Food prices will remain elevated for years due to the war in Ukraine and other inflationary factors, a senior U.S. official predicts.
“We’re dealing with a number of issues that are having an impact on inflation, that are not issues that can be easily solved,” State Department special envoy Cary Fowler said Wednesday. “I think we’re dealing with a multiyear crisis, and we ought to plan in that regard.”
Food prices will remain elevated for years due to the war in Ukraine and other inflationary factors, a senior U.S. official predicts.
“We’re dealing with a number of issues that are having an impact on inflation, that are not issues that can be easily solved,” State Department special envoy Cary Fowler said Wednesday. “I think we’re dealing with a multiyear crisis, and we ought to plan in that regard.”
Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea has taken one of the world’s largest food providers off of the international market in an apparent plan to gain leverage against Ukraine and Western powers. That maneuver has contributed to a surge in food prices around the world as U.S. and European officials scramble to develop alternative strategies to arrange the secure export of Ukraine’s vast stockpiles of grain.
“When Russia invaded the Ukraine, we were already in the midst of what we probably could have called a world food crisis anyway,” Fowler, whom Secretary of State Antony Blinken tapped as his point man for global food security in May, told the Atlantic Council’s European Union-US Defense & Future Forum in Washington. “When you look at the current acute crisis that we face, you have to say to yourself and you have to get into the mindset that this is a three-year crisis.”