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Salinas, California, isn’t just “Steinbeck Country,” its landscape famously memorialized in novels. The Monterey County city is also known as “America’s salad bowl,” for the produce, including lettuce, that is grown there. And last night, it was a fitting site for the Zócalo and The James Irvine Foundation event, “‘What Is a Good Job Now?’ In Agriculture,” part of a larger series exploring low-wage work in sectors across California.

One-third to one-half of all agricultural workers in the U.S. reside in California—so what happens here matters immensely for the industry, The James Irvine Foundation president and CEO Don Howard reminded a packed audience at Sherwood Elementary School, in opening remarks.

The evening’s panel consisted of farmworkers and their advocates: Salinas local and UC Berkeley student José Anzaldo; agricultural consultant James Nakahara; Alianza Nacional de Campesinas executive director & co-founder Mily Treviño-Sauceda; and retired farmworker attorney Juan Uranga. Los Angeles Times staff writer Rebecca Plevin moderated.

The group teased out the many challenges California’s farming industry and its workers face, from climate change to low wages to health issues. A meaningful message emerged: The solutions to these challenges will have to center on the humans that do the work.

Plevin launched the conversation by asking Treviño-Sauceda to list issues impacting California’s campesinas (women farmworkers) today. Citing wage theft, pesticide positioning, and discrimination, Treviño-Sauceda noted that sexual harassment and rape are widespread—9 out of 10 women are harassed in the field. Alianza Nacional de Campesinas aims to bring attention to these issues and more, she said.

Anzaldo chimed in, speaking directly to Treviño-Sauceda, saying that he respects the work she and her organization do.

“And we want people like you, too, talking about it and building consciousness in society,” she responded.

What about climate change? Plevin wondered, moving on to another hot-topic issue. With extreme heat, wildfires, and floods ravaging California farmlands, what kinds of changes are needed to protect workers?

Nakahara, who advises on farming practices, said that climate change presents both risks and opportunities. Some agriculture will have to shift geographically to accommodate changing climes—citrus, stone fruits, and avocadoes will move north—but other crops may move in to take their place. “We are going to get to grow things here we couldn’t 3,000 years ago,” he said. Throughout these large-scale changes, though, the industry will need to support and care for its workers.

But isn’t California progressive, with good protections for its workers? Plevin, who reports on equity issues, pointed out that California’s rules exceed federal standards. The state regulates when workers cannot work outside due to extreme heat, and requires growers to extend overtime benefits to farmworkers.

“I think the solution is better wages, not better overtime laws,” Nakahara said. Farmworkers cannot afford to live near their work, sometimes commuting four hours each way to get to the fields.

This resonated with Anzaldo, who recalled his own experiences pulling weeds and strawberries. “I remember being paid $13 an hour. I needed it for textbooks.”

To make ends meet, Anzaldo’s mother worked another job in addition to her farm work, and did not have a lot of time to spend with him and his siblings. The work is also physically grueling, and back-breaking. If he put his back up to rest or stretch, Anzaldo remembered, he would be penalized. “We will replace you,” his employers told him.

“It’s disheartening,” Anzaldo told the audience.

And change isn’t easy, said Uranga, the retired lawyer. “Anytime you make substantial changes to the relationship between grower and farmworker, growers are going to complain,” he said. Uranga started working in Salinas in 1974, with California Rural Legal Assistance. Growers like the status quo, and don’t want the challenges of creating new business models that take into account protections for workers.

There’s another big problem, too, Uranga said: Farm work is seasonal. So even if you’re getting $17 an hour, you’re getting it only some of the time. The communities that farmworkers live in have a big role to play, he said. Salinas and Monterey could help agriculture and farmworkers by subsidizing affordable housing or tutors in schools.

And what about technological changes? Plevin asked. How is tech changing farm work?

It’s helped—seed planters and other advances in greenhouses and nurseries have helped make the work easier—but advances are often hard-won, both Nakahara and Uranga noted. Outlawing short-handled hoes, which are more strenuous on the body, only happened when workers and advocates pushed for it, Uranga said.

