War in Ukraine, Drought Converge to Worsen Hunger Crises in Horn of Africa

Global food crises are being made worse by the convergence of drought and conflict. 

Russia’s war against Ukraine is causing global food prices to soar, worsening hunger emergencies in countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia where millions of people are not getting enough calories due to harvests and livestock that were decimated by three consecutive subpar rainy seasons. 

Russia and Ukraine are top exporters of staple crops, accounting for 30 percent of global wheat exports and 20 percent of global maize exports. The prices of those crops have spiked since February. In the month following Russia’s invasion, cereal prices climbed 17 percent, according to the FAO. Wheat prices rose by 19 percent, as did maize prices. 

The alignment of drought and conflict, experts said, should be viewed as a warning sign for the future. As the planet heats up, the risk of weather disasters – droughts, floods, hail storms – in multiple grain growing regions increases. 

What’s Up With Water — April 19, 2022

For the news you need to start the week, tune into “What’s Up With Water” fresh on Monday’s on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, and SoundCloud.

Featured coverage from this week's episode of What's Up With Water looks at:

• In Ukraine, nearly two months of war have taken a toll on the nation’s people – and also on its infrastructure. According to a new assessment, about one and a half million people in eastern Ukraine are without piped water.
• In Chile, there are concerns about water supplies, but for a different reason. Record-breaking dry conditions have forced government officials to plan for rationing water to the country’s largest city.
• Drought is also squeezing communities in the American West. Because of low snow totals and depleted reservoirs, federal officials are eying emergency water cuts in the Colorado River basin.
• Droughts like those in the western states are among the conditions affecting how people in the entire country view their surroundings. For the U.S. public, concern over environmental quality is near a two-decade high, according to a recent Gallup poll.

The North Crimean Canal runs near the town of Lenino. In February, Russian forces destroyed a dam that Ukrainians had built to restrict the flow of water in the canal after Russia overtook Crimea in 2014. Photo by Aleksander Kaasik, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

War in Ukraine Lengthens List of Violent Acts over Water

One of the first casualties of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not a human life.

In late February, as Vladimir Putin’s war machine was beginning to uncoil, Russian forces destroyed a dam in Ukraine that was blocking water from a Soviet-era canal that flows into Crimea, the peninsula that Russia wrested from its neighbor in 2014. Ukrainians had erected the dam in retaliation for the loss of territory nearly eight years ago.

The destruction of the dam across the North Crimean Canal is the most recent entry in the Water Conflict Chronology, a compendium of violent acts related to water throughout 4,500 years of history. The database is maintained by the Pacific Institute, a water policy think tank.

In a March 2022 update to the chronology, the Pacific Institute is adding 376 entries, most of which occurred in the last three years.