Return of a beacon | Mint

On a day that North Korea shot off a fusillade of missiles and pushed up tensions in the East, we got good news from Europe. On Wednesday, Russia said it would again honour a United Nations-brokered deal forged in July to let exports of foodgrain leave Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea unharried. According to the country’s state media agency Tass, Moscow was satisfied with an assurance that Ukraine would not use humanitarian trade corridors for military attacks on its forces. This change of stance should relieve global agri-commodity markets, especially for wheat, for which some 40 countries depend heavily on the two combatants. The original pact was struck after the UN warned that about 50 million people had been put at starvation risk by a food crunch caused by the Ukraine war. The multilateral body’s secretary-general Antonio Guterres called it a “beacon in the Black Sea”. But Russia recently withdrew from the safe-passage deal in response to a strike on its naval fleet in Crimea that the Kremlin blamed on Kyiv-run drones. This brought back the spectre of global food shortages and collateral harm done to neutral countries. Eritrea and Somalia were among the worst affected, with several other African nations left struggling to secure wheat supplies. Now that shipments seem set to resume from such ports as Odessa, we should be thankful that good sense has prevailed on food adequacy. That still leaves the world a worse place than it was before hostilities broke out and a geopolitical schism of the Cold War era returned to haunt us.