Agriculture
The China – Russia “Grain Entente” – what is at stake for Canada and its allies?
From the Macdonald Laurier Institute
By Serghey Sukhankin
Moscow – with China’s help, approval, and likely, guidance – intends to challenge the West by changing the rules of trade in foods critical to global buyers.
Throughout its entire history the Soviet Union faced one existential peril that was never solved until its collapse in 1991 – the prospect of food shortage and mass starvation. Its cumbersome, utterly ineffective, and artificially subsidized agricultural sector was a living testament to the erroneous nature of a planned command-administrative economic model.
The situation with food and staples became so dire that starting from 1963 the Soviet Bloc (the USSR, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia) started importing wheat from the United States, Canada, and Australia. This practice continued until the demise of the Soviet Empire. Everything changed after the collapse of the USSR and introduction of market-oriented reforms in Russia in the 1990s, along with the growth of commodity prices and Russia’s inclusion in the global economic architecture.
By 2000, Russia had already doubled the amount of grain it produced, making it one of the world’s top producers of this strategic commodity. By the late 2010s to early 2020s, Russia emerged as a one of the world’s largest exporters of grain and agricultural products.
However, Russia quickly realized that commodities – especially food along with hydrocarbons – could become a very useful tool of coercion in geopolitical confrontations with its rivals. This became abundantly clear after the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022, when both Russia’s top-tier politicians (such as Deputy Chairman of the Security Council and former President Dmitry Medvedev) and chief propagandists (such as Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT) claimed “hunger” to be Russia’s natural ally, and threaten to cut supplies of food staples to “unfriendly countries.”
At the same time, Russia tried to spark a confrontation between Ukraine and Poland, Hungary, Slovakia over commodities and staples supplies. Ironically, rather than hurting the West, Russia’s actions had a worse impact on so-called “friendly countries” – especially those in the Global South, where access to inexpensive and available foodstuffs is a matter of life and death.
Russia’s strategy of intimidation was also ineffective due to its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Its so-called “special military operation” was supposed to be quick and decisive. Two years later, the war has imposed massive pressure on the Russian budget, requiring a constant cash flow that mainly comes from exporting raw materials and commodities.
Forced to evolve its strategy, Russia seems to be abandoning its plan of threatening to starve its adversaries. Instead, Moscow – with China’s help, approval, and likely, guidance – intends to challenge the West by changing the rules of trade in foods critical to global buyers. This strategy is being implemented via pursuit of two interrelated initiatives: formation of a “Grain Entente” between Beijing and Moscow, and the use of the BRICS trading bloc (consisting of nine nations led by founding countries Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) as a critical vehicle of change.
The first major step in this direction was made in October 2023, when the Russian Food Export Trade LLC company and China Chengtong International Limited concluded the “grain deal of the century” – the largest contract of this type ever signed between the two countries – according to which the Russian side pledges to deliver 70 million tons of various types of grain (produced in the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East) over the next twelve years for US$26.5 billion. As a result, already in the first quarter of 2024, Russia broke a historical record by supplying China with large volumes of oats (.7 times more than the previous year) and buckwheat (3.3 more than the previous year) receiving a staggering US$127 million. Yet, mounting grain sales is only the tip of the iceberg. The most critical development is China’s gradual overtaking of Russia’s logistical infrastructure, which could pave the way for China’s growing control over Eurasian logistics and trade routes.
In September 2023, officials from Russia and China met at the 8th Eastern Economic Summit in Vladivostok, where officials from Russia and China agreed to create a logistical hub – the “Grain Terminal Nizhneleninskoye–Tongjiang” in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. The goal is to create the Russia’s first “land-based grain fleet.” Consisting of 22,000 containers transporting grain, it will be capable of moving up to 600,000 tons of grain with a maximum storage capacity of up to 8 million per year. The strategic significance of this move is clear. On one hand, it allows Russia to “safeguard” itself against sanctions pressure, which will likely make Russia’s behaviour in Europe (and elsewhere) even more aggressive and unpredictable. On the other hand, China – which will acquire de facto control over Russia’s grain – will see Beijing become the world’s largest grain hub, giving it enormous power to influence and set global food prices.
