“I came to see you to ask you to realize that our countries (…) are victims of this economic crisis,” he said in Sochi (southern Russia) at the start of their meeting. .
The UN fears “a hurricane of famine”, mainly in African countries which imported more than half of their wheat from Ukraine or Russia, especially since no ship can leave Ukrainian ports because of the conflict.
Mr. Sall pointed out that African states were suffering the consequences of the Russian offensive against Ukraine while “the majority of African countries avoided condemning Russia” in two UN votes, and that with ” Asia, the Middle East as well as Latin America, a good part of humanity” preferred to stay away from the conflict.
Macky Sall noted that the food tensions caused by the conflict have been aggravated by Western sanctions which affect Russia’s logistics, trade and financial chain.
He therefore called for the food sector to be “out of the sanctions” imposed by the West in retaliation for the Russian military offensive.
“The sanctions against Russia have led to more seriousness, we no longer have access to cereals from Russia, but above all to fertilizers”, noted the Senegalese president.
“This really creates serious threats to the continent’s food security,” he said.
Vladimir Putin, for his part, did not address this theme in the public part of the meeting.
He stressed the “support” of the Soviet Union to African countries “in the fight against colonization” and praised the development of Russian-African relations.
Macky Sall is in Russia amid fears of a global food crisis, with the Russian offensive in Ukraine having crippled food exports from these two agricultural giants.
This led to a spike in the prices of grains and oils, whose prices exceeded those of the Arab Springs of 2011 and the food riots of 2008.
Earlier, the Kremlin had indicated that Vladimir Putin wanted to take advantage of this meeting to “give a full explanation of his view of the situation regarding Ukrainian cereals”.
According to him, only Ukraine and the West are responsible for the emerging food crisis.
