Food Fight

In retaliation for sanctions by the European Union, the United States, and a handful of other countries that want Moscow to change its policy in Ukraine, Moscow has banned a large assortment of food products from import to Russia.

The surprisingly harsh measure will close off the Russian market from essential items like meat, dairy products, fruits, and vegetables and is seen by the Kremlin as a boon to local producers, who will race to replace US chicken, French Brie, and Greek olives on supermarket shelves.

Initially, western sanctions were aimed at specific, targeted individuals or companies, not the larger Russian economy. Yet global outrage surged after the downing of the Malaysia Airlines plane, which killed nearly 300 and scattered body parts across the sunflower fields of eastern Ukraine. The exact circumstances behind the horrific tragedy are still unclear, yet it has turned much of the world against Moscow and led to broader sanctions.

Russia’s embargo move, taken August 7, could radically alter consumers’ diets: nearly 15 percent of fruit, 13 percent of pork, and 14 percent of fish are imported from sanctioned markets. The EU, which exports far more goods to Russia than the United States, will have to sell $7 billion in sanctioned products elsewhere, though this figure represents just half of a percentage point of the overall EU economy, said economists from London-based think tank Capital Economics.

Overall, Russia imports 35 percent of its food, and consumers will feel the impact of this measure if other suppliers are not found. Many observers darkly dismissed comments praising the embargo as something that will “teach the West a lesson.”

“You will be eating potato peels and washing yourself with dish soap so that an American doesn’t have an extra portion of french fries,” commented the acerbic blogger KermlinRussia, adding that it will be poorer Russians, the very people who rarely buy more expensive European imports, who will bear the brunt of the embargo once prices on domestically produced food skyrocket.

The measures immediately triggered recollections of long lines for food in the early 1990s, images of store shelves filled with neat pyramids of identical tins, and jokes that now Russia will be awash in salmon and oysters from Belarus (a landlocked country).

Why would the Russian leadership punish its own citizens, wondered economic analyst Andrei Movchan: “Our authorities probably decided that light sanctions introduced against Russia by the West do not elicit enough anger from the Russian people, enough desire to fight. The self-ban on food import… should play the role of inciting aggression and patriotism in the Russian people,” he wrote for the website Slon.ru.