Russia’s next major move was to push for the creation of a BRICS grain exchange. Fully supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the proposed grain exchange would bring together some of the world’s biggest grain buyers and exporters, cumulatively accounting for more than 42 per cent of global grain production (at nearly 1.2 million ) and 40 per cent of global consumption. International observers and subject experts have already warned that Russia- and China- adverse exporters of grain and agricultural products such as the United States, Canada, and Australia “might face challenges in maintaining their market share and negotiating for favourable trade terms, while facing competition from cheaper Russian .” In effect, this may have “significant implications for global agricultural dynamics, ranging from geopolitical and geoeconomic realignments to increased competition in agricultural trade. For traditional exporters such as Australia and the US, it is a call to reassess their national policies and strategies to navigate the evolving landscape of international trade to maintain competitiveness.”
The emergence of the BRICS grain exchange – which will undoubtedly increase Russia’s (and most likely China’s) geoeconomic role – is only a part of a much bigger strategic challenge. If the BRICS grain exchange is successful, it will have a spillover effect on another critical product – the fertilizers required by both developed and developing nations. Russia already has a competitive advantage in fertilizer production, and post-2022, has tried to use its fertilizers as geopolitical tools pressuring international organizations (such as the United Nations) to lobby for the end of sanctions imposed on Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
– If the Russia-China grain alliance proliferates and BRICS becomes a major player in the global flow of grains and other foodstuffs, it could prompt even greater changes to the established world market. Analysis of Russian-language sources and publications indicates that the next step would be the creation of an alternative to the “West-dominated” financial architecture, and ultimately, the transformation of global trade.
Russia’s plans (undoubtedly supported by China) pose a very serious challenge to Canada, its allies, and other liberal democracies.
They will likely suffer economic losses of grain exports due to the cheapness of Russian grain, and that country’s current occupation of a large part of Ukraine’s most fertile black-earth areas. If unchecked, Russia could assume control of more than 30 percent of global grain supplies.
Currently, the Indo-Pacific region is Canada’s largest export destination, with agriculture and food exports totaling $9.4 billion in 2022. If China gains unfettered access to Russian grain, it could seriously undercut Canada’s trade.
Making matters worse for Canada, its relationship with New Delhi is arguably at an all-time low, making it challenging to pivot sales of its agricultural products toward India or other countries without significant economic losses.
Looking at the bigger picture, there are a host of other potential threats to the global foods market, from the ongoing war in Ukraine to droughts and adverse climate conditions in the US, Argentina, and Australia. Amid growing uncertainty and upheaval, it’s possible that the global foods market will be carved up and dominated by Russia and other undemocratic, aggressive nations. Given Russia’s strategic goal of weakening the European Union, and ultimately causing its disintegration, it will continue to use artificially created food shortages in Africa and the Greater Middle East as a geopolitical weapon against the EU. The Kremlin hopes to replicate the crisis that occurred in 2015, when hundreds of thousands (now, potentially millions) of illegal migrants and asylum seekers poured into the EU – wreaking havoc, fostering intra-EU conflict, and assisting the rise of far-right (and left) populists.
The first step in Russia’s grand strategy is the de facto establishment of the Russo-Chinese “Grain Entente.” The next move will be the creation of a BRICS grain exchange and inclusion of other strategic commodities under the umbrella of BRICS operations. This is clearly a wakeup call for the West. We need to heed it, or else risk more dire, far-reaching consequences.
Dr. Sergey Sukhankin is a Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation (Washington, DC) and a Fellow at the North American and Arctic Defence and Security Network (NAADSN). His project discussing the activities of Russian PMCs, “War by Other Means,” informed the United Nations General Assembly report entitled “Use of Mercenaries as a Means of Violating Human Rights and Impeding the Exercise of the Right of Peoples to Self-Determination.”
