Brian McDonald: When the breadbasket boils: why Russia’s drought is the world’s problem
By Brian McDonald, Substack, 7/31/25
By any measure that matters, agriculture in southern Russia is in trouble. The sort that sinks in like cracked clay and doesn’t let go.
This summer, a brutal drought—the worst in decades—has scorched the Krasnodar and Rostov regions, an area long known as the grain heartland of Russia. The figures don’t lie. State of emergency declarations have now spread across 37 districts, with thousands of farms reporting yield collapses that are nothing short of catastrophic.
Wheat yields in the Kuban are down from 64.7 to 48.8 centners per hectare; barley is off 21%; peas and maize are also flagging—and sugar beet losses are still being counted.
According to Konstantin Yurov, deputy chairman of the People’s Farmer association, Krasnodar alone has lost 2.8 million tonnes of grain, translating to around ₽42 billion in damages. Rostov’s losses are expected to be similar. In total, Yurov told RBK, “Farmers in the Kuban and Don regions have missed out on 70–80 billion rubles.” That’s $855 to $978 million, gone with the heat.
And this is no local misfortune. This is Russia—the world’s largest grain exporter. Southern Russia produces up to 20% of its grain, most of it passing through Novorossiysk and Azov ports to markets stretching from Cairo to Jakarta. When the Kuban stumbles, bread prices don’t just shift in Kursk or Kazan—they spike in Lagos, Damascus, Amman.
We’ve seen this story before. In 2011, a surge in global food prices—driven in part by Dmitry Medvedev’s export restrictions following another severe drought—helped trigger unrest across the Arab world. Despite what some think tanks would try to have you believe, the Arab Spring wasn’t born in Twitter feeds. It was born in bakeries. When bread doubles in price and wages don’t, people don’t just complain. They revolt.
So when Russian officials from the Ministry of Agriculture now claim that the 2025 grain harvest will hit 135 million tonnes, surpassing last year by 5 million—even projecting 55 million tonnes for export—the optimism feels brittle, like a harvest forecast written in chalk on a dry stone wall.
The numbers from the ground tell another story. In some of the worst-hit districts—Kanevskoy, Pavlovsky, Yeysky—grain yields have plummeted to just 20–30 c/ha, two to three times lower than the usual regional average. Maize and sugar beet assessments aren’t even in yet. Livestock producers are already discussing cutting the cattle herd due to feed shortages.
Equipment loans. Fertilizer bills. Warehousing costs. They don’t take a year off because the skies didn’t cooperate. And they certainly don’t pause for the slow gears of Moscow’s subsidy machine. “In what happened, the farmers bear no blame,” says Vyacheslav Legkodukh, the governor’s representative for farmer relations in Krasnodar. “We must do everything possible to ensure these farms survive to next season.”
But survival in this new era can’t rely on last-century tools. Yes, subsidies, crop insurance, emergency lending—all of these help soften the blow. But none of them solve it. You don’t adapt to climate breakdown with forms and stamps.
What’s needed now is strategic resilience: new drought-tolerant crop strains; smart irrigation systems that can stretch a dry season; data-driven yield modelling that sees past the next quarterly target.
Russia’s grain heartland is shifting under its own boots, whether Moscow likes it or not. The Kuban and the Don—fields once fat with black earth—are drying out, while the better soil edges north toward Ryazan, Kursk, Tambov. Trouble is, up there you’ve got dirt but no silos, no rail spurs, no deep-water docks. Hard to ship a loaf out of a meadow.
The real peril isn’t only in the cracked furrows. It’s in the comforting lie that last year’s export crown guarantees this year’s. The sky doesn’t read ministry memos. Weather tears up contracts for fun. If the planners don’t move with it, they’ll end up— as every old farmer knows— betting the harvest on a cloud that never breaks.
And if that wager goes sour? Russia will still feed itself, just about. But the grain market’s strung tight as a fiddle string; miss one shipment out of Novorossiysk and bread jumps in Cairo, tempers boil in Khartoum. Wheat isn’t just food. It props up governments.
So what’s happening down south isn’t a local mishap. It’s front-line climate news. In this new game, soil is strategy and a sack of grain can tip a cabinet.
The breadbasket’s smouldering. Best notice before the wind changes.
