Recently, Rus­sia announced an aggres­sive plan to boost the amount of food it grows and sup­plies to the world. Rus­sia plans on spend­ing more money and using more of it’s land to grow food and become a leader in global food supply.

In this analy­sis from Guardian writ­ers Amie Ferris-Rotman and Karl Plume, many say that Rus­sia will need to spend more on infra­struc­ture to fol­low through with their ambi­tious plans.

The Kremlin’s pledge to ease a world food short­age needs invest­ment in port capac­ity and farm­ing know-how if Rus­sia and its Black Sea neigh­bours are to usurp the United States as the world’s biggest grain sup­plier. Rus­sia, with a tenth of the world’s arable land, said at the week­end it could dou­ble grain exports within 15 years. By becom­ing a top sup­plier in a world where every sixth per­son goes hun­gry, it aims to carve out a sim­i­lar key role in food secu­rity to the one it holds in energy sup­ply.

But while some in the grain mar­kets believe the Black Sea region can become the bread bas­ket for the entire world, right now it does not have the capac­ity to do so.
“They are some years away from being con­sid­ered a mas­sive grain pow­er­house,” said Gavin Maguire, direc­tor at Chicago bro­ker­age EHedger, though he added the region had potential.

“If they did invest sig­nif­i­cantly in the infra­struc­ture there — build­ing roads, build­ing rail and port facil­i­ties that are capa­ble of mov­ing mean­ing­ful amounts of grain — we could have some­thing inter­est­ing emerge over the next decade or so.“
Rus­sia plans to add 50 per­cent to its grain har­vests by bring­ing into use some 20 mil­lion hectares of derelict farm­land, or an area the size of West African nation Sene­gal. The tar­get was unveiled by Pres­i­dent Dmitry Medvedev at the Kremlin’s show­case World Grain Forum in St Petersburg.

This extra grain could meet a chunk of a fore­cast 50 per­cent rise in world demand over the next two decades, a result of the more than 60 mil­lion peo­ple born each year, Asia’s rapid growth and the bet­ter diet sought by a 2 billion-strong mid­dle class.

Medvedev called the world’s fix­a­tion with profit “immoral” and backed a pro­posal to cre­ate a global grain reserve to bet­ter admin­is­ter food resources and curb price spikes such as those that led to riots from Haiti to Sene­gal to Indone­sia last year.