RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin has told a summit of African leaders that Russia will give them tens of thousands of tonnes of grain within months, despite sanctions by the United States and other Western states, who are beating the Ukrainian war drums for a war on the Russian workers.
Speaking at a summit on Thursday in Leningrad, devoted to Russian-African ties, Putin said Russia was expecting a record grain harvest and was ready to replace Ukrainian grain exports to Africa on both a commercial and aid basis to honour Moscow’s critical role in global food security.
‘We will be ready to provide Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, Central African Republic and Eritrea with 25-50,000 tonnes of free grain each in the next 3-4 months,’ the president said. ‘We will also provide free delivery of these products to consumers.’
This is an offer that the imperialist gangsters are absolutely incapable of even considering, since it would obviously interfere with making the biggest possible profits out of the working people of the planet. Responding to Western bosses criticism of Moscow’s decision to quit the Black Sea grain deal, which allowed Ukraine to ship grain from its seaports despite the war, Putin restated his argument that promises made to Russia about facilitating its own grain and fertiliser exports had not been met.
The Russian president said that over 70% of Ukrainian grain exported, thanks to the now-lapsed deal, had gone to high, or above-average-income countries, including the European Union, and that the poorest countries, like Sudan, had been ‘screwed over’ and received less than 3% of the shipments.
Putin pointed to a glaring contradiction. He observed that: ‘A paradoxical picture is emerging. On the one hand, Western countries are obstructing supplies of our grain and fertilisers, while on the other they hypocritically blame us for the current crisis situation on the world food market.’
Putin was in fact addressing the whole of Africa with Russia revealing that 49 of the continent’s 54 states are represented in Leningrad, including 17 by their heads of state and four by heads of government.
On Tuesday, the Kremlin said the United States, France and other Western countries were putting an unprecedented level of pressure on all African countries to prevent them from taking part in the Russia-Africa summit.
With ties forged under Soviet rule, Russia has historically enjoyed warm relations with many African countries, and these relations can only get warmer, as the crisis of the imperialist powers deepen and they seek to reimpose their ‘Iron Heel’ on Africa,
In fact the imperialist powers led by the US, the UK and the EU are in their greatest crisis ever as they seek to impose the full weight of their economic crisis onto the working class of the world.
France is near to a state of civil war, with its police forces insisting that they have the right to murder ‘vermin’, that is rebellious young workers.
The US workers are poised on the brink of a great political strike wave to defend living standards that the US bosses are desperate to destroy. The truth is that capitalism as a worldwide system has reached the end of its road.
The workers of the world have the power, but they lack the revolutionary leadership to do the job that Lenin and Trotsky provided in the 1917 Russian revolution, and then with the formation of the Third Communist International.
Today the central political task for the workers of the world is the building of the International Committee of the Fourth International to mobilise the working class of Europe, Africa and the Americas to complete the World Socialist Revolution that the Bolsheviks began in October 1917.
The US and the European capitalists are reeling from a developing economic and political catastrophe of their own making, which will require the workers of the world completing the 1917 revolution by overthrowing capitalism in Europe, Africa and the USA.
The capitalist crisis can only be resolved by the victory of the World Socialist Revolution to complete the job that Lenin and Trotsky began in October 1917.
