DAVOS, Switzerland—Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara says donors urgently need to close the U.N.’s $10 billion food program funding gap to avoid a catastrophe as sanctions on Russian fertilizers and Ukraine’s grain export problems have created an extreme global shock.
“The world has realized that food can be a weapon and it is being currently used,” Svein Tore Holsether, CEO of Yara International, one of the world’s largest suppliers of plant nutrients, told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
He said the direct impact of Russian sanctions has removed at least 15 percent of global fertilizer supply and the indirect impact was even more severe due to disruptions of supply chains and the impact of gas price rises….