Published Sunday, February 06 2011, Ukrainian Echo

By Wolodymyr Derzko
04.02.2011

Late January, Timothy Snyder - a Yale University history professor - packedauditoria and lecture halls at St Vladimir Institute in Toronto and theUniversity of Toronto and spoke to an evenly distributed crowd from theUkrainian, Polish and Jewish communities about his recent book, Bloodlands:Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Kudos' to the organizers.

Prof. Snyder starts his lecture with the shocking finding that 17 million
people were killed between 1933 and World War II, with a concentration of 14
million in the "bloodlands" - Ukraine, Poland and Belarus. Both Hitler and
Stalin viewed Ukraine as a strategic asset; an eastern pastoral paradise,
which Hitler even called "the Garden of Eden". Nazi Germany was not
self-sufficient in food. Hitler's plan for the destruction of the Soviet
Union would bring Ukraine's breadbasket under German control, making Germany
unassailable. Equally for Stalin, mastery of Ukraine was a precondition and
proof of the triumph of his version of socialism. Germany concluded that
Ukraine was "agriculturally and industrially the most important part of the
Soviet Union." After all, it produced 90% of all the food. According to
Germany's long term colonial plan, the western Soviet Union would become an
agrarian colony dominated by Germans. This required the murder,
displacement, assimilation or enslavement of 40 million people. Hitler
believed that Germany would secure Ukrainian food and Caucasian oil in a
matter of weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union. When the War dragged
on and the Soviet Union didn't collapse, Jews in Ukraine were blamed for the
Nazi failure and the Nazi extermination process started.

I had a chance to ask Prof. Snyder a question after his talk. What
lessons can we learn from his book about preventing a similar and deliberate,
policy-triggered famine today, since historians are fond of saying that
history is important to study so that we don't repeat past mistakes? Without
missing a beat, Snyder referred to his recent article in The New Republic on
October 28, 2010, called The Coming Age of Slaughter: Will Global
Warming Unleash Genocide?

The recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland had food security as
the main topic. While the figure of 17 million deaths in the "bloodlands" is
hard to comprehend, today, over 50 times that number, or 925 million people
mostly in Africa and South Asia are at risk of famine and starvation, says
the UN.

One troubling scenario involves China, the most populous country on earth
that has just half of the world average of fertile cropland per capita and
one-quarter the world average of potable water per capita. China has bought
every hectare of available arable farmland in Africa and is exporting food
back to feed hungry Chinese, who are suffering from the worst persistent
droughts in six decades in the northern wheat-growing provinces. These
exports have led to food shortages, price spikes and famine in some African
countries. To add to their troubles, much of China's potable water comes
from Himalayan glaciers, which are now melting and shrinking.

To solve its food and water scarcity problem, it is quite plausible that
China could soon invade Siberian Russia to secure precious water and
cropland, becoming the next geopolitical conflict hotspot.

Grains are becoming scarce around the world due to climate change after
floods in the Prairies in Canada, droughts in America, floods in
Australia and Pakistan, and last summer's fires in Russia. Over 30 countries
are now at risk of food shortages and famine including Egypt and Tunisia,
whose government regimes are crumbling after massive street protests. However,
if you think Ukraine is safe, you are wrong. According to the Nomura Food
Vulnerability Index (NFVI), Ukraine is in 20th spot out of 80 countries at
risk of a food crisis, due to high food inflation and the high percent of
household wages going to the purchase of food - over 61%.

After recent trade talks, China along with Egypt, Libya and the United Arab
Emirates are secretly eyeing the Ukrainian breadbasket, just as Hitler and
Stalin did seven decades ago, not just for imports of grains, but to buy or
lease land directly to ship crops back to feed their hungry people
-sidelining the Ukrainian farmer.

While Ukraine is self-sufficient in grain production and exports today,
it is tenth in the world in grain exports, and its food exports total
only 0.9 percent of GDP. So far, Ukraine has exported 5.9 million tonnes of
grain since the beginning of this marketing year - July 2010.

It's plausible that the Party of Regions, desperate for revenues, will
arrange secret loans-for-land swaps. Watchdog groups in Ukraine should
monitor changes in the constitution, land privatization, and visa-free
travel of Chinese farm labourers, which would benefit China and threaten
Ukraine's food security.

Walter (Wolodymyr) Derzko is a Senior Fellow at the Strategic Innovation Lab
(sLab), and a lecturer in the MA program in Strategic Foresight and
Innovation, Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) University in Toronto.