Food For Thought

From USA Today:
"Russians already hurt by Western food import ban"

Russians are already paying a price — literally — for the ban on food imports from Europe and the United States that Russia imposed last week to retaliate for American and European economic sanctions. Suppliers and consumers are facing shortages and price hikes on staples such as fish and fruit, as well as gourmet items such as Italian Parmesan and French Brie cheese. Suppliers have raised prices for some fish by 20-36%, one of Russia's biggest retailers, X5 Retail Group, complained to Russia's government, the Kommersant business daily reported on Wednesday. Suppliers reported shortages and higher prices for fruit, retailers braced for milk prices to go up, and some meat suppliers were engaging in price speculation, Kommersant reported. "I was at the market, you can already see there's no Polish apples, and prices for berries have (gone up)," said Vladlen Maksimov, head of the Inter-regional Union of Entrepreneurs, a Russian group that includes small businesses and retailers. The economic warfare began as an attempt by the United States and European Union to use sanctions to deter Russia from aiding ethnic Russian separatists fighting for autonomy in eastern Ukraine. Russia is one of the world's leading importers of food, and its ban on fruit, meat, poultry, fish and milk products is hurting European suppliers. (The U.S. exports much less food to Russia.) But the ban is also hurting Russians who have acquired a taste in recent years for imported European products. Although fears of empty shelves reminiscent of chronic food shortages during the Soviet era have not materialized, some hoarding has been reported in the media, such as people buying up all the cases of imported cheese they could get. Consumers found empty shelves at a number of discount stores on the outskirts of Moscow, where clerks said some customers were buying out of panic. Moscow authorities announced Wednesday that retailers would be required to provide lists of their current imported stock and when they expected to sell it, the pro-government Izvestia daily newspaper reported. It said police would raid stores found to be carrying banned goods that were not disclosed. Ian Zilberkweit, president of the Nash Xleb Bakery Group, which has a chain of cafes across Moscow and St. Petersburg, said the ban will force his business to look for other suppliers for his company's dairy and fruit products, though some, like Grana Padano and Brie cheeses, are irreplaceable. "We're going to have to switch in the next 10 days either to Russian or Belorussian dairy products," he said. "The taste is going to be a bit different." Russia's Central Bank warned last week that the sanctions are likely to increase an already rising inflation rate. Even so, Russia's government has pledged that prices will not go up as a result of the import ban, promising that the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service will check reports of suppliers raising prices. In the worst case, the government could resort to price controls, Kommersant reported. Russia's state-owned media have touted the import ban as a boon for local industry. They have claimed the ban will harm European businesses, forcing Europe to rethink the energy and financial sanctions it imposed on Russia last month over its aid to Ukrainian insurgency. So far, the public strongly supports the food ban. According to a poll released by the Levada Center last week, 82% of Russians supported some form of retaliatory sanctions, and 76% supported the ban on imported fruit. Local industry may not be able to take up the slack, however. "Russian producers have a number of problems," Vladlen Maksimov, the head of the Inter-regional Union of Entrepreneurs said. "One of them is lack of proper storage equipment. It's not that we can't produce the food, it's that we can't store it. Polish apples picked in August, stored adequately, are sold for 11 months. Our apples can't keep." Prominent nationalist commentators have ridiculed those complaining about the import ban as pampered middle-class consumers who have developed an elitist taste for foreign cheese and prosciutto. In response, some Russians say the ban interferes with their personal freedom, not their personal tastes. "It's not just about what we can and can't eat. I'd like to understand who exactly is going to benefit from this import ban," said Sonya Sokolova, who heads an online music site, "because it looks like this will be bad for everybody."

^ The ban has just started and is already affecting ordinary Russians. Some may not think it is a big deal to ban Western food, but considering Russia has never been able to sustain itself on the food that it grows within its territory there is a lot more at stake than just craving Polish kielbasa or French cheeses. You can't ban something like food and have no substitute for it. That leads more than empty shelves (which Russians are used to) but also empty stomachs and that's just wrong. It looks like the Putin popularity bubble will burst when people either can't afford the food prices or there's no food for them to buy at all. The 1917 Communist Revolution occurred mostly because people couldn't even get bread (a Russian staple.) I'm not saying that will happen this time, but history does seem to repeat itself especially when people are hungry. ^


http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/08/13/russia-western-food-import-ban-sanctions-kraine/13999577/