The prospect that the war in Ukraine will continue, the risk that its cereal production will rot in the sun due to the blockade of its exports in the Black Sea and the rapidly worsening food crisis that this causes have motivated that the Davos Forum end this Thursday with the same feeling of uncertainty the one you started with.
The political leaders -particularly Europeans- who attended this annual meeting addressed these issues with the heads of international institutions, with businessmen, economists and experts looking for answers to a set of unprecedented crisis that make the expected economic recovery after the pandemic impossible.
The managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, said that does not foresee a recession in the big economiesbut admitted that he could not rule out this happening, while inflation soars in much of the world, dragged down by the increase in fuel and basic food prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Also at the Davos Forum, the director general of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, anticipated that if they fail to open safe corridors to get the cereals from Ukraine to the rest of the world, the food crisis – a reality for hundreds of millions of people in the world – may last until 2024. The executive director of Yara International (a group that produces fertilizers), Svein Tore Holsether, stated that 276 million people suffer food insecurity in a severe and acute phase, twice as much as just two years ago, although he recalled that the heat waves in India, Pakistan and the United States have also influenced this.
Regarding this possibility, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmitro Kuleba, said that his Government agrees with the principle of these corridors, but that this would require the demining of the port of Odessa (the largest in the Black Sea), and he wondered cHow could it be guaranteed that Russia will not seize the opportunity to attack. What is certain, he added, is that the grain stores in Ukraine are overflowing and that the next harvest will have to be put out in the open and will most likely end up rotting if no solution is found for its export.
More sanctions on Putin
The war in Ukraine was without a doubt the central theme of this edition of the Davos Forum, stimulated by an important Ukrainian delegation headed by Kuleba and including the mayor of kyiv, the Ukrainian ombudsman and several parliamentarians, who participated in numerous events to champion their cause.
European leaders were unanimous on the need to further strengthen its position against Russia, strengthening its own defense, deepening sanctions, supporting Ukraine with arms and diplomacy, and completely disassociating itself from Russian oil and gas. “We can’t allow that Putin win the war and I think it won’t. Until now, it has not achieved any of its strategic objectives, and one of them, that of occupying all of Ukraine, is further away than ever,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the last political leader to speak at this Davos Forum, said today.
In this Forum, several leaders also made a “mea culpa” by acknowledging the It was a big mistake to accept Russia’s energy dependency instead of proposing an energetic union.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was very direct and said that The West should never have put its economic interests before its security and its values. “For too long we looked away when our colleagues from countries bordering Russia told us they had problems,” said the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola. She acknowledged that for Europeans “it was too easy to remain dependent on gas, some countries at 100%, without seriously considering creating an energy union in which we depended on each other and not on a country that could cut us off (supply) at any time.”
discussions about the expansion of totalitarianism, the attacks on freedom of the press, the promises of immersive reality and the phenomenon of eco-anxiety among young people closed the Davos Forum, while a few hundred meters away members – almost all women – of the student movement demonstrated. Fridays for Future’. His claim was summed up in that the powerful of the planet assume their responsibility to contain climate change and give them hope for a future on this planet.