GENEVA, 13 Mar: Senior U.N. officials hosted Russ-ian envoys in Geneva on Monday in a bid to extend an export agreement amid Moscow\u2019s invasion of Ukra-ine and prevent a potential new spike in world food prices.
\nThe United Nations and Turkey brokered a deal between the two warring countries in July that allows Ukraine \u2014 one of the world\u2019s key breadbaskets \u2014 to ship food and fertilizer from three of its Black Sea ports.
\nThe 120-day agreement, which helped take some of the sting out of rising global food prices, was renewed last November. That exten-sion expires on Saturday.
\nMoscow has been frustrated that a parallel deal to allow exports of Russian food and fertilizer, which is used across the globe, has only resulted in a trickle of Russian fertilizer getting out and no Russian grain at all.
\nAs part of the arrange-ment, Moscow wants Russ-ian ammonia to be fed thro-ugh a pipeline across Ukra-ine to reach Black Sea ports for possible export. Russian officials also say banking restrictions and high insur-ance costs have hurt their hopes of exporting fertilizer.
\nRebeca Grynspan, secretary-general of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, and Martin Griffiths, the head of the U.N. humanitarian agency, were hosting a team led by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin at U.N. offices in Geneva.
\nNone of the officials involved spoke to reporters as they arrived for the talks.
\nA lot is at stake: Ukraine and Russia are key global suppliers of wheat, barley, sunflower oil and other food to countries in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia where millions of people don\u2019t have enough to eat. Russia was also the world\u2019s top exporter of fertilizer before the war.
\nThe loss of those sup-plies, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, drove global food prices higher and fueled concerns of a hunger crisis in poorer countries.
\nThe so-called Black Sea Grain Initiative involves seaborne checks of cargo by U.N., Russian, Ukrainian and Turkish officials to ensure that only foodstuffs \u2014 not weapons \u2014 are being transported.
\nThe amount of grain leaving Ukraine has dropped even as the deal works to keep food flowing. Inspec-tions of ships under the grain initiative have fallen sharply since they got rolling in ear-nest in September, and ves-sels have been backed up.
\nWestern critics accuse Russia of dragging its heels on inspections. Moscow denies that.
\nThough the grain deal helped stabilize global food prices, there are still concerns about the impact on prices of possible trade restrictions and weather, especially heat waves, said Michael Puma, director of Columbia University\u2019s Center for Climate Systems Research whose research focuses on global food security.
\n\u201cBig picture, we\u2019re pretty fortunate that the weather conditions have allowed \u2026 high levels of production across many of the grains,\u201d he said.
\nOn the front lines in Ukraine, the eastern city of Bakhmut remained the site of fierce fighting, with Ukrainian forces denying Russian forces the prize of its capture after six months of attrition.
\nYevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian millionaire with ties to President Vladimir Putin who owns the Wagner private military company, has repeatedly claimed that only the Wagner fighters, not the regular army, are involved in battles for Bakhmut. His claims could not be independently verified. (AP)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
GENEVA, 13 Mar: Senior U.N. officials hosted Russ-ian envoys in Geneva on Monday in a bid to extend an export agreement amid Moscow\u2019s invasion of Ukra-ine and prevent a potential new spike in world food prices. The United Nations and Turkey brokered a deal between the two warring countries in July that allows Ukraine \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-212728","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212728\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}