MINSK, 11 May (BelTA) - The sanctions against Belarus have affected the food security of the European Union, Deputy Permanent Representative of Belarus to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Kirill Petrovsky said at the 33rd session of the FAO regional conference for Europe, BelTA reports.
The situation in Ukraine and its consequences for world food security and agriculture, including world food prices, were on the agenda of the session.
Kirill Petrovsky believes that the politicization of the issue does not allow making objective assessments and finding the right solutions. Belarus has already drawn the attention of the FAO Council to this issue.
"We can discuss the impact of the Ukraine crisis on food security in the world as much as we like, but if we focus solely on this crisis, the conclusions will be obviously incomplete, flawed. We need to admit honestly that people in the world are starving because of a complex of reasons," the Belarusian diplomat said.
He noted that these reasons are regularly voiced by the FAO Secretariat: the conflicts (Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine and others); unilateral sanctions and restrictions on the movement of fertilizers, food, farm machines; climate change, the fight against which is being gradually turned by individual countries and their unions into an instrument of economic confrontation, and the pandemic as the related restrictions have not yet been lifted everywhere.
"We see that our discussion is bearing fruit. The EU has excluded food from the fifth package of sanctions. Representatives of the European Union have finally admitted that the prices for fertilizers rose long before the conflict in Ukraine. I hope that we will not be hearing any more statements that the sanctions do not affect food security. But none of that is enough. We're wasting time. An honest and frank dialogue on the entire range of issues is needed," Kirill Petrovsky emphasized.