This article was published with support from Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Canada.
From the Brownstone Institute
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In my previous two articles, we covered the global war on farmers and the culprits behind this agenda. Today, we will dive into the tactics these organizations use to foist their dystopian vision on the rest of us.
Perhaps you remember Event 201, the pandemic simulation run in late 2019 that served as a dress rehearsal for the 2020 Covid response. Such simulations have been used in the War on Food as well. Take, for example, the Food Chain Reaction Game, a 2015 wargame that simulated the time period from 2020 to 2030. Cargill and the other participants have removed the Food Chain Reaction Game data from their websites, but Cargill’s version was archived by independent researchers, so you can still see it here.
In the simulation, the decade brought “two major food crises, with prices approaching 400 percent of the long term average; a raft of climate-related extreme weather events; governments toppling in Pakistan and Ukraine; and famine and refugee crises in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Chad and Sudan.” When the game ended, its organizers had imposed meat taxes in Europe, capped CO2 emissions, and instituted a global carbon tax. The time period of the Food Chain Reaction Game handily coincides with the 2020 Covid crisis and ends with the culmination of Agenda 2030. If you don’t think those dates are significant, you aren’t paying attention.
The parties behind this simulation include the World Wildlife Fund, the Center for American Progress, the Center for Naval Analyses, and Cargill. Note the participation of US military and intelligence-linked organizations in this simulation, much as they appeared throughout the Covid power grab. Cargill, as I mentioned before, is one of the most powerful members of the global Big Ag cartel and have excelled in crushing independent farmers globally to establish total control of the food supply. The Center For American Progress is a Soros and Podesta-affiliated think tank.
The World Wildlife Fund has a shady Malthusian history dating to its eugenicist founders like Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, co-founder of the Bilderberg Group; transhumanist Julian Huxley (brother of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley); and Britain’s Prince Philip, who said he wanted to be reincarnated “as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.”
Note that the measures these conspirators concocted – meat taxes and a global carbon tax – have nothing to do with increasing the food supply to end famine – much as Event 201’s participants obsessed about vaccines and controlling misinformation rather than providing effective early treatment for disease. To state the obvious, neither simulation is really about solving hunger or viral contagion. They are designed to game out how to ram an agenda down the throats of an unwilling populace.
Both exercises are classic examples of Hegelian Dialectic, the problem-reaction-solution strategy whereby a problem is created or used to stimulate public demand for a solution. The solution always involves pre-planned actions or legislation that never would have passed public approval before the problem was created. To quote Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. By that I mean, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
The goal of the Food Chain Reaction Game simulation and the global elites who share this vision is simple but devastating: the controlled demolition of the current food supply and supply chain network – not to end factory farming and replace it with regenerative, earth healing agriculture – but to replace it with a global, centralized, fully surveilled, and tightly controlled food system based on lab-created and industrially processed so-called foods, with little dietary choice and abysmal health outcomes for all but the elites, using climate change as the excuse for it all.
As Bertrand Russell predicted, diet will not be left to individuals, but will be such as the best biochemists recommend.
If you’re new to this topic, you may feel that statement is hyperbolic. It is hard to grasp that there are people planning something this far-reaching and diabolical – it’s as far-fetched as a network of global elites using a lab-escaped virus as an excuse to destroy the economies of the world and forcibly inject billions with experimental poisons. But it is reality, and as the quotes from Bertrand Russell and Monsanto’s CEO hint, this agenda has been in the works for decades.
In my next article, we will look at some of the publicly acknowledged projects that are in the pipeline for achieving this goal.
From the Brownstone Institute
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In every war, there is necessarily an enemy force, and the war on our food supply is no exception.
My previous article addressed the ongoing attacks on farmers across the globe. In today’s article, we will look at some of the culprits behind this agenda. For anyone who delved into the entities behind the tyrannical Covid policies, many names on the list below will seem quite familiar.
