Chef José Andrés, founder of World Central Kitchen, said that the war in Ukraine is not only a fight for freedom, but also a battle to prevent hunger around the globe.
“Ukraine will have food to feed its people. The big question is if we don’t have Ukraine to win this war and to make sure that ports like Odesa are open again, what we’re going to have is a big food shortage around the world,” he said from Kyiv.
Russia has implemented a blockade of Ukrainian ports, and there are more than 20 million tons of grain that are currently stuck inside Ukraine.
Ukraine is the world’s fourth-largest exporter of corn and the fifth-largest exporter of wheat, according to the US State Department, and the United Nations’ program to fight food insecurity buys about half of its wheat from Ukraine each year.
Andrés said a potential food crisis has already been compounded by issues from hurricanes and drought around the world over the past year.
“If we don’t think about food in the same way we think about people, the economy, fuel, we are going to be up for a big problem in the year 2023,” he said.
He said he and his team were able to bring food through the Danube River, but there is not enough capacity to have multiple grain ships there. He called on democracies around the world to help open all the Ukrainian ports to ship grain.