On Wednesday, Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, proclaimed that America would provide Ukraine with further 215M dollars in emergency food aid, with more assistance expected in the future, to assist the country in combating the humanitarian disaster caused by Moscow’s brutal incursion of the East European state.

Secretary Blinken said at the U.N. during a ministerial meeting that, given the imperativeness of the disaster, the United States is declaring additional 215M dollars in news emergency food aid and will do substantially more. He also said that they anticipate their governing body to pass nearly 5.5 Bn dollars quickly in further spending for humanitarian food assistance.

Moreover, the US State Security said that America would be vowing 500M dollars to boost American manufacturing of fertilizer. The latest aid comes as there’s an amplified need for plant food in states that typically export it from the Russian Federation, the leading exporter of fertilizers globally, with an export value of nearly $7 billion. Antony Blinken requested other states having grain and agricultural fertilizers, that’s also experiencing deepening shortages amid the Ukraine-Russia conflict, to swiftly join to reduce the effects of the global crisis.

On Wednesday, at the Food Security Ministerial, Antony Blinken said that they met during what is called as the greatest global food security crisis of the present time, a crisis that the world knows has been building for several years, driven in part by accelerating climate crisis, and in part by deadly COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, between 2016 and 2021, the number of people living in acute food insecurity has climbed sharply from 108M people to 161M people worldwide.

Russian Aggression Intensified Global Food Crisis

In addition, he said that it was this mounting crisis that led Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US Representative to the United Nations, to make the nexus between global food security and conflict the focus of a UNSC meeting that she chaired in March 2021. And it is why America made firm commitments at the United Nations Secretary-General’s Food Systems Summit in September last year.

And all of that was before Moscow’s all-out incursion of Ukraine, which, the World Bank says may drive additional forty million people all over the world into deep poverty and food insecurity in 2022. So certainly, every driver of the catastrophe they’ll talk about on May 18 has been intensified by the Russian President’s aggression in Ukraine.

Furthermore, Secretary Blinken said that America has announced over 2.3 Bn dollars in the latest spending for emergency food aid to satisfy humanitarian needs (food, shelter, non-food items, sanitation, hygiene promotion, etc.) since Moscow’s brutal incursion of the post-Soviet country.

Previously, America has made explicit that it intends to provide long-term support to the government in Kyiv and has already given the country billions of dollars in humanitarian, security, and military aid to bolster its defense against Russian violence. Earlier in May, the United States leader declared a further 150M dollars’ worth of military aid to Ukrainian forces in the form of more artillery, radars, and other military equipment.

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