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Abstract
The war in Ukraine, which started in February 2022, has disrupted the important Black Sea grain trade. At the same time, and partly as a consequence of the war and of Western sanctions, both energy and fertilizer prices have soared. Many commentators have attributed rises in food prices on world marketsto the Ukraine conflict. The paper reports an analysis of the impact of the war on wheat and corn prices in the world market. The estimates are obtained from an empirical implementation of the competitive storage model. The model links the prices of hard wheat and corn to grain availability, grain stocks and crude oil and fertilizer prices taking into account the Black Sea Grains Initiative (BSGI). Three counterfactuals are analyzed – “no war”, “no BSGI” and “no sanctions”.