“We need to stabilize the labor force,” Uranga argued, which dovetails with immigration reform and policy. The H-2 visa program allows growers to go directly into other countries, like Mexico, to recruit farmworkers for brief periods—making it difficult to develop an empowered, stable farming workforce. Fieldworkers should be allowed to stay, with some sort of pathway to permanent residency and citizenship, Uranga said.

For Uranga, that growers and industry leaders didn’t stand up for immigrant workers when political reform came up and amid Republican vitriol against migrants was disappointing. It “gets in the way of creating a job situation for the farmworker community in the U.S. that is more valued,” he said.

The way society values farm work needs reframing, all the panelists agreed. “We need to change the way we view the people who do the hardest work in our country and state,” Nakahara said, pushing back on the notion that farm work is “unskilled.” Treviño-Sauceda, too, pointed out that farmworkers were considered “essential workers” during the COVID-19 pandemic, but not treated as such. No one gave them health insurance or sick days.

The panel fielded questions—from both the online and in-person audiences. “How can consumers leverage purchasing power to drive positive change in food systems?” asked one in-person guest.

Change the packaging, said Nakahara: We have all these labels—certified organic, local, natural. But we don’t have a label that says “this food was made without exploiting labor,” or without forcing workers to get by on poverty wages, he noted. “I think if we did, people would shop differently.”

The night closed with a performance from a live mariachi band and catered food from El Charrito. But before the reception, the audience viewed clips from East of Salinas, a 2016 documentary film that features a young Anzaldo and his mother as subjects; and Beyond Salinas, a forthcoming sequel delving into Anzaldo’s experience at UC Berkeley as a first-generation college student.

Anzaldo said a few words to the crowd at Sherwood, which he attended all those years ago. He said he was dedicated to his community in Salinas, and he wanted those who viewed the films to understand not only his compassion but the issues he and his community face.

“My struggle doesn’t stop,” he said.

*CORRECTION: This “Takeaway” originally reported that panelist Juan Uranga argued for cities and counties like Salinas and Monterey to subsidize farmworker wages. Uranga mentioned subsidies for affordable housing and tutors.

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There is only one person more obsessed than I when it comes to the memory of Don Andrés Bermúdez: his son, Andrés Junior. Junior lives with his family in the place where he came of age, a spacious ranch home his father acquired in 1993, on the outskirts of Winters, California, in the western Sacramento Valley.

In a nod to his Catholic upbringing, Junior crosses himself when he passes the town cemetery, where his father is buried. He bought the burial plot adjacent to his father’s, so that he can be as close to him as possible.

It’s easy to understand the devotion. Bermúdez, the “Tomato King,” who died of cancer in 2009 at just 58, willed himself from undocumented field worker and ranch hand to naturalized U.S. citizen; from successful farmer and labor contractor in California to pathbreaking congressman and migrant politician in Mexico.

In 2001, he made history by being elected mayor of his hometown of Jerez, in the state of Zacatecas, which has sent over half a million people to the U.S. over the last half century. Bérmudez is believed to be the first U.S. immigrant to win a mayoral election in Mexico. His first victory was overturned—because his primary residence was in the U.S.—but he won again in 2004 after his binational residency was established, then left that post to run for federal congress in Mexico City two years later. There, Bermúdez championed migrant causes, including allocating greater federal resources for the repatriation of paisanos who died in the U.S.

I am writing a biography of Bermúdez, and I am drawn equally to this complex and contradictory figure by his larger-than-life character—in his signature all-black cowboy ensemble—and by the unprecedented transnational movement he ignited. Bermúdez gave migrants a voice in the politics of their homeland. He also reproduced the strongman tendencies and political bossism he fought against, not to mention machismo.

He is both rule and exception: so much like millions of fellow Mexican migrants who anonymously toil in this country, but also remarkable for transcending strictures of citizenship and borders. Tracing his California path through rural swaths of the state is a reminder of how Bermúdez, and others, have made it their home while maintaining lifelong ties to their ancestral motherlands.

