Inside the UN's high-stakes deal to open Ukraine's grain corridor

On March 22, just weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, Richard Wilcox, a former World Food Programme official, attended a conference in Nairobi, Kenya. There he met with a senior Kenyan diplomat conveying alarming news: Russia’s Black Sea blockade was driving food prices up in the city. A boatload of tea bound for Russia was stuck in the port at Mombasa.

Wilcox, who had once served as a senior official in the African Union, was well aware of Africa’s dependence on Russian and Ukrainian wheat, fertilizers, and other grains. If action wasn’t taken soon, he reasoned, low-income countries in Africa and beyond could be buffeted by an unprecedented wave of food inflation, hunger, and potentially starvation, threatening the stability of governments.

Before departing Nairobi, Wilcox, an adviser to a Geneva-based mediation outfit called the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, or HD, crafted a memo outlining a way to ease the grain crisis from his hotel room. His proposal — which was shared nearly a week later with top United Nations officials in New York and key Western governments — constituted a key basis of the landmark U.N.-brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative, which restored millions of tons of grain to the world market.

“Irrespective of the course of the war, active mediation diplomacy could align actors’ interests,” Wilcox wrote in the confidential “Concept Note” obtained by Devex. “Ukraine would benefit from export revenues. … Russia could protect its interests with key countries in Africa and the Middle East and mitigate perceptions of its global role. Russian wheat exports, being avoided by traders even if not directly under sanctions, could also be included in the deal.”

He proposed the establishment of a protected shipping lane — “blue corridors” — that would allow commercial vessels to transport millions of tons of grains through a watery maze of defensive Ukrainian sea mines. But in addition, it proposed that in exchange for suspending the blockade, Russia would gain assurances that it could export its wheat and fertilizer without hindrance by Western powers.

So although the U.N.’s various institutions were already working on a wider effort to address the food crisis — including an International Maritime Organization proposal for a Black Sea grain corridor — there was no practical diplomatic plan to address the looming crisis that would satisfy the interests of both Ukraine and Russia, two of the world's largest suppliers of wheat, fertilizer, and other essential foods.

Devex’s account of how the diplomatic deal evolved is based on interviews with multiple officials intimately familiar with the process, as well as internal documents and chronologies of the negotiations that led to an arrangement that took some of the sting out of the global food crisis.

It constitutes a potent case study in high-stakes agricultural diplomacy. It’s also an extraordinary example of how a private nonprofit could help devise, sell, and implement one of the most significant diplomatic initiatives to emerge during the over six-monthlong war.

Feeling the burn

Wilcox’s work took place against a backdrop of increasing international anxiety over the prospect of global food shortages.

In early March, in Rzeszów, Poland, David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Programme, which usually purchased more than half of its wheat from Ukraine before the conflict, warned of a “contagion” of hunger that threatened to spread across the globe. “As the war heats up, dozens of distant countries are set to feel the burn,” he wrote in a March 8 Washington Post editorial. 

After writing his note, Wilcox, and other colleagues at HD, began discreetly shopping their plan to officials in the Ukrainian and Russian governments, and urging key figures from the Middle East and Africa, including Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director-general of the World Trade Organization, to mobilize regional support for it. The British government, which was briefed on the proposal, expressed interest in raising the idea at the Group of Seven leading industrial nations’ meeting of foreign ministers, according to a diplomat familiar with the matter. They even reached out to the United States, which was initially skeptical but supportive of the initiative, and China to secure its backing.  

David Harland, a former New Zealand diplomat and ex-U.N. official who serves as HD’s executive director, is a member of the U.N. secretary-general’s High-Level Advisory Board on Mediation, providing him with access to the top U.N. brass.

Harland brought Wilcox’s plan to the attention of senior U.N. officials in New York, including Volker Türk, then a senior adviser to the U.N. secretary-general; David Nabarro, a veteran U.N. troubleshooter overseeing Guterres’ response to the food crisis; and Amina Mohammed, the U.N. deputy secretary-general. The proposal ultimately found its way to the desk of Secretary-General António Guterres.

Stéphane Dujarric, the U.N.’s top spokesperson, said that a number of sources from within and outside the U.N. system fed into the world body’s planning.

