The negative impacts on global food security wrought by Russia’s war in Ukraine are obvious. But recent news that Russia currently occupies more than one fifth of Ukrainian farmland, draws attention to another dimension of this politically-induced food and agricultural crisis: land itself. Of course, territory has long been an object of conflict and warfare. But agricultural land—in particular—is also a key, though understated, dimension of the geopolitical ambitions undergirding Russian activity at home and abroad.

After all, such land is a natural resource whose productivity and use is understood to impact state power in tangible ways. As Russian President Vladimir Putin observed in 2015: “[W]e need to conquer [zavoyovyvat’] foreign markets, and why not—with so much land, and such colossal arable land that can still yet increase. In this sense, we are the richest country—not in terms of oil and gas, but in terms of the possibilities for agriculture. And the need for food in the world will only grow.”

Russian leaders are of course not unique in seeing food, agriculture, and land in such a zero-sum way. But Russia is, as Putin notes, a uniquely important global actor. Russia is already the world’s largest exporter of staple wheat; as the world’s largest territorial landmass, it possesses substantial amounts of land available for additional agricultural use. Even as demand for such land grows across the planet, projections are also that Russia will see new climate-driven agricultural frontiers open up in the next decades.

Russian leaders see extensive farming and cultivated land as a metric for economic productivity, which they connect to its overall geopolitical might. This land is thus central to Russian leaders’ ambitions to become the world’s largest overall producer of food, and turn the country into an “agrarian superpower.” As a result, its government has set priorities and targets to increase the amount of land under cultivation by millions of hectares (ha) over the next decade. Such ambitions have consequences for Russian domestic and foreign policy, as well as implications for food security at regional and global levels. They also come with a range of environmental risks and trade-offs that should not be ignored.

Agrarian Resurgence: Politicizing Food and Agriculture

In the beginning of the 20^th century, areas now comprising both contemporary Russia and Ukraine served as a breadbasket for much of the rest of the world. But it is only after a substantial collapse in agricultural output in the years since Soviet Union’s dissolution, that Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet states have recently reclaimed this position in global markets.

Indeed, it has been a long climb back from that precipitous plunge. According to experts, the post-1991 collapse “triggered the most widespread and abrupt episode of land use change in the twentieth century,” with estimates of land abandonment ranging from 40 million ha to as high as even 100 million ha – the equivalent of all of the EU’s cropland. This abandoned or unused agricultural land is considered a key aspect of what Russia’s leaders broadly characterize as the economic and “geopolitical catastrophe” of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Indeed, concerns and anxieties stemming from the experience of the 1990s—including an overt focus on national food self-sufficiency—continue to manifest themselves in the defensive posture of the Russian government towards food and agriculture today. 

Yet while this “unused” or idle agricultural land has been deemed a symbol of state weakness for authorities, it has also come to symbolize Russia’s putative untapped geopolitical and environmental capacity and might. Having reemerged in the past five years as one of the world’s largest wheat exporters, Russian authorities now have begun to refer to food (and, in particular, grain) as an offensive weapon in their strategic arsenal—and even as a “new oil.” This formulation is more than tongue-in-cheek banter, as Russia’s profits from agricultural exports already exceed that of its arms exports.

Such politicized—and even weaponized—perspectives on food were obvious as early as 2014, when Russian authorities imposed an import ban on Western agricultural products. But now they are becoming increasingly explicit. As former President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev recently stated, “we will only be supplying food and agriculture to our friends… [and] we will not be buying food from our enemies.” Russia’s war on Ukraine further evidences this posture, with months-long disruptions of Ukraine’s grain export operations, documented looting, and tactics that directly target and disrupt Ukrainian farming operations.

Nationalizing Agricultural Land

Agricultural land is an inextricable element of these food politics; it is seen by Russian leaders not only as a natural resource, but also a national one. Embedded both in Russia’s Food Security Doctrine and other policy guidelines, maximizing agricultural land use is also the subject of State Council meetings. Governors of Russian regions also often report directly to Putin himself about meeting agricultural land use targets. A recent state programme for agriculture land use puts these objectives at least 13 million ha of expansion by 2030.

But this top-down approach reaches further down the ladder. Nominal private ownership and property rights aside, the Russian government increasingly takes punitive measures against citizens for not using agricultural land for its “intended purposes”(i.e. leaving it idle). By law, forcible confiscation and seizure of this land can be triggered by offenses as minor as a third of it being overrun by weeds, or 15 percent being occupied by bushes or trees in the case of arable land.

But if agricultural land use is part of a broader economic and political project of nationalization in Russia, this project is also taking place beyond its internationally recognized borders. Crimea, annexed from Ukraine in 2014, has also become part of this top-down reporting system, while authorities in Russian-occupied Donetsk have passed a new Land Code modelled after the Russian rather than Ukrainian system. In this regard, land and land use are part of a larger political project to tighten the grip of the Russian state both domestically and abroad.

Risks for Environmental Sustainability

Beyond the geopolitical implications of Russian authorities’ land ambitions, there are also environmental implications to consider. Globally, land use is responsible for nearly a quarter of GHG emissions. More critically, much of the abandoned agricultural land in Russia has over the past decades returned to forest cover. These natural vegetation and soils serve an important carbon sequestration function at present, and their recultivation would entail high carbon emissions.

Perversely, one of the Russian government’s central positions in international climate negotiations relies on the fact that Russia holds a quarter of the world’s forest reserves. Because forests serve in an important role in combating climate change, they argue, this offsets Russia’s mitigation obligations. But this passive accounting ruse becomes obvious when compared to their active prioritization of agricultural land cultivation.

Indeed, legislation passed this year in the Duma now forbids the growth or cultivation of forests on idle agricultural land. As groups like Greenpeace Russia point out, this measure not only hinders sustainable forest management, but it poses additional environmental risks in the form of wildfires, as farmers often burn vegetation to avoid punitive fines and seizures. This is no small concern when 90 percent of the wildfires in Russia in recent years—which account for dozens of millions of ha of forest, and gigatons of GHG emissions—have been caused by human activity.

Tellingly, authorities refer to these agricultural land use ambitions as a modern day “Virgin Lands” campaign, referencing the Soviet megaproject in the 1950s and 1960s to dramatically boost grain production through cultivation of 40 million ha of steppe land. Such references not only conveniently leave out questions of economic inefficiency and waste; they also leave out the profound ecological disasters of soil degradation, water drainage, and loss of biodiversity wrought by that campaign.

Policy Implications: Trade-offs

Russian agricultural policies are highly concerning. But they also exemplify policy perspectives adopted across a wide range of states, that consider food and agriculture in terms of national power and advantage, or that continue to prioritize aggregate agricultural output over more sustainable developmental and environmental goals. Indeed, the EU has recently backtracked on sustainability commitments made under the Green Deal, derogating them in favour of expanding agricultural land cultivation.

Pointing out the environmental and sustainability risks that these positions entail is not to downplay the fact that we are in the midst of a humanitarian crisis of global food security, or that medium- and long-term projections do predict increasing food demand over the coming decades. Cultivation of agricultural land—not least Russian—will inevitably play a role in meeting both challenges.

But it is a false dichotomy to insist that local or global food security requires sacrificing the environment. To the contrary, much of the global food crisis and global hunger is driven not so much by supply shocks or insufficient aggregate production, but by the parochial forms of politics and self-interest—resulting in war, conflict, competition, inequality—outlined above. To the extent that actors continue to emphasize national gains over the cooperative forms of global governance that today’s environmental and humanitarian crises call for, land as an element of nature will continue to be an object—as well as casualty—of increasingly fractious geopolitics.