And so I take the 99 Highway to Porterville, where the Bermúdez clan’s U.S. trailblazers first arrived in the mid-20th century as part of the Bracero program, which brought hundreds of thousands of guest workers from Mexico to the fields of California. Fiddling with the radio dial, I’m as likely to hear conservative Christian propaganda as I am to stumble over country music or a Mexican station with Mixteco programming.

In Porterville, I meet a group of Bermúdez’s first cousins and contemporaries. Their aging bodies and visible ailments—strained backs, aching knees—are a testament to lifetimes of physically taxing work in the fields.

We sit in their back patio under a light drizzle and talk. Like any good transnational testimonio, the assembled elders start by honoring their elders, the patriarchs who first came to the U.S. They left rough upbringings in the scattered ranchos of the Zacatecas mountains, where they migrated seasonally between their native El Cargadero and Cueva Grande, tending drought-stricken land and famished dairy cows.

After stints in construction jobs in L.A., these pioneers eventually landed in the Central Valley. They worked the crop circuit up and down rural California, picking grapes, peaches, apricots, plums, strawberries, cherries, oranges, and olives. Labor contractors murdered workers for their paychecks. The migra launched raids that sent them scattering through orchards “like deer.”

When Bermúdez followed these forbears, arriving in town in his late teens in 1969, he did what the rest of the single migrants did, his cousins tell me: worked, drank, smoked, dated. You couldn’t tell, in Porterville, that his trajectory would be any different.

And so I head to Winters, a small town of just over 7,000, the place where Bermúdez’s path diverged from other young undocumented migrants’ stories. After his stint in Porterville, Bermúdez briefly returned to Mexico to marry and start a family. He then moved them to the U.S., choosing Winters for yearlong agricultural work—more appealing for a new father than following the crop circuit. A local white rancher named Tufts saw in Bermúdez a swift English learner and a hard worker, consistently the fastest picker on his crew. He invited Bermúdez and his young family out of the subsidized housing they lived in on the other side of town and into a trailer home on the ranch property.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the flow of migrant workers into California was plentiful, and Bermúdez, now bilingual, struck out on his own and began recruiting laborers for the U.S. Forest Service. By the 1990s, he returned to Winters a wealthy man and ventured into tomato growing—this time, as his own boss. He got involved in every stage of production, from sowing to transplanting, even innovating a technique that would earn him the “Tomato King” moniker, adapting agricultural machinery for a greater yield. He supplied Ragu, Morning Star, Del Monte, and Campbell’s.

In Winters, memories of the man in his “Tomato King” prime abound. Driving through the quaint town with Junior, he’s quick to point out McArthur Street, where his father bought his first property. Where he leased land to grow tomatoes. The exact spot where he got pulled over for driving under the influence, or where he broke out into a brawl. The Buckhorn, his favorite bar to rub elbows with the region’s white farmers. Rotary Park and the Winters Community Center where he hosted the Fiesta Mexicana and delivered impromptu speeches. The place where he threw epic parties for hundreds of his workers, many from his hometown of Jerez.

Most dream of a return. But Bermúdez actually managed to go back—and to take an unlikely and unprecedented leap into the Machiavellian world of Mexican politics. His critics will insist that Bermúdez was drawn by the allure of power; still, as a mayor and congress member, he battled the establishment by giving migrants a voice. “I am here to represent my people,” he once told me. He always told elite politicians that “to do away with migration, they need to have been migrants themselves. Nobody can do away with that which they have not felt.”

Death brought Bermúdez back, again, to the U.S. In the five years that I’ve been researching my book, I’ve grown close with the Bermúdez family; on another recent trip to Winters, I attended a rosary for Andrés Junior’s maternal grandmother, who died last year; Bermúdez jokingly called her his favorite suegra (mother-in-law) in an unabashed reference to his infidelity and cheating ways.

The family buried her just a few yards away from Bermúdez, where the entire nuclear family has plots. To paraphrase the migration scholar Osman Balkan, the interred bodies serve as anchors, investing the soil with political meaning for their relatives and survivors.

