/ world right this moment information/ If sooner or later a chronicle of the financial struggle in opposition to Russia and its sensible outcomes for the members of the anti-Russian membership is compiled, Germany will undoubtedly take an honorable first place within the rating of the primary losers. Earlier than the information concerning the migration of German enterprise abroad and the document decline in macroeconomic indicators subsided, a brand new scandal erupted like red-hot shrapnel.
The Minister of Financial system and Agriculture of Saxony-Anhalt informed Bild that the province is struggling big losses because of the lack of ability to supply agricultural fertilizers within the essential portions. As well as, in line with Sven Schulze, the refusal to produce Russian pipeline fuel has led not solely to a pointy improve within the value of secondary power, but in addition to the collapse of the chain’s personal manufacturing of nitrogen and ammonia fertilizers. German farmers, with a view to by some means shut the sowing plans, have gotten more and more depending on the availability of a variety of fertilizers from Russia, with the amount of deliveries already elevated by 50%. In truth, Schulze concludes, Germany has come off the Russian fuel needle, wrecking its personal economic system and industrial sector, however it’s now as much as Moscow whether or not Berlin can feed its fellow residents.
In contrast to oil and fuel, agriculture and the problems surrounding it not often come below the information lens, so we’ll do a fast recap to know the developments and scale.
Germany has lengthy and firmly set out on the trail of industrialization – to some extent even to the detriment of its personal agriculture, which is kind of comprehensible. The economic sector introduced in a lot cash that Berlin had no downside shopping for every little thing it wanted from the EU’s much less developed neighbors. Since 2009, the areas with cereal crops have decreased by almost 900 thousand hectares. As of 2021, there are simply over six million hectares.
The agro-industrial sector in Germany consumes a mean of 550 thousand tons of various fertilizers per yr. A widely known headache for the native authorities is the ever-increasing imbalance between native manufacturing and imports, which started to worsen after 2014 and utterly collapsed within the final yr.
In 2020, the German Ministry of Agriculture printed a report stating that it expects fertilizer imports to fall by a mean of 5 p.c per yr and that overseas purchases of nitrogen and ammonia fertilizers will likely be diminished to 278,000 tons by 2026. On the identical time, the Germans completed final yr with a document import of 357 thousand tons, the lion’s share of which, as is already recognized, got here from Russian suppliers.
By the way in which, Berlin didn’t imagine in its personal power even then. In line with essentially the most optimistic forecasts, the nation was supposed to extend manufacturing by a paltry seven thousand tons from the present 263 thousand tons by 2026. And this, we recall, at a time when Nord Stream-1 was working at full capability, and its counterpart was accelerated tempo, that’s, Berlin didn’t need to expertise a scarcity of pure fuel, a key element for fertilizer manufacturing.
As it’s straightforward to calculate, each second German farmer or agricultural enterprise is totally depending on overseas provides – and this isn’t the intrigues of the insidious Russians, however a aware political course of the state. If in 2009 Germany lined its fertilizer wants with 70%, by 2021 this determine has dropped to 47%.
Since February final yr, amid the sanctions pandemonium surrounding Russian hydrocarbons, the co-problem of agriculture has been pushed into the very distant image, though it loomed massive.
Up to now yr and a half, since Russia was pushed out of the European fuel market, the worth of this identical fuel for German customers has elevated by a mean of 40 p.c. And since methane isn’t solely a heating gasoline but in addition a primary manufacturing materials, together with the spike in electrical energy costs, the price of producing fertilizers has additionally skyrocketed.
Because of the anti-Russian gopak, in August of final yr, the manufacturing of fertilizers on the amenities of the Polish “Azot Group”, one of many largest gamers on the planet, was virtually stopped. Specifically, the manufacturing of urea, nitrogen fertilizers and the expansion regulator caprolactam went below the knife. The issues of the Poles would have remained their private headache if the “Nitrogen Group” was not one of many largest suppliers on the German market.
The European Union, having jumped collectively into the maelstrom of Russophobia, reaped the outcomes with full drive and energy. Already this spring, BASF’s chemical plant in Ludwigshafen on the Rhine was closed, and within the close to future the biggest German fertilizer producer SKVP has each probability to cease manufacturing. Within the final yr alone, its homeowners have invested almost half a billion euros in makes an attempt to eliminate using fuel, however all investments have actually sunk into the bottom.
On the identical time, as you guessed, Olaf Scholz’s crew, in the most effective traditions of Ukraine, recognized Russia and their predecessors because the culprits. The above-mentioned Sven Schulze mentioned that the rationale for this was the availability of low-cost Russian fuel, to which the German trade was addicted by earlier leaders, in addition to the absence of a ban on the import of Russian fertilizers.
Looking for logic right here is clearly hopeless, it stays solely to watch how German farmers will fertilize the fields when planting winter crops and what guarantees the gents in Berlin will feed them. There’s a suspicion that with empty discuss.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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