Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, Susanna Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about sanctions. The impact of sanctions, as we expected them to be,

but also the unintended consequences of sanctions, both on Russia itself, but in particular also on us.

Because as it seemed to, as it turned out, some of the sanctions we have agreed have consequences

that those who took the decision to impose sanctions may not have thought through and fall.

Jack, one of the issues that seems to, that is arising now, are supply chain

disruptions, the most serious being, apart from energy, which, you know, the stuff we know,

the most serious being food. You know, where are we there? What should we expect?

So it's difficult, obviously, to precisely say what we should expect because it's a very complex

situation and there are lots of interlocking factors. But the outlook at the moment is not great.

The problem is that with food, you're dealing with really a kind of triple hit, right?

I mean, the first thing is that as many of us will be

familiar with now, Russia and Ukraine are both very large exporters of food, primarily, so

you know, especially wheat, you know, so the combined impact of sanctions and the actual

course of the war has driven wheat prices up quite substantially since the war's beginning.

So that's one, right? You know, they actually export a lot of food themselves. Another one is that

Russia exports a lot of fertilizer. That also causes problems because, of course, if you want to

actually produce the food yourself and you relied on Russia for fertilizer, you don't have as much

as that anymore. And then

the third issue comes back to gas, which is that gas is an important, like natural gas is an

important feedstock for nitrogen fertilizers. So if you kind of have then high gas prices,

you know, it compromises your ability to make the fertilizer. So, you know,

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