Hunger as a Weapon – Vladimir Putin’s Underestimated Advantage Over the West.
It is at the initiative of Putin that Russia has recovered the "farm power" in the mid-2010s.
Taking food sanctions against Russia is useless. Putin has built the food weapon and is now standing up to everyone by saying: “You can take all the food sanctions you want, my people will not go hungry”.
Indeed, when, in 2000, the Russian president came to power, Russian agriculture, which dominated the world grain trade in 1914, was in a pitiful state, devastated by a hundred years of Soviet neglect. “Farm power” had become American, and the United States used it to extend its sphere of influence.
Anxious to wash away the affront, Putin passed a law in 2002 that allowed the arrival of private capital, while deploying the necessary logistical infrastructure. As a result, in 2015, one hundred years after its exclusion from world markets, Russia regained its position as the leading wheat exporter and the power of influence that goes with it. In the age of the most sophisticated weapons, food remains the nerve of war as it has been for millennia. When properly honed, it can wreak havoc.
Napoleon's lesson
Feeding your army (well), starving the enemy ... Since time immemorial, military and food are closely intertwined. For experts, they are in three ways. Before the war in Ukraine, geopolitical experts already distinguished between food for the military, military for food, and, finally, military by the food. This reading grid is solid, and the proof is that we find it again in the current conflict.
Food for the military? To win a war, it is better to have well-fed soldiers. Napoleon understood this well, he said: "An army marches with its stomach". It was thanks to a competition launched by General Bonaparte to ensure the quality of his troops' meals that chef Nicolas Appert invented canned food.
On the other hand, we have seen how the insufficient and outdated rations served to the Russian soldiers have damaged their morale and motivation. The Russian staff, both incompetent and corrupt, had not calibrated the needs of its men in terms of food and often the money that was intended for them went to fill other pockets.
Fighting for food
There are many reasons for wars, and one of them is to ensure food for the population. Goebbels summed up the Reich's need for living space as follows: “a big breakfast, a big lunch, a big dinner”. Good appetite! …
It is not a question of vital space for Vladimir Putin, but how can we not think that he would like to get his hands on Ukraine, which has also succeeded in becoming a great agricultural power. Some even see this as Putin’s hidden plan for the invasion of Ukraine.
It must be said that, as soon as it was liberated from the Soviet yoke, Ukraine was equipped with ultramodern equipment, private investors from all over the world rushed to its fertile black lands, the harvests are monitored by drones, and the millions of hectares are pushed to maximum productivity, the port logistics followed. To this success, Odessa now owes it to have become a target.
The food itself becomes a weapon of war when you deprive your enemy of it. Since Troy, history is full of blockades, sieges, and terrible famines. Parisians have long remembered having to eat rats during the 1870 war. But what about the million Russian civilians who lost their lives during the 900 days of the siege of Leningrad or the sinister Holodomor, 5 million dead, a famine organized by Stalin in 1932 to punish the Ukrainian peasants who rebelled against his tyrannical collectivism?
How not to think of the inhabitants of Mariupol surrounded in the hope of making them break? “People have started to fight for food”, noted a Red Cross representative in early March 2022. The denunciation of famine as a weapon of war by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) motivated its Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. Unfortunately, this has not prevented the “de facto blockade” of the Tigray region by the central Ethiopian government. Nearly 4 million people are in a situation of “extreme food shortage”. Mothers have to feed their children with tree leaves. The specter of the one million Ethiopians who died of hunger in the 1980s has resurfaced.
A double trigger
Depriving the enemy of his crops: the method is as old as the world. When in Ukraine, Russian troops target farms, food stocks, and silos, steal tractors, mine, or bomb tens of thousands of hectares of farmland, they are not inventing anything.
At the height of the Punic Wars in the third and second centuries BC, Rome defeated Hannibal's armies by destroying their crops and soaking the land in salt to make it infertile. Better than scorched earth, salted earth. Imaginatively, the Romans poisoned the water of their enemies by throwing dead animals into their wells. This idea was taken up twenty centuries later by Confederate soldiers who polluted the water supplies of the Union forces.
David Beasley, the WFP's executive director, insists: “There is no doubt that the Russians are using food as a weapon of war”.
This weapon is all the more effective because it is a double trigger since it is aimed not only at Ukrainian agriculture but also at all of Kyiv's clients, such as Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia, which depend on it for almost 80% of their basic food. This will help them to understand Putin's warmongering. And the infernal loop would be closed.
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