“Given the tremendous volume of Ukrainian grain exported through the Black Sea, its removal from the global marketplace was quickly understood to have [a] potentially catastrophic impact on global food security,” Dujarric told Devex by email. “Plans on how to avoid such a situation were under discussion at the U.N. since early March.”

“The Secretary-General, with his team across the U.N. system, worked on a proposal,” he added. “He brought together senior officials from around the U.N. system, as well as the private sector and civil society, to use their expertise in fields from humanitarian work to development to shipping to start political negotiations with the parties concerned [on] how to address the impending crisis, which included facilitating trade in Russian goods and fertilizer.”

“After three months of negotiations and visits to Moscow, Kyiv and Ankara, the Black Sea Grain Initiative was finalized in Istanbul.”

Guterres touted the deal at the opening address to the U.N. General Assembly last Tuesday.

“The Black Sea Initiative has opened the pathway for the safe navigation of dozens of ships filled with much needed food supplies,” Guterres told U.N. member states. “Ukraine and the Russian Federation — with the support of Türkiye — came together to make it happen — despite the enormous complexities, the naysayers, and even the hell of war. Some might call it a miracle. In truth, it's multilateral diplomacy in action.”

‘President Putin, stop your troops’

For much of his tenure, Guterres has been reluctant to seek a lead role in tackling many of the world’s greatest political crises, exhibiting reluctance to wade personally into messy conflicts from Ethiopia to Venezuela that he had little hope of solving.

At first, the war in Ukraine seemed no different.

Russia, a veto-wielding power with the muscle to gum up the works at the U.N., had blatantly attacked its neighbor. There was little the U.N. could do to stop it. Even before the war, Guterres initially resisted appeals from European governments and the U.S. to reach out personally to Russian President Vladimir Putin and press him to stay out of Ukraine.

Guterres was skeptical of U.S. and British intelligence assessments that Putin had already set a plan in motion to launch an all-out invasion of Ukraine, led by tens of thousands of Russian troops massing along the Russian and Belarusian borders with Ukraine.  

Russia’s march toward Kyiv infuriated the U.N. leader.

Seated beside Russia’s U.N. ambassador Vassily Nebenzia in the U.N., Guterres acknowledged on Feb. 23 his misreading of the crisis and appealed directly to Putin to “stop your troops from attacking Ukraine.” But it would take weeks of pressure from Washington, London, and other Western capitals before Guterres agreed to undertake a personal mission to the region to help contain the violence.

Within days after the invasion, Guterres established a Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance to manage the U.N. response to the food crisis, and appointed Nabarro and Inger Andersen, a Danish economist who leads the U.N. Environment Programme, as the leads on food security. 

“The conflict between Ukraine and Russia is creating impacts that reach far beyond those directly affected by the current destruction, human displacement, and loss of life,” according to an internal March 15 draft assessment by the group, which was obtained by Devex. “The international community needs to fully understand the impacts of the conflict on global grain and fertilizer markets and the resulting impacts on trade, trade policy, food security, political stability and poverty.”

The turning point came on April 26, when Guterres, seated across Putin’s ridiculously long banquet table, threw out a handful of asks. Might Putin be willing to agree to a series of local humanitarian ceasefires? Would he permit the U.N. and the International Committee of the Red Cross to organize the evacuation of hundreds of desperate Ukrainian civilians and soldiers under siege by Russian forces in the Azovstal iron and steel works factory in the port city of Mariupol?

Putin agreed to the Mariupol plan.

No illusions

It was not a deal to end the war, but it saved lives and demonstrated that the much-maligned international organization could play a limited, though useful, role in the conflict. The proposal for the resumption of grain and fertilizer exports, while raised in the meeting, received little public attention.

The U.N. didn’t even mention it in the official readout. But Putin didn’t reject the proposal out of hand. Nor did Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was miffed over Guterres’ decision to meet Putin before himself, during a subsequent meeting in Kyiv.

The Moscow meeting, however, would open the door for future negotiations over a range of issues, from agricultural exports to a potential prisoner exchange. Earlier this month, Guterres spoke by phone with Putin in an effort to finalize a deal to facilitate Russia’s export of ammonia, a critical ingredient in the production of fertilizer. The initial grain deal explicitly called on Western governments to permit ammonia exports, but the key pipelines run through Latvia and Ukraine, both of which have blocked its export. One senior U.N. official said an agreement to transport ammonia through Ukraine could be agreed on any day.