In death, as in life, Bermúdez has imbued this corner of California with his legacy—one that stretches to Zacatecas, and beyond.

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Is there a family trait more common than keeping secrets?

These secrets can have hidden costs. When we leave a place or person behind, we don’t know what becomes of them. We miss out. We cut them out of our familial history.

These secrets can even make us miss the entire life of a loved one—a burrowed family secret, not passed down, and brought to light only in late harvest.

That’s one lesson of the most thought-provoking California story I’ve come across in years. It’s told with heart and heightened imagination by David Mas Masumoto, the Central Valley writer and farmer, in his recent memoir Secret Harvests.

The book ranges widely but at its center is Shizuko Sugimoto.

She was the sister of Masumoto’s mother. But he didn’t know she even existed until about a decade ago, when a Fresno funeral home called to ask if Sugimoto, who was 90 and appeared near death, was related.

He was skeptical about the call at first—could this be a scam?—but he went to meet her and began talking with family members about her. In the process, he pieced together many elements of the life of an extraordinary California woman whose very existence had been a family secret.

Sugimoto was born in Fowler, California in October 1919, daughter of a family of farmworkers of Japanese heritage. At age 5, she contracted meningitis, which attacked her brain. No one called a doctor. No one knew what to do.

The illness left Sugimoto with an intellectual disability. She would never again complete a full sentence or thought. In the recollections of Masumoto’s family, she was described as “confused, fuzzy, irritable, and difficult to comfort, traits that will linger for a lifetime.”

She was 23 in 1942, when the family was ordered to evacuate to Arizona as part of the government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans. The burdens on the family were immense—it was just before the harvest, and they were being evicted from their rented home. How could they survive in a concentration camp?

The father went to Arizona, and died within a month. But Sugimoto remained in California. A few days before the evacuation, the family turned her over to a county sheriff, making her a “ward of the state.”

It’s believed that Sugimoto lived in various institutions from 1942 until the early 1950s. It’s unclear where. Masumoto learned that some relatives had spent years searching for her after World War II, and may even have visited her at a facility in Porterville. The story goes that once they found her and visited her, they believed that she was doing better than she might have done with her own family, who were trying to rebuild their lives after incarceration. So they left her where she was, and resolved not to speak of her again.

Other family members who had known Sugimoto were left to assume she had died. But she had lived, moving between institutions for decades. Masumoto would learn that she spent several years, until the 1970s, at the DeWitt State Hospital in the foothills above Sacramento. For a time, she was at a Fresno-area facility only a few miles from his farm in unincorporated Del Rey.

Sugimoto had been living at the Golden Cross nursing home for 13 years when Masumoto received the call asking if he was the relative of a person whose existence was unknown to him.

“How do you tell your family that after seventy years, you ‘found’ their sister and aunt?” he writes. “None of us had seen her since 1942. No one knew anything about her. There are no photographs of her existence.”

When he went to see her, she had suffered a stroke and was in bed, dying.

“I am struck by her size, small and compact, folded in a fetal position. She appears comfortable, breathing gently as if asleep. She lays motionless and alone, real and authentic. This is not historical research conducted safely behind words, photographs and artifacts. I touch her warm hand, feel a bony shoulder, hear a soft sigh as she moves her head to one side. She embodies all that is wrong and right in the world, the sorrow and joy of life, the guilt and happiness of family. She delivers light to our dark past; she complicates and completes us.”

But that was not the end of the story. Masumoto got to know the staff that cared for Sugi, as they called his aunt. In the book, he praises them, and gives his due to the system that kept her alive into her 90s. The caregivers tell him of her feistiness, how she loves to tease and tickle them, how she adores music and dancing, how she wanders the halls, and how she drinks her morning coffee and then throws the cup behind her.

“She is a real character,” he writes. “Sugi has a home here. … Her disability is not a punishment and not a cure… She refuses to believe anything is wrong with her.”

As Masumoto and his family were making plans for her funeral, one day, amazingly, Sugimoto woke up. She returned to moving through the halls. She playfully kicked Masumoto in the leg. “Shizuko came to life and visits us,” he writes. “She is a living ancestor, awakened to illuminate. She no longer lives in the shadows and now steps into the light of family and our history.”

