which, for the sake of its political ambitions, makes decisions that are one of the main causes of global hunger,” Kirill Petrovsky believes. 
Obviously, if the situation with the supply of Belarusian potash does not change, many poor countries will find themselves in a difficult situation. Prices for potash fertilisers, which have risen above nowhere, will continue to rise, according to the World Bank. Starving countries are already voicing fears about next year’s harvest. In conditions of acute food shortages, their harvest directly depends on the amount of fertilisers, a significant part of which is Belarusian.  



DIRECT SPEECH 
Andrei Khudyk, Minister of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection,
“At the moment, the reserves of potassium salts in our country amount to 7.3 billion tonnes. With the existing annual production — about 53 million tonnes — the country is provided with these reserves for more than 100 years.”


MEANWHILE
According to the UN, there were 828 million malnourished people in the world in 2021. This is approximately 88 times more than the population of the Republic of Belarus. One in five people in Africa, 9 percent of the people of Asia, 8.6 percent of the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, and almost 6 percent of the population of Oceania have already experienced hunger.

By Svetlana Isaenok