United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he wrote a letter to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in an effort to revive the Black Sea Grain Initiative.
"We have some concrete solutions for the concerns allowing for an effective or more effective access of Russian food and fertilizers to global markets at adequate prices," Guterres told reporters during a news conference at the U.N. headquarters in New York.
"We believe that the Black Sea initiative has given a very important contribution to make the food markets more adequate to our objectives of food security," he said, adding the deal brought prices down and created conditions for access to global markets of many countries.
"We believe it would be extremely important to renew it. And at the same time, we took into concern the Russian requests, and I believe we presented a proposal that could be the basis for renewal," he said.
But Guterres stressed that renewal "must be stable."
"We cannot have a Black Sea initiative that moves from crisis to crisis from suspension to suspension. We need to have something that works and that works to the benefit of everybody," he said.
The war in Ukraine sent food commodity prices to record highs last year and contributed to a global food crisis also tied to other conflicts, the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, droughts and other climate factors.
High costs for grain needed for food staples in places like Egypt, Lebanon and Nigeria exacerbated economic challenges and helped push millions more people into poverty or food insecurity.
The U.N. and Türkiye brokered the Black Sea Grain Initiative with Russia and Ukraine in July 2022 to help alleviate a global food crisis worsened by Moscow's invasion and blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Last month, Moscow suspended the deal until its demands to get its own food and fertilizer to the world were met.