When she later died, shortly before her 94th birthday, she was the oldest client at the Central Valley Regional Center. At her funeral, the family passed out plastic cups. Mourners pretended to sip coffee, and then tossed the cups blindly behind them.

Sugimoto was interred in the family mausoleum, and Masumoto dedicated a bench at the Fresno Fairgrounds—she loved the Big Fresno Fair—to her and “those with disabilities and special needs who were separated from their families” during the World War II relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans.

When I spoke with Masumoto recently, he talked about Sugimoto’s story, and the roles racism and discrimination against people with disabilities played in it. But we also talked about secrets, especially in families, and all that we miss when we keep them.

“I now force myself not to look away,” he said, adding: “Memories can and should change.”

The post What’s the Cost of a Family Secret? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Food can connect us to the earth, our community, and ourselves. But first, we need to open a space to listen to and be in exchange with the ingredients.

As a professional chef, I have spent years learning to do this with the plants I grow and cook with. This practice has profoundly changed the way I think about my work and the world around me.

Looking back, one of my most important teachers on this journey, in the kitchen and in life, was the tomato.

Growing up, I struggled with my relationship to this beautiful plant and its magic fruit, even as I found myself drawn to it. It was only after I learned how to truly listen to tomatoes and give them what they need to thrive, that I experienced the true magnificence, amazing flavors, and powerful energy they have to share with us all.

The first dish I ever learned how to make was salsa. I was 5 years old, and I can still remember picking the juicy tomatoes, serrano chilies, and fragrant cilantro from my parents’ garden in Ojai, the Southern California valley at the base of the Topatopa Mountains. I kept tasting the salsa over and over again, adding a little more chili, then a little more salt, then a little more lemon. Adjusting and experimenting with the balance of flavors until it tasted just how I wanted it: delicious.

But a tomato on its own? That grossed me out. Now I know that the culprit was store-bought tomatoes—pink, mealy, store-bought tomatoes. I still cringe when I think about their watery, bland flavor. The worst were the slices that sat goopy and soggy in my sandwich, waiting to be eaten in my lunchbox at school.

What I didn’t realize then was that these weren’t a proper reflection of the tomato family. They were the industrialized representatives. There are actually more than 10,000 types of tomatoes out there—way more than the two to three varieties you see in the average grocery store.

The revelation that there was a whole other world of tomatoes out there came to me when I went away to San Diego for college and started working at my first fine-dining restaurant, NINE-TEN. I’ll never forget the heirloom tomato salad on their menu. Who knew tomatoes came in so many colors and variations? I took my first bite, and the bright, sweet, sharp flavors of their tomatoes opened my eyes to what high-quality ingredients can do for a meal, and how limited my understanding of the plant had been up to that point.

After college, I returned to Ojai, where I got focused on growing my own food. With my mom as my mentor and advisor, I started to develop a deeper relationship with plants, and saw how they could thrive when they received the love and nutrients they needed.

The work thrilled me. Every morning, I woke up early to check on the land, inviting friends to come and garden with me. We planted all kinds of vegetables in the beautiful soil we created by composting our food and garden scraps.

Through gardening, I learned that all food needs good food and good vibes to flourish. The same can be said for humans. For years I hadn’t been taking my health as seriously as I should have, and it was around this time that I realized I needed to make some drastic changes myself if I wanted to feel strong and capable in my body and keep doing the things I loved—like surfing, playing in nature, and growing my garden.

At this point, I had been growing over 40 varieties of heirloom tomato plants. I had been so excited to see them fruit, and find out what it would be like to cook with them and how they would taste. Unfortunately, after a few weeks of chowing down on them, my chiropractor recommended that I take a break from eating plants from the nightshade family, as they can be inflammatory.

Author Evan Rilling. Photo by Natalie Karpushenko.

