As of: 03/15/2022 6:43 p.m
The international supply chains were under pressure even before the Ukraine war – due to Corona. Now the situation is getting worse due to mutual embargoes. Are the chains about to break?
It is the emptiness on the cooking oil shelves, especially in the lower compartments, where the inexpensive varieties are, which unsettles an elderly customer in a supermarket in Cottbus. “Someone has three or four bottles in the basket. ‘What’s going on here?’ You ask yourself and sometimes you grab something,” she says. Delivery difficulties are certainly due to the circumstances that are known to everyone, the branch manager describes the situation, but through a variety of other providers one is secured and can supply the customers. The reactions from the press offices of various supermarket chains such as Aldi-Süd, Lidl, Kaufland and Edeka read similarly.
“Behave in solidarity with one another”
“As at the beginning of the Corona crisis,” customers should “act in solidarity with one another and only buy products in quantities that are normal for households,” warns Christian Böttcher, spokesman for the Federal Association of German Food Retailers (BVLH). The association has already called on the Germans not to buy hamsters. The BVLH still has no information about a nationwide undersupply of sunflower oil in German retail, Böttcher told the newspapers of the editorial network Germany. However, economists assumed that the general rise in food prices would continue for the time being.
The longer the war lasts, the greater the risk that prices will continue to rise; that delivery failures can perhaps be compensated for in the short term from stocks, but not easily in the medium and long term – and if so, then only with greater effort and costs.
Prioritize agriculture in energy supply?
And that in a situation in which the high energy prices are already immense price drivers. Among other things, the German Raiffeisen Association (DRV), representative of the interests of cooperatively organized companies in the agricultural and food industry, is calling for the federal government to intervene quickly. The state must cushion the high energy prices for companies in the short term. “The state benefits directly from the high prices through taxes. This cannot be explained to the companies in view of diesel prices in excess of 2.30 euros per liter,” criticizes DRV President Franz-Josef Holzenkamp.
“We cannot change the procurement costs for oil and gas, but we can reduce the high price share of state taxes and levies,” says Holzenkamp. , demands the association president. “The agriculture and food industry is part of the critical infrastructure and must be given high priority when it comes to the supply of energy.”
Demands for less EU bureaucracy
In view of the expected war-related import losses of agricultural products, raw materials, animal feed and fertilizers, the DRV sees greater demands on local agriculture. All available options should be exhausted here. According to the association, up to half a million hectares of arable land could be made usable in the short term by temporarily suspending the EU-wide mandatory set-aside.
“Land is scarce in Germany. This makes it all the more important to use the available space optimally,” explains Holzenkamp. This should not lead to a fundamental departure from the turn towards sustainable agriculture and animal welfare. “Sustainability and productivity are not necessarily contradictory. The compatibility can be achieved to a large extent by using modern technologies and exploiting the potential of digitization,” says Holzenkamp.
Don’t “fall back into the old reflexes”
“It would be wrong to fall back into the old reflexes,” emphasizes Peter Strohschneider, chairman of the Commission for the Future of Agriculture. The war in Ukraine shows that the right to food must be realized in global society, it is wrong to use the buzzword “food security” to play off economic versus ecological concerns, said Strohschneider in view of the dispute about an ecological agricultural turnaround that is currently reappearing.
Irrespective of the duration of the war in Ukraine, it will only be seen in a few months how far-reaching its consequences will be for the immediate food supply. Then when the harvest has come in and it is foreseeable what the war has cost the Ukrainian farmers not only in personal suffering but also economically.