As seed and food companies invest in Ukrainian farms, Ukrainian refugees trek to help tornado victims in Mississippi

Agriculture was responsible for 40% of Ukraine’s exports
before the war. (Photo by Julia Kochetova, Bloomberg News)

What's it like to farm while your country is at war? Ukrainian farmers can tell you. "Equipment has been destroyed, land has been expropriated and mined and export routes choked off. Financing is hard to come by," report Patrick Thomas and Alistair MacDonald of The Wall Street Journal. "Foreign countries and some of the world's largest agriculture companies are donating or lending hundreds of millions of dollars to Ukrainian farmers. . . . even as the war shows little sign of ending soon."

Farmers need seeds, which Ukrainian farmers struggle to afford. "Seed giants such as Bayer and Corteva have stepped in to help supply farmers with products for this year's harvest. Bayer said it had donated about 40,000 bags of corn and vegetable seed, worth about $2 million," Thomas and MacDonald write. "Bayer has said it was investing some $38 million in a seed plant in the country. Corteva said it intended to increase corn-seed production in the region by 30% over the next five years."

Ukrainian farmers also need export help. "Grain merchants including Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland and Bunge have said they intended to keep shipping crops from the country," the Journal reports. Japan and Canada have also delivered aid, and "foreign banks, including Credit Agricole of France and Austria's Raiffeisen Bank International  have taken part in a government plan that has lent more than 5,000 farmers about $2.43 million," Thomas and MacDonald report. "For many Western companies, the help could bolster crucial partners struggling during the war. It also could preserve or strengthen these companies’ reputations with local farmers and their position in the country, which is an important agricultural exporter, analysts said."

Meanwhile, seven Ukrainian refugees who had resettled in Minnesota headed to Mississippi to help "several towns in Mississippi recovering from a devastating tornado that killed at least 25 in late March," reports Daniel Wu of The Washington Post. "They made the 16-hour drive south to donate bottled water and volunteer with aid workers, buoyed by the idea that they could help a community facing a similar struggle to theirs." Rfugee Denys Pavliuk told Wu through an interpreter, “We had to leave our home, and they don’t have a place to go back, either.”

From left: Viktoriia Hasiuk, Taras Zhmurko, Sofiia Rudenko, Iryna Hrebenyk, Dmytro Fedirko, Denys Pavliuk and Nazar Teteruk in front of the van of water bottles they delivered to towns in Mississippi on March 29. (Photo by The American Service via The Washington Post)