The UN said that they continue negotiations on food exports of Russia and Ukraine

The UN continues negotiations to reach a package agreement on food exports between Russia and Ukraine. This was stated on Monday at a briefing by the official representative of the Secretary General of the world organization Stéphane Dujarric.

"Negotiations continue to reach an agreement on a package agreement. <...> The UN Secretary-General [Antonio Guterres] has not set deadlines for the agreement to be concluded," Dujarric said.

According to him, the services of the UN Secretary General for mediation between the parties have always been available. "Our task now is to get the parties to sit down at the negotiating table to resolve the food issue, the issue of fertilizers. This is very important for hundreds of millions of people," the UN representative said.

"We would like to see a solution as soon as possible for the people in need, for the sake of world markets in need of grains and fertilizers," Dujarric said.

The situation in Ukraine and large-scale sanctions imposed against Russia by the United States and the European Union led to violations of grain supplies. Since the beginning of the year, prices for wheat and corn have risen significantly. As noted at a meeting of the UN Security Council on May 21, the world's wheat reserves will last only 10 weeks.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov previously stated that the food crisis in the world happened long before the start of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, among other things, the pandemic and the miscalculations of Western countries became its causes. Lavrov stressed that the current situation has exacerbated the problem, and Western sanctions have become one of the key reasons for the disruption of food supplies, which exacerbated the crisis.