When looking for evidence of a changing global order, consider the potato. Russia is currently experiencing record shortages of this widely consumed staple food. The root of the insecurity is a dangerous combination of geopolitical upheaval, market volatility, and poor adaptation to climate change. In response, Putin’s potato politics with “friendly” and “unfriendly” nations demonstrates just how fast international norms have fallen away in recent years.
According to Rosstat, the Russian State Statistics Service, the year-on-year harvest of potatoes across the country fell by around 12 per cent in 2024. For consumers, the price of a potato has more than doubled since. This matters in a country that consumes the fourth most potatoes in 2022 – and more per capita than all the countries above it on the list: China, India, and the United States.
The potato crisis has not gone unnoticed by the uppermost echelons of the Russian ruling elites. In a public meeting in the white marbled Catherine Hall, deep inside the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin addressed the issue frankly: “By the way, about potatoes …Yesterday, I repeat, I also met with representatives of various business areas … it turns out that we do not have enough potatoes”.
The shortage boils down to three factors.
The first is market volatility and poor infrastructure to deal with changing supply and demand. A bumper harvest in 2023, where overstocked supermarket shelves caused prices to fall, prompted farmers to prioritise other more valuable vegetables the following year. But a lack of storage infrastructure and future planning, which could have maintained a stock of potatoes in a surplus year, meant that much of Russia’s reserve went to waste.
Climate change is another contributing factor. Prolonged droughts and sudden cold snaps across Russia’s fertile western states have chipped away at the harvest. In the fertile black chernozem soils of Bryansk, 500,000 fewer tonnes of the vegetable were harvested last year. In Nizhny Novgorod, the shortfall was 120,000 tonnes, and in Moscow, it was 100,000 tonnes.
Finally, the fallout from the invasion of Ukraine has sharply hit Russia’s potato supply chains. Moscow might yet rue its decision in January 2024 to restrict seed imports from countries deemed as “unfriendly”, which included all European Union member states. Oksana Lut, the Head of the Ministry for Agriculture in Russia, succinctly summed up in a recent meeting how a policy of economic isolationism has led to potato shortages: “if in recent years we annually imported around 10,000 to 12,000 seeds from the European Union, this season we imported 290 tonnes from Germany”.
The Russian response to the potato crisis has been two-fold.
First, Putin turned to his long-term ally Belarus. According to Belarusian State Media, President Aleksandr Lukashenko is keen to back the Russian President and to make a tidy profit on the side.
Unfortunately, potato growth fell even more (by up to 23 per cent) in Belarus. Unfavourable growing conditions – made more likely by climate change – as well as inadequate storage (more than 40 per cent of those kept in storage spoiled) were to blame again.
Many of the remaining potatoes have already been sold to Russia. The capacity to help their Eastern neighbour is limited. Lukashenko has turned his ire on both senior figures in government and farmers alike. In a televised address in February, Lukashenko called out his government’s insufficient storage capacity and has gone so far as to blame corruption and collusion with foreign marketeers for poor government procurement.
The politics of food insecurity shares many of the same characteristics as the energy politics that have dominated the news since the invasion of Ukraine.
Belarus has taken steps to alleviate its own potato crisis. This includes lifting the moratorium on importing potatoes from “unfriendly countries” in the European Union in an act described by the state as “good neighbourliness”.
But in the long run this is unlikely to be a solution for Russia. Belarus borders on Russia’s agricultural heartlands, and by pegging its economy to the Russian Ruble, Belarus is unlikely to offer a sufficiently diversified economy to that of Russia.
More significantly, in the long term, Russia has turned to members and partner states of the BRICS+ coalition to bridge the gap. Egypt, Russia’s main foreign importer and a potato market superpower in its own right, has increased its supplies to Russia four times over. China has increased its supplies to Russia by 26 times. Pakistan has upped its supplies to Russia by 4.4 times in a move that cannot hurt its application to be a full BRICS+ member.
The politics of potatoes have gripped Russia. But the storm also illustrate a graver threat of prolonged and deeper food insecurity in a world where climate change, trade wars, and geopolitical conflicts become more ingrained.
The politics of food insecurity shares many of the same characteristics as the energy politics that have dominated the news since the invasion of Ukraine. Both result in the bifurcation of global trade between Western and Eastern blocs, and a cadre of third-party countries, including Egypt and Pakistan, who can straddle the two. But when faced with massive economic shocks and war, both European and Russian parties have been unable to fully untangle their economies.
There is an additional significant factor when it comes to food security, however, which is a persistent and worsening climate. Last year was a poor year for farmers in Russia and 2025 is likely to be just as bad. The Governor of Rostov – the largest grain-growing region in the country – has already decreed a state of emergency after a combination of high temperatures, drought, and sudden cold snaps raised concerns about the productivity of the harvest. Payouts by private insurers and the state have risen by more than 75 per cent in 2024 alone.
Look closely and the dynamics of potato politics crop up in other unexpected places.
The egg crisis in the United States provides a good case in point. In early 2025, egg prices skyrocketed after a reduction in availability. Shortages were linked to rapidly spreading bird flu - which was made more severe due to climate change. The image of the egg became a rallying cry for Republicans in the run-up to the election in 2024, which carried Donald Trump to victory. The Trump administration has since looked to import millions of eggs from Turkey and South Korea to lower prices in the short term – while a string of European countries have declined to aid the United States by exporting their supplies of eggs.
Meanwhile, in Japan, rice prices have doubled in the last 12 months, due to repeated disrupted harvests since 2023 and a lack of trade flexibility due to its domestic policies that restrict imports. Disgruntled farmers have taken to protesting in Tokyo in support of policy reform to expand domestic production. The protests will collide with the election of the upper house of the National Diet – Japan’s legislature – in the coming months.
Potatoes might not capture the economic spotlight so much as energy or advanced technologies. But the phenomenon does provide a key insight into a changing world. One in which tense geopolitics is threatened by a destabilised climate and poor investment in resilience for countries to weather it. Food and agriculture are at the sharp end of this transition, but other sectors will catch up. And so, for the time being, potato politics is likely to be a staple in international politics discussions.