Bayer/Monsanto
Bayer merged with Monsanto in 2018, combining the companies responsible for Agent Orange and pioneering chemical warfare. In 1999, Monsanto’s CEO Robert Shapiro bragged that the company planned to control “three of the largest industries in the world—agriculture, food, and health—that now operate as separate businesses. But there are a set of changes that will lead to their integration.” Today these chemical manufacturers control a huge percentage of the world’s food supply.
Cargill and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)
Cargill is a World Economic Forum partner and the largest private company in the United States. This behemoth monopolizes unimaginably vast swaths of the global food industry, including meat processing in the United States. Cargill’s business practices, along with bigger-is-better policies enforced by their cronies at the United States Department of Agriculture, have led to the closures of many local abattoirs which forced farmers to depend on a few corporate mega-slaughterhouses. This leaves farmers waiting 14 months or longer for butchering slots, for which they often must transport their animals hundreds of miles—indeed, farmers and ranchers must book processing dates up to a year before the animal is even born. The high fees charged by Cargill’s slaughterhouses contribute to the skyrocketing price of meat—all while the farmers themselves are barely paid enough to cover the cost of raising the livestock. The USDA, meanwhile, makes sure their policies prevent farmers from processing meat themselves on their own farms.
Wellcome Trust
The Wellcome Trust, the former owner of Glaxo before it merged with SmithKline, played a major role in Britain’s Covid debacle and is unapologetic about its goal of reducing your food sovereignty. Wellcome Trust funds Livestock, Environment and People (LEAP), an organization dedicated to developing and testing behavioral modifications to coerce the public into removing meat and dairy from their diets. LEAP’s co-director Susan Jeffs bemoans that motivating people with environmental impact labels on their foods does not seem to work: “People are already settled into very established habits” and suggests instead altering what the industry provides, thereby forcing consumer choice. Wellcome Trust researchers recommend “availability interventions” that “rely less on individual agency” to reduce access to animal food products. Researcher Rachel Pechey opines that “meat taxes show a promising evidence for effectiveness but have been less acceptable in survey work…we don’t want to just go for the most acceptable [solutions].”
The World Health Organization
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s Director-General, would like you to believe that food production is responsible for almost one-third of the global burden of disease. He calls for transforming the global food system toward plant-based foods, reducing meat and dairy in our intake, and enforcing policies to save the climate through restricting diet. A WHO 2022 report concluded that “considerable evidence supports shifting populations towards healthful plant-based diets that reduce or eliminate intake of animal products.”
World Economic Forum
You are likely familiar with the World Economic Forum and their Great Reset agenda. Visit their webpage and treat yourself to such morsels as 5 reasons why eating insects could reduce climate change, why we need to give insects the role they deserve in our food systems, and why we might be eating insects soon. Suffice it to say that their plans for your dietary future are clear.
EAT Forum, the Lancet, and their Big Tech and Big Chemical Partners
The EAT Forum is “dedicated to transforming our global food system through sound science, impatient disruption and novel partnerships.” It was co-founded by the aforementioned Wellcome Trust, the Strawberry Foundation, and the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Their FRESH initiative—Food Reform for Sustainability and Health—aims to transform the global food system. Partners in the FRESH initiative include Google, Cargill, Syngenta, Unilever, Pepsico, and many chemical processors such as BASF, Bayer, and DuPont—a rather odd cast of characters for developing a healthy and sustainable dietary plan. EAT’s Shifting Urban Diets Initiative advocates for cities to adopt the Lancet-endorsed Planetary Health Diet, in which plant-based proteins are set to replace meat and dairy. Red meat is limited to 30 calories per day. A report drafted by EAT found that the transformation they want to foist upon our diets is “unlikely to be successful if left up to the individual,” and “require(s) reframing at the systemic level with hard policy interventions that include laws, fiscal measures, subsidies and penalties, trade reconfiguration and other economic and structural measures.”
The Rockefeller Foundation
Members of the Rockefeller family may carry more blame than anyone else in history for turning agriculture away from independent family farms towards corporate conglomerates.
