MAKSIMYCHEV: West, not Russia, responsible for global food crisis

Global food crisis is at the doorstep of Africa. It is a real issue, and a matter for a serious concern for all the poorer and economically vulnerable countries.

Of course, there is always an easy explanation for all the woes of the world: Russia! And this is precisely what you get 24/7 from the entire “international mainstream” propaganda machine outlets.

But I would like to share with my Kenyan friends a wider political economy perspective. If we are honest and serious, we will have to admit that the problem started long before the Ukrainian events. And its root cause is the overall systemic crisis of modern global economy.

Liberal capitalism has simply exhausted its creative potential, which is manifested in perennial global economic imbalances, increasing trade distortions, rise of protectionism, rapid increase of inequalities among and within countries, phantasmagoric debt crisis, erosion of the middle class, social unrest, racism and violence.

The last attempt by the UN to address the situation in an honest and fair way through the sustainable development goals was sabotaged by the global ruling class a.k.a. former colonial rulers of the world and self-proclaimed “democracies” because of greed and fear of a more equitable redistribution of wealth among countries and people.

The global ruling class is losing its competitive advantage to the new emerging economic powers that can offer better productivity, better technological solutions, better quality of everything the world needs.

And the only response they are capable of producing is protectionism, “sanctions” and brutal pressure. The cases of repressions against Huawei’s 5G technology and Russia’s international media RT and Sputnik are very telling.

Is it the behaviour you would expect from someone strong and self-confident? No, this is a reaction of someone who feels weak and scared of honest competition and freedom of expression.

To understand the origins of the current food crisis, let us take a step back and look how the global ruling class reacted to the 2008-09 financial crisis and Covid-19 pandemic. Their response has always been distressingly primitive, shortsighted and destructive. All they did was printing money and suppressing competition. What are they doing now? They are printing money and suppressing competition.

What happens when you pump trillions of empty dollars and euros into your economies and monopolise the markets? The answer is inflation. That means that everything people need, everything that has real consumer value (first of all food) becomes very expensive to the consumer.

Now, on the current Ukraine-related situation: What happens when you take a key international producer and supplier of food and fertilisers, Russia for that matter, and try to isolate it from the global financial system, steal its sovereign reserves and other assets, impose a trade blockade, illegal restrictions on its capacity to pay and receive payments, to deliver its produce to the consumer, when you prevent its ships from leaving ports and entering others’ ports, etc.?

Right, the offer in the global food market shrinks, and the prices go up. And if you add to that a global campaign of intimidation and political and economic coercion to scare whole countries from cooperating with us, the prices soar.

It is disturbing that they are doing exactly the same thing to global energy. And this leaves very little hope that they will ever comprehend what they are doing, and the world will soon see a global energy crisis as well, which probably will degenerate into all-out global economic meltdown.

What is remarkable is that they are hurting themselves (it’s all right, they are free to engage in any activities they have an inclination to), but in the process they really endanger the lives of millions of people around the world. And this is serious.

What is the solution? I have no easy answers.

I would only recommend to my Kenyan friends to think independently, be creative, and try to figure out how to do away with the neo-colonialist, highly dysfunctional and, to be frank, dishonest structure that is the western financial system, which stands between Russia that wants to trade with Africa and Africa that wants to trade with Russia.

And, as a matter of mental and intellectual hygiene, please, turn off western propaganda.

The writer is the Ambassador of Russia to Kenya