Plenty of verbiage has been spent on restoring the Black Sea grain deal but little action. In a keynote address delivered yesterday at the opening session of the three-day UN Food Systems Summit +2 in Rome, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on Russia to return to the deal. Guterres said he was committed to unimpeded access to global markets for food products and fertilizers from both Ukraine and Russia and urged the global community to stand behind that effort, reported Anadolu. He underlined that Russia and Ukraine are “both essential to global food security.” The summit convened yesterday and, according to the UN, is being attended by 2,000 participants, including 22 heads of state and more than 100 ministerial delegations, who will “review progress on commitments to action and identify successes, enduring bottlenecks, and priorities to close the implementation gap for food systems transformation.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking on Turkish national TV rather than in Rome, said that Turkey is ready to continue its efforts to settle the Ukrainian crisis and that proposals on the matter had been submitted to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. He reiterated that on July 7, he had met with Zelensky in Istanbul. “We discussed issues on our agenda. In particular, we exchanged our proposals with regard to the war which has been underway for over 500 days and again stated our readiness to do everything that depends on us on this track,” the Turkish leader noted, following a meeting of the government that he had chaired.
