UN: Dam breach will hit food security

MOSCOW — The United Nations on Tuesday said the breach of the Soviet-era dam on the Dnipro River in Ukraine will have a huge impact on global food security, lead to a rise in food prices and could cause drinking water problems for hundreds of thousands of people.

The dam, part of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant, was breached in the early hours of June 6, allowing some of the 18 cubic kilometers of water it held back to surge down across a swath of Kherson.

It is unclear what caused the breach, although Norwegian seismologists and US satellites picked up what looks like an explosion. Ukraine and Russia blamed each other for blowing it up.

UN aid chief Martin Griffiths told the BBC that the impact on food security could be significant.

"This is a breadbasket, that whole area going down toward the Black Sea and Crimea is a breadbasket not only for Ukraine but also for the world," Griffiths told the BBC. "We're in difficulties already on food security but food prices, I'm sure, are bound to increase.

"It is almost inevitable that we are going to see huge, huge problems in harvesting and sowing for the next harvest."

Key producers

Ukraine and Russia are two of the world's key agricultural producers, and major players in the wheat, barley, maize, rapeseed, rapeseed oil, sunflower seed and sunflower oil markets.

He said that up to 700,000 people depended on the reservoir for drinking water. Without clean water, he said, people would be susceptible to disease and that children were most vulnerable in such a situation.

Griffiths also said that damage of this scale to civilian infrastructure was completely contrary to international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions.

"That's self-evident. Whoever did it has breached the Geneva Conventions," Griffiths said.

On the battlefield, the governor of Russia's Kursk region said on Tuesday that Ukraine's early morning shelling damaged several houses and disrupted gas and electricity supply to two villages in Kursk near the border with Ukraine.

Nine houses were damaged and gas and power supplies disrupted in the village of Tyorkino, governor Roman Starovoyt said on the Telegram messaging app. Two houses caught fire.

On the same day, Ukrainian officials said that Russia launched a "massive missile" attack overnight on the city of Kryvyi Rih.

"There are dead and wounded," Serhiy Lisak, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region where Kryvyi Rih is located, said on the Telegram messaging app.

In the early hours of Tuesday, air raid sirens blared across the whole of Ukraine, with Kyiv's military officials saying air defense forces destroyed all Russian missiles targeting Kyiv. There was no immediate comment from Russia.

Agencies Via Xinhua