![ABOUT THE FOOD SECURITY STRATEGY AND WHY IT MATTERS]()
In Ukraine, the Russian Federation has destroyed most of the largest food warehouses belonging to major retailers such as ATB, Fozzy, Novus, Tavria and Varus – through which the vast majority of food products are sold – with powerful missile and drone strikes.
These strikes immediately affected the shelves of hypermarkets and caused anxiety amongst residents of Ukrainian cities. Consequently, the issue of food security is taking on new significance.
Ukraine has a Food Security Strategy in place, but in our view it is currently too general, lacks specificity and fails to answer the question of whether there will be enough food should the war and Russian attacks continue.
We will therefore attempt to outline how such a strategy should be approached and what its essential components must be.
Firstly, we need to define for ourselves what we mean by the term ‘food security’. Let us try to formulate this.
Food security is the guarantee that all citizens have sustained physical, social and economic access to sufficient quantities of safe, high-quality and nutritious food that meets their physiological needs, regardless of external threats or internal upheavals.
If we now break down each component of the definition of ‘food security’, we will see that, for this security to be ensured, it is necessary to have not only a sufficient physical quantity of food, but also other important components: accessibility and sustainability.
• Availability of physical food supplies: The consistent and uninterrupted availability of sufficient food supplies through domestic production and diversified imports.
• Economic and physical accessibility for people: The ability of all sections of the population to purchase high-quality food at a fair price, regardless of where they live.
• Safety and quality: Food products are safe for consumption and provide sufficient calories.
• Resilience and sustainability: The ability of the agricultural and food sectors to withstand unexpected shocks (pandemics, wars, climate change) and to provide people with food in difficult circumstances.
Secondly: If we have agreed on this definition of the term ‘food security’, then each component of food security can now be broken down into smaller parts:
Availability of physical quantities of food:
1. Ukraine must produce foodstuffs sufficient to provide a complete and balanced diet across all food groups, amounting to at least 90 per cent of the recommended intake levels.
2. Food imports of those product groups that are not grown or produced in Ukraine are sourced from various countries and involve different supply chain logistics.
Economic and physical accessibility for people:
1. There must be a sufficient number of organisations supplying or selling food products, distributed fairly evenly across Ukraine in proportion to the population;
2. Products must be available in different price categories so that different social groups have access to food; there must be a way to ensure that people in the SJO are provided with food;
Safety and quality:
1. All products, regardless of price category, must be safe for consumption;
2. All products sold to the public must meet quality standards;
3. The method of storing and selling products must protect them from spoilage;
Resilience and sustainability:
1. The production of different types of products must be diversified and spread across different regions and producers;
2. Product storage facilities and transport routes must be equipped with systems to protect against power cuts, and their layout must ensure complementarity and redundancy.
3. Retail chains should include outlets of varying sizes and product ranges.
4. Micro-producers and small businesses must have the opportunity to sell their goods directly.
Thirdly: The next stage will involve working out the steps needed to turn ideas into reality.
1. Availability of physical product volumes
1.1Digitalised monitoring and balancing of domestic production (at least 90 per cent of targets):
• The introduction of a National Digital Platform (agricultural cadastre and real-time food balance), which collects data from the State Statistics Service, customs authorities and agricultural producers to automatically forecast shortages by product group in different regions.
• Targeted state support (grants of up to 50 per cent of the cost) for the construction of small-scale processing plants, vegetable storage facilities and greenhouses in safe regions, with a view to meeting 90 per cent of requirements across key food groups.
1.2 Encouraging the cultivation of produce by households and communal institutions:
• Launch of the state programme ‘Seed and Resource Pack for Households’ (free or subsidised provision of seeds, seedlings, micro-fertilisers and drip irrigation systems to rural and smallholdings).
• Reorienting the subsidiary farms of municipal enterprises (medical facilities, residential care homes, vocational colleges) towards growing vegetables and herbs for their own needs and those of local communities (installation of modular greenhouses).
1.3 Development of urban gardening and urban farming:
• Development of municipal programmes to allocate land for urban gardens, community gardens and allotment cooperatives to ensure that city dwellers are self-sufficient in essential foodstuffs .
• Support for vertical farms and hydroponics based in derelict industrial buildings and warehouses.
1.4Diversified imports through the digitalisation of logistics:
• The creation of a single digital customs queue, the ‘Green Food Corridor’, for the priority duty-free import of critical categories of goods (meat, fish, certain types of cereals and vegetable oils)
2. Economic and physical accessibility for people
2.1 Digital decentralisation and support for direct supply chains:
• Establishment of a national ‘Farm-to-Shelf’ direct sales marketplace, connecting micro-producers, farmers and urban residents’ associations/markets without intermediaries, with integrated logistics provided by ‘Ukrposhta’ or private courier services.
• Regulatory simplification (deregulation) for small business owners and households regarding the legal sale of surplus produce at local markets and weekend fairs.
2.2 A balanced distribution network instead of the demolished giant warehouses:
• a public-private partnership to create a network of small, decentralised distribution centres with a capacity of 500–1,000 square metres in every neighbourhood of major cities.
2.3 Targeted digital tools for vulnerable groups (SJO):
• The use of a digital ecosystem (based on ‘Diia’ or social media platforms) for targeted funding of food (digital food vouchers) for citizens in difficult life circumstances, linked to local producers.
3. Safety and quality
3.1 Digital traceability of food products:
• Integration of barcode/QR code systems with state food safety registers to enable instant tracing of product origin (from field to shelf), even amongst small-scale producers.
3.2 Safety of local and small-scale production:
• Streamlined digital protocols and mobile laboratories operated by the State Service of Ukraine for Food Safety and Consumer Protection to enable rapid safety testing of products from small businesses and markets.
3.3 Autonomous storage infrastructure:
• Subsidising the transition of warehouses, markets and small shops to hybrid energy systems (solar panels + inverters + batteries), ensuring an uninterrupted temperature regime (cold chain) during power cuts.
4. Resilience and sustainability
4.1 A distributed network of micro- and small-scale producers:
• Legislative provisions establishing quotas for retail chains regarding the sale of products from local and small-scale producers (at least 15–20 per cent of shelf space), thereby breaking the monopoly of large agricultural holdings and logistics giants.
4.2 Logistics redundancy and backup:
• The Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food should establish strategic long-term storage reserves (grain, tinned goods, oil, sugar, etc.) in decentralised underground storage facilities across the country, with stock rotation via retail chains.
4.3 A network of ‘Resilient Community Markets’:
• The establishment in every district of cities of self-contained trading areas (with their own generators, water supply and shelters), where small businesses and households will be able to trade directly in the event of the destruction of permanent supermarkets.
Note: these proposals are set out solely to illustrate the approaches that should be adopted when drafting a document as important to the people of Ukraine as the updated Food Security Strategy.
Unfortunately, the war has shown that efficiency and resilience are not one and the same. Efficient large supermarkets and warehouses excel in terms of efficiency but fall short in terms of resilience. A balance between efficiency and resilience is therefore needed; in wartime, resilience becomes more important.
This material has been prepared as part of the project ‘Organisational and IT-oriented models for the development of local food markets to ensure food security in the Baltic Sea region and Ukraine’.
The SFSC4FoodSec project is a transnational initiative led by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) with financial support from the Swedish Institute. The project is being implemented in partnership with SLU (Sweden), IsoTech(Poland), the Institute for Civil Society (Ukraine), the Latvian Rural Forum (Latvia) and Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania).
