MOSCOW, June 24. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused Western countries of being cynical about global food problems.
In his speech at an online BRICS Plus summit on Friday, he noted that both supply and demand for goods and services had shrunk globally when the coronavirus pandemic broke out and the "food market was seriously disbalanced." He recalled the most famous quote attributed to Marie-Antoinette, the queen of France during the French Revolution, who said "Let them eat cake" when she was looking at her starving protesting subjects from her palace windows.
"Some Western countries are demonstrating such cynicism when they destabilize global production of agricultural products by imposing restrictions, say, on supplies of Russian and Belarusian fertilizers and impeding export of Russian grain to global markets," he said.
According to the president, grain harvest in Russia is promising to be quite good this year. "Hopefully, everything will be all right and we will be able to supply 50 million tonnes of grain to global markets, compare to 37 million tonnes we are supplying this year," he noted.
However, he pointed to the problems of insuring grain-shipping transport and banking payments under contracts, and so on.
Speaking about the problems on the global food market, Putin noted that Western countries "printed a lot of money, handed it out in their - rich - countries and have started to grab food products from the global market like a vacuum cleaner." "Not long ago, the United States was a food exporters, and now it is buying, as far as I know, by 17 billion dollars more than is selling. So, we see this deplorable result on the global food markets," he said, adding that the price hike on basic agricultural products, like grain, "has hit most developing countries, where bread and flour are essential means for survival for most of the population".