A cruel, hot summer

Like the wise farmer who knows disaster can and does strike, no matter how carefully he cultivates his harvest, policy makers at the Kremlin must be shaking their heads at how badly their well-laid plans have gone arwy. Moscow had sown all the seeds a country should need to achieve a greater share of the global grain export market in recent years, having overhauled its agricultural industry and boosted sector investment. The result had been a near doubling of wheat exports between 2005 and 2009, from 10 million to 18 million tons, with Russia’s biggest export markets including Egypt, Turkey, Syria and Iran. This amounted to Russia last year cornering 14 percent of global market share — a number that is precipitously set to plummet in 2010 from the disastrous interventions of Mother Nature and rising temperatures. The wildfires raging across Russia this summer have destroyed as much as 25