Fields across southern Ukraine could be turned into “deserts” due to massive flooding caused by the destruction of Kakhovka dam, the country’s agricultural ministry has warned.
Flooding across southern Ukraine caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam on Tuesday is likely to have a massive negative effect on Ukrainian farming yields, with the country’s agricultural ministry warning that large swathes of land are likely to turn into “desert” due to irrigation systems being taken offline.
Immediately affecting tens of thousands of people, many of whom have been forced to leave their homes, officials fear that the massive flooding caused by the dam’s destruction could end up causing an ecological crisis of astronomical proportion.
One senior official has even gone so far as to brand the dam’s destruction as being likely to cause “the worst environmental disaster in Europe since Chernobyl”.
According to a press release by the country’s Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food, the flooding will also likely have a notable impact on the world’s food supply, with tens of thousands of hectares of land being flooded as a result of the incident on Tuesday.
However, the ministry appears to be even more worried about the large swathes of land upstream, with officials warning that hundreds of thousands of hectares have now been left with no water supply due to a sudden drop in water levels.
The ministry believes that the flooding has stopped water from being supplied to 31 separate irrigation systems in the Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia regions.
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“In 2021, these systems provided irrigation for 584,000 hectares. from which we collected about 4 million tons of grain and oil crops, worth about 1.5 billion dollars,” the press release read.
“The destruction of the [Kakhovka dam] will lead to the fact that the fields in the south of Ukraine may turn into deserts as early as next year,” they continued, adding that further biological damage caused by the disaster could end running costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Such warnings are terrible news for the many across the world who are already suffering due to a weakening supply of food, with both Russia and Ukraine previously being some of the world’s largest exporters of grain worldwide.
According to the World Food Programme, many of the poorest countries throughout the globe have struggled to keep up since Russia’s invasion last year, with inflationary pressures worldwide making it more and more difficult for many to keep themselves and their families fed.
Ukraine had already been predicting a further fall in this year’s grain harvest compared to 2022 as farmers desperately try to keep their businesses afloat amidst one of the largest conflicts of the 21st century so far.
Food Crisis: Grain Shipments from Ukraine Falling https://t.co/YWrzD5LSSQ
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) February 19, 2023
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