Background

The war in Ukraine has triggered population displacement, damaged civil infrastructure and restricted the movements of people and goods, preventing farmers from tending their fields, and harvesting and marketing their crops and livestock products. According to the latest assessment (31/07), the war has already resulted in total damage of USD 2.2 billion for the agriculture sector, while the aggregate losses total USD 28.3 billion.

Objectives of the assessment

Against this background, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has conducted a nation-wide survey, targeting 5 230 rural households across the country, with the objectives of:

• collecting necessary evidence of the impact of the war on rural livelihoods to inform programming decisions and support advocacy efforts; and

• complementing the data from consolidated and ongoing analyses including sectoral damage and loss assessments.

Results

After eight months of active war, rural households are increasingly affected by the negative impact of the conflict. The impact of the war on the broad production system, characterized by disruption of value and supply chains and unpredictability of prices, has repercussions on the rural population, underlining their interdependence with the country’s agricultural economy.

The analysis shows that the war has negatively affected agricultural production of one fourth of the rural households interviewed nationally. One in every four respondents (25 percent) of the rural population reported stopped or reduced agricultural production due to war. The trend is higher in areas along the front-line, with more than one in three respondents reporting to have stopped or reduced agricultural production (38 percent).

Increase in agricultural production costs for both crops and livestock activities due to war was widely felt across the country, negatively affecting income levels of rural households with drastic and significant decreases reported by more than a third of the interviewed households. Almost three quarters (72 percent) of the respondents involved in crops production and 64 percent of the respondents involved in livestock production reported increases in production costs.

Since the start of the war, rural households have reported decreased levels of income. This is evident across the country, with 55 percent of the respondents recording such decrease between June and September 2022, compared with the same period during the previous year.

In terms of the total damages and losses for the rural households, estimates amount to almost USD 2.25 billion in the first six months of the war. Of this, USD 1.26 billion in the crops sector and USD 0.98 billion in the livestock sector. The cattle sub-sector has been most affected with over 64 percent of the total value of damages and losses within the livestock sector, while the grains and oil seeds sub-sector amounted to over 67 percent of the overall value reduction in the crops sector.