Fed with import and starved by war: Estimating the consequences of the Russia-Ukraine conflict on cereals trade and global hunger

The fight against hunger has been confirmed as a global goal by the UN Agenda 2030 but the war between Russia and Ukraine is expected to create millions of new undernourished due, among others, to its impact on international trade in cereals, especially in wheat and maize. The present note represents a first effort to quantify such impact and its consequences on hunger in developing countries. This is done by (1) identifying the changes in trade flows of wheat and maize caused by the war; (2) computing the resulting variation in each developing country’s cereals import openness; and (3) applying the most recent estimates of the relation between cereals import openness and the prevalence of undernourishment provided by the recent literature to obtain the corresponding change in the number of undernourished because of the war. Results show a huge impact on the number of new undernourished, which, however, becomes less dramatic when the analysis is limited to countries where maize or wheat are staples. Along with the Black Sea blockade, the main impact on hunger comes from the bans issued by Ukraine and other economies reacting to the crisis and it particularly hurts people in countries depending on few trading partners.