Despite progress on the grain deal, Guterres has sought to minimize expectations that he can bring the parties closer to a peace deal.

“It would be naive to think that we are close to the possibility of a peace deal,” he told reporters. “My good offices are ready, but I have no illusions.”

‘Guterres has had a pretty good war’

Nowhere has the U.N. chief’s diplomatic intervention had more of an impact than his role this past summer in securing a complex diplomatic agreement, involving Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine, to end Russia’s Black Sea blockade.

In the process, Guterres has demonstrated that the U.N., when it tries, can provide a limited role in improving the humanitarian lot and perhaps take a small bite out of the global hunger crisis that has been exacerbated by the conflict.

It also provided a boost to the standing of Guterres.

“Within the limits of the possible, Guterres has had a pretty good war,” said Richard Gowan, the U.N. representative for the International Crisis Group, who said the U.N. chief’s star has risen a bit. “He is one of the very few international figures who have come out of the last few months able to get some very limited concessions from Putin and that is not a small thing.”

Following the signing of the July 22 Black Sea agreement, wheat prices fell between 6-8% and the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Prices Index fell by nearly 9% in July, the biggest decline since 2008, according to an internal U.N. account of the grain negotiations. In the past two months, commercial traders have exported more than 3 million metric tons of grain onto the world market, helping to stabilize international food prices, though stubborn inflation and interest rates have kept local food prices in low- and middle-income countries painfully high. In the process, the grain deal has made the U.N. seem more relevant.  

But there remain serious challenges.

The agreement provided opportunities for Moscow to use procedural maneuvers to slow down or stall the exports. And Putin has recently expressed concerns that the deal unfairly favors European consumers of Ukrainian grains over the world’s poorest, claiming that less than 5% of Ukrainian grains were exported to the neediest.

The right place at the right time

Harland’s outfit was well placed to shape events in Ukraine.

HD had a team in Ukraine since 2014, reinforcing the nation’s mediation capacity and advising it on its negotiations with Russia. As thousands of Ukrainian civilians and foreign diplomats fled at the start of the invasion, David Gorman, who oversees HD’s Eurasia regional office, traveled to Kyiv to monitor the war’s impact firsthand, and to help the Ukrainian government negotiate a way forward.  

While Wilcox was brainstorming in Nairobi, his colleague in Kyiv, Maryna Domushkina, an HD mediation expert, was separately exploring the possibility of a grain deal. She reached out to Olena Kovalova, a former Ukrainian deputy minister of agriculture tasked with figuring out how to ship the grain during war. Meanwhile, top officials from the U.N. maritime organization, independently provided advice on conducting commercial shipping in war.  

Their analysis was fed into the U.N. system.

On May 10, Guterres established two task forces, and appointed Martin Griffiths, the U.N.’s emergency relief coordinator — and the founding director at HD — to oversee the grain shipments. He charged Rebeca Grynspan, an economist and former Costa Rican vice president who serves as secretary-general of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, with overseeing the effort to facilitate the export of Russian wheat and fertilizers.

In a sign of the importance of HD’s role, the U.N. invited Gorman and Wilcox to join its negotiation task force, while Domushkina was dispatched to Istanbul, where she monitors the shipping operations for key players in the deal.

‘Now for the hard part’

Still, the negotiations were anything but easy.  

Kyiv initially feared the deal would require the removal of its sea mines, exposing it to Russian attacks, while insurers and shippers balked at the prospect of exporting grain in the middle of a hot war.

In a memo to HD’s board members, Harland credited his team’s quiet diplomatic support for the initiative.

“HD has played the low-key exploratory, connecting, strategizing and supporting role in a major Track 1 process in inter-state warfare,” Harland wrote, noting that a member of his team, Gorman, was quietly added to the U.N. secretary-general’s delegation at the signing ceremony.

“The implementation of these agreements will be difficult, and likely fraught with frustration and recrimination,” Harland added. “They are a necessary but not sufficient condition for agricultural products to flow to world markets in quantities sufficient to bring down prices to hundreds of millions of people currently burdened by food costs that they simply can’t afford.”

“Now for the hard part, which will be implementation,” he added.

Update, Sept. 27, 2022: This article has been updated to clarify that the International Maritime Organization was one of the various U.N. agencies that has a proposal for a Black Sea grain corridor.