The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) defines food security as the situation where people have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and preferences for an active and healthy life at all times; in other pwords, people are free from hunger and malnutrition (FAO, 2000).

Food security has a number of pillars: it is about availability of, access to, use and stability of the food supply. In the 1970s, the focus of definitions of food security was mainly on food availability. Over time, the definition has been expanded to include aspects such as quality, nutritional value and access.

When analysing food security, it is important to distinguish between the availability of food and access to it. After all, a great deal of food insecurity comes not as the result of food shortages, but as a consequence of lack of access. Poverty is the main cause of limited access to food: people simply do not have the money to buy it. The quality of food can also be a major obstacle to achieving food security; people may have access to sufficient calories, but the nutritional value – in terms of micro and macronutrients – is lacking. In this article I consider the impact of the war in Ukraine on global food security.

Ukraine is a major exporter of wheat (18 mtonnes), maize (27.9 mtonnes), sunflower oil (6.8 mtonnes) and rapeseed (2.4 mtonnes) per annum (2020 UN Comtrade, www.comtrade.un.org). It has a substantial share of international trade for these crops as shown in Figure 1. Russia is also a major exporter of wheat and sunflower seed and oil (Figure 1).

The largest importers of Ukrainian wheat are Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey and Yemen. Russia exports its wheat mainly to Egypt and Turkey. These two countries are therefore heavily dependent on both Ukraine and Russia together for their wheat imports (Figure 2) and have limited possibilities to expand their wheat production (Meijl et al., 2022). All these importing countries also depend on food aid supplied through the World Food Programme (WFP). Ukraine is the largest supplier of food aid to the WFP.