It was a total bummer to stop eating tomatoes after we’d come so far together, but by overindulging in them and then cutting them out of my diet, I actually became even closer to tomatoes. The experience taught me to listen to my body and find out how to develop a healthier relationship with the plant that worked for me. I can now eat tomatoes freely when it feels good for me to and know when to stop when I need to. I recommend this exact method to clients who really want to understand how food affects them. It’s true, I tell them, after you take some time away from an ingredient, try going all in if you truly want to understand how the food is affecting you. Even junk food: I dare you to eat a whole bag of Doritos and see how you feel! I bet you won’t be going back for seconds.

I am grateful to tomatoes for all of the gifts they’ve shared and the lessons they’ve taught me, and am honored to now share these teachings with you.

Here’s how anyone can connect to ingredients in a deeper way:

First, choose an ingredient that you feel called to and would like to build a stronger connection with.

Then place the ingredient in front of you. Look at it. What did you see?

Touch it. What did you feel?

Listen to it. What did you hear?

Smell it. How would you describe it?

Taste it. How would you describe the experience?

How have you worked in harmony with it?

How could you work in harmony with it?

These teachings will expand your abilities and awareness of what you eat.

Developing your own relationship with any plant or ingredient—whether you’re cooking, gardening, applying a wellness technique, or working with them for healing—can be powerful, not to mention fun.

But before you try this process, I invite you to take a moment, center yourself, and let yourself be open to the possibilities that may present themselves to you. Because by letting yourself truly connect and listen to a plant, you may find it has many lessons for you, just like the tomato has had for me.

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Russia and Ukraine control about 11.2 percent of the world’s arable land, and supply 28 percent of its exported wheat. A substantial portion the world’s most fertile wheatfields lie along the two nations’ borderlands south and east of Kiev, stretching to the Black Sea. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, most of those croplands have become battlefields.

It is unknown exactly how much productive capacity for wheat has been damaged since the war began, but the situation is dire. The Statistics Service of Ukraine estimates that roughly 40 percent of Ukraine’s cropland may not be planted this year, resulting in a 54 percent decrease from 2021 wheat production levels—an amount of lost wheat equivalent to that consumed by 151 million people in an average year. With U.S. wheat yields also expected to drop 15 percent this year because of drought, the world faces food shortages on a global scale. Much of humanity, including food insecure nations, relies on Ukrainian and Russian wheat. Without it, millions may go hungry—and wartime politics and international relations could suffer a destabilizing jolt.

Images of wheat are stamped on currencies and engraved upon temples. Our oldest stories equate wheat with salvation, and with life itself. And wheat is ubiquitous in conflict. Armies have often targeted wheat storage for capture and destruction. Control of wheat protects allies and coerces opponents. Modern history shows us wheat’s central role in large-scale human conflict and evinces the enormity of the global disaster unfolding in Ukraine.

During the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, increased efficiencies in transportation enabled countries to produce specialized goods and generate surpluses to facilitate trade, laying the foundation for our current global system. Between 1868 and 1902, as the internal combustion engine mechanized food harvesting and processing and powered faster trucks, ships and trains, the cost of wheat shipments dropped 75 percent. It became economically feasible to move wheat from the U.S. to Britain, or from Odessa to Britain. What had been a local commodity began to become part of an interconnected international system. This interconnectedness is further illustrated by the fact that most of the wheat grown in Kansas and throughout the Great Plains today shares a common genetic heritage with Russian and Ukrainian wheat. For example, the prolific Turkey Red varieties were first introduced to the U.S. in 1874 by immigrants from the Volga River region of Russia.

But while efficient transportation created more interconnections between different commodity markets and enabled international trade, it also created new vulnerabilities in economic warfare. Wheat was crucial in World War I and World War II. In both conflicts, combatants, struggling to feed their populations and starve their adversaries, sought control of rich agricultural areas in and around Ukraine. World War I revealed the fragility of nascent global supply chains for grain. In 1914, over 90 percent of the world’s wheat was exported from only seven countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, India, Romania, Russia, and the United States. Net wheat importers such as Britain proved vulnerable; for example, prices in the United Kingdom rose by about 60 percent during the war, leading to severe rationing and bread riots.

