"What the history of wheat tells us about what’s to come."
"“Ukraine has what may be the richest soil in the world,” writes University of Georgia historian Scott Reynolds Nelson in his astonishing new book Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World. “In 1768, Tzarina Catherine II sent a hundred thousand Russian troops through this region and across the Black Sea to capture it.” Her goal: to establish a Russian Empire by “seizing the steppe, planting wheat here, and then feeding all of Europe.”
It wasn’t just the fertile land that made Ukraine such a prize. Nelson writes evocatively of the “black paths” (chorni shlyakhy in Ukrainian), the “ancient oxen trails that cut across Ukrainian plains to Black Sea ports,” where grain could be gathered on ships and sent to the Mediterranean, the gateway to the lucrative European wheat market.
Two and a half centuries later, Russian soldiers have once again besieged Ukraine, and another Russian ruler dreams of an empire with easy access to the Black Sea and Europe. Russia’s latest assault on its western neighbor has plunged global food markets into a state of chaos, with prices gyrating upward."
Tom Philpott reports for Mother Jones March 20, 2022.
SEE ALSO:
"How War In Global Breadbasket Threatens Food Security Everywhere" (Christian Science Monitor)
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