There’s a version of the Russia story that everyone understands. Oil. Gas. The energy weapon. The pipeline politics. It’s the version that gets written about because it’s visible; you can see it in the petrol price and in the gas bills of European households.
But there’s a quieter instrument that Russia has been building for years, and it’s one that the current focus on the Iran war and oil prices is completely obscuring. Food. Specifically, wheat and fertiliser. Right now, as shipping lanes choke and supply chains fracture globally, that instrument is becoming more powerful than it has ever been.
Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter, controlling close to 25% of the global grain trade. That alone is a significant number. But the geographic concentration of where that wheat goes is what gives it geopolitical teeth. Russia’s share of Africa’s total wheat imports has grown from 13% to 32% over the past two decades. In North Africa specifically, Russian wheat now accounts for around 42% of total imports, nearly 70% of Egypt’s wheat market alone, which is the most populous country in the Arab world.
It doesn’t stop at wheat. Russian company PhosAgro, one of the world’s largest phosphate fertiliser producers now supplies 21 African countries, with South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Morocco, and Mozambique among its top five African importers. Fertiliser is upstream of everything. You can import wheat this year if your own harvest fails. But if you can’t afford fertiliser, your harvest fails next year too. Russia understands this. It has positioned itself at both ends of the food security equation.
The diplomatic dimension of this is already playing out in plain sight, though rarely analysed for what it actually is. In early 2025, Russia completed delivery of 200,000 metric tonnes of free grain to six African countries: Somalia, the Central African Republic, Mali, Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, and Eritrea. The timing wasn’t accidental. Those grain shipments coincided directly with Russia’s expanded security presence across the Sahel, where Russian troops arrived as part of the Africa Corps. Wheat bags printed with Russian and Burkinabe flags. Security partnerships. Mineral concessions. This is a package deal, and Africa is being asked to sign it one shipment at a time.
The political consequences are measurable: African countries that depend heavily on Russian grain imports have consistently tended to abstain or vote against UN General Assembly resolutions condemning Russia’s war in Ukraine. That’s not a coincidence. That’s leverage working exactly as intended.
Now consider the current moment. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Global supply chains are fracturing. The Houthis have resumed Red Sea attacks, forcing cargo to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope. In this environment, any further disruption to global food supply is not a future risk, it’s an immediate one. Wheat prices are sensitive to shipping disruption. Fertiliser prices are sensitive to energy costs, and energy costs are spiking. The countries most exposed are exactly the ones Russia has been cultivating for three years.
Putin has also signalled support for a BRICS grain exchange, a rival to the current Western-dominated grain pricing system. If that materialises, Russia wouldn’t just be supplying grain to Africa and the Global South. It would be setting the price.
Here’s where I think this gets underappreciated. Oil leverage is visible, transactional, and relatively substitutable over time. Countries can develop renewables, diversify suppliers, build strategic reserves. Food leverage is different. You can’t solar-panel your way out of a wheat dependency. You can’t sanction your way around a fertiliser shortage when your planting season starts in six weeks. Food insecurity operates on a timeline that is unforgiving in a way that energy insecurity simply isn’t.
Analysts have started warning that Moscow’s food diplomacy risks converting African nations from trade partners into client states dependent not just for this harvest but for the agricultural inputs that determine every harvest after it. That’s a structural dependency of a different order to buying oil.
Russia has spent three years building this position while the world focused on pipelines and price caps. The Iran war has pulled attention even further away. But food is the instrument that will still be working long after the bombs stop falling, because hunger doesn’t care about ceasefires, and dependency doesn’t end when the shooting does.
Written by:
*Dr Iqbal Survé
Past chairman of the BRICS Business Council and co-chairman of the BRICS Media Forum and the BRNN
*Chloe Maluleke
Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group
Russia & Middle East Specialist
**The Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.
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