Wheat exports from Russia, Romania, and what is now Ukraine, were disrupted when Turkey entered the war at the beginning of November 1914 and closed the narrow Turkish straits. Meanwhile, drought reduced Australia’s and Canada’s wheat crops, and Argentina exported 10 percent less wheat than the previous year as well. India embargoed exports to reduce prices for its internal market. U.S. grain, reinforced by hardy Russian wheat strains, remained plentiful—but prices, buffeted by fluctuating growing conditions and wartime chaos, were unstable from 1915 through 1921.

Price variability and blockades caused human suffering and negatively affected war efforts. Historically, when nations are at war, their populations and their armies require higher calories—thus the old Napoleon-attributed aphorism: “an army marches on its stomach.” Even populations that were not directly involved in conflict were affected by price increases as food became scarce and unaffordable, which led to malnutrition and social upheaval.

World War II was marked by greater stability in wheat and other staple grain production, as nations implemented lessons of the earlier conflict by reinforcing supply lines and stockpiling what wheat they produced. But this was easier for the Allied powers—which included major wheat producers the United States, the Soviet Union, and Romania—than for smaller wheat-producing Axis powers. In particular, Germany and Japan shared a concern about producing enough food for their large urban populations. Thus, wheat became an objective and a weapon of war.

Sometime around 1940, German SS-Obergruppenführer leader Herbert Backe convinced Adolf Hitler to try to divert Ukrainian grain flows from Soviet cities to Germany in what was known as “The Hunger Plan,” to sustain the Third Reich and impose death by starvation on 30 million Soviets. By 1942, Germans consumed more than 7 million tons of Ukrainian grain and tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians starved.

Global wheat prices doubled from February 1941 through the end of the war. And by 1948, as Ukraine and Russia contended with failed crops and poor transport infrastructure, prices doubled again leading to malnutrition within Europe and other countries, experiences that drove many governments, including the Soviet Union, to prioritize national food production in the later part of the century.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, Russia pursued a policy of strategic self-sufficiency and surpluses large enough to support the global market for wheat and other critical staples like sunflower seed and oil, rapeseed, and corn. Despite economic sanctions, Russia is still poised to be the world’s top wheat exporter in 2022 and 2023.

Like earlier conflicts, today’s war in Ukraine has enormous potential to disrupt economies and lives not only within the region but beyond. The United Nations and World Food Programme is warning that food insecurity has worsened in the past year for 193 million people across more than 20 countries—of these, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen require urgent humanitarian interventions to avoid starvation and death.

Low-income countries are most affected by tightened wheat supply and price volatility since they will have to increase the proportion of income they expend on food. If governments subsidize food purchases, then precious resources will be diverted from other investments like healthcare, sanitation, and education.

Impacts from upended harvests and exports are staggered, and until detailed damage assessments of Ukrainian infrastructure can be performed, predicting the damage to wheat exports will be difficult. Logistical challenges could conceivably outlast the war. One reason for Ukrainian and Russian dominance over wheat exports is their farms’ proximity to the Black Sea and global shipping routes. But critical food transport systems are under attack. Ukraine’s Mariupol port has been destroyed, and other ports are occupied, or under blockade. With Russia closing off access to the Black Sea, Ukraine wheat exports may face bottlenecks on other transportation routes.

In anticipation of global wheat shortages, governments around the world are spurring their farmers to plant more acreage to replace missing Black Sea grains. In the United States and Australia farmers may plant more winter wheat than usual. Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s breadbasket, announced temporary export quotas on wheat grain and flour of 1 million metric tons and 300,000 metric tons, respectively. And India, the world’s second largest wheat producer after China, announced it will withhold its wheat exports this year, about 900,000 metric tons, to meet domestic food security demands. With wheat harvest scheduled to begin in July in Ukraine, the ability to effectively store that crop along with other crops harvested in September and October is critical. Without proper storage, wheat will spoil, further reducing food availability.

While questions abound, this is certain: Any war between Russia and Ukraine is a war over critical nutritional resources for humanity. Bread is life.

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