In 1947, Nelson Rockefeller founded the International Basic Economy Corporation to modernize and corporatize agriculture in South America, particularly in Brazil and Venezuela. IBEC transformed farming to depend on expensive machinery and inputs that priced subsistence peasant farmers out of viability. The American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA), a Rockefeller-funded philanthropic organization, helped build the market through which IBEC could enrich its owners. While IBEC’s promotional literature claimed that the company was generously assisting the Third World by providing necessary consumer products while turning a profit, on closer examination, it was simply a business enterprise built on the Rockefellers’ old Standard Oil model, in which smaller competitors are forced out using monopolistic practices before prices are raised.
This tactic was taken to a whole new level with the so-called Green Revolution, first in Mexico in the 1940s, then in the Philippines and India in the 1960s, as well as in the United States. Traditional farming practices such as the use of manure as fertilizer for heirloom native crops were replaced with a model of mechanized chemical farming, using Rockefeller-funded new seed varieties which had been developed to require petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce significantly increased crop yields compared to the traditional crops grown by peasant farmers in these countries.
It is worth noting that the Rockefellers, as oil oligarchs, stood to profit handsomely from the petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides that this new method demanded. The crops grown were almost all cereal crops like rice and replaced more nutrient-dense, traditional crops like millet. India experienced an increase in food but a decrease in nutrition: with more empty calories but fewer fruits, vegetables, and animal proteins, micronutrients disappeared from the diet. Anemia, blindness, fertility problems, low birth weight, and immune impairment increased.
While the Green Revolution was hailed as the solution to world hunger and poverty, it also poisoned local water supplies, depleted the soil, and left farmers drowning in debt as they could no longer independently produce the fertilizer and seeds they needed. Informed readers can see how the later Monsanto GMO Roundup-Ready seed model followed this playbook established by the Rockefellers.
In 2006, the Rockefeller Foundation, Bill Gates, and others pushed the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA, and they again followed this proven playbook. Since AGRA’s launch, African biodiversity has been lost, and the number of severely undernourished people in sub-Saharan Africa has increased by nearly 50 percent, even by the UN’s own reports. Just as in India, farmers are being tricked into abandoning nutrient-dense, drought-resistant crops like heirloom millet in exchange for the empty calories of GMO corn. Hundreds of African organizations have demanded that this neocolonial project end, leaving the future of African agriculture in the hands of the native farmers who know the land best.
Now the Rockefeller Foundation has set its sights on the US food system with its Reset the Table agenda, handily launched in 2020 just weeks after the Great Reset was announced. Under rosy language calling for inclusivity and equity, the report states that “success will require numerous changes to policies, practices, and norms.” This includes a major focus on data collection and objectives that align closely with the One Health Agenda—more on that in a future article.
Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation
Bill Gates has followed the Rockefeller playbook for fumigating his fortune and transforming his image—while building more wealth—through the cynical ploy of philanthrocapitalism.
His fingers are deep in every public health pie, and his influence is nearly equal in the food wars. Besides financing the development of fake meats, he is behind the aforementioned AGRA program, is investing in geoengineering programs to dim the sun, and as of January 2021, owned 242,000 acres of prime US farmland, making him the largest private owner of farmland in the US. It is disconcerting to think that a man who believes we should phase out real meat controls so much of the method of production.
USAID and BIFAD
Another organization pushing you to eat bugs is USAID. This may surprise some of you who think of USAID as an organization dedicated to helping third-world countries, rather than as a longtime Trojan horse for CIA operations. (Skeptical of that claim? Go down the rabbit hole here and here and here and here.) Their Board for International Food and Agricultural Development, known as BIFAD, released a report titled “Systemic Solutions for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation.” This report calls for a complete transformation of the food supply and global agriculture. They propose to do this through ESG scores, carbon tracking, and eating insects.
So how do these organizations manage to push their agenda on the global population? We will cover that in a future article.
