PM Modi, Biden to meet in Tokyo, wheat export ban up for discussion

India’s move to restrict the export of wheat may come up for discussion when Prime Minister Narendra Modi and United States President Joe Biden will meet in Tokyo on Tuesday.

Biden is also likely to have “constructive and straightforward” talks with Modi on Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, as India continues to refrain from joining the US and other western nations in denouncing President Vladimir Putin of the former Soviet Union nation for ordering the launch of the military offensives against the East European country.

The impact of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine and the consequent supply disruptions on global food security is likely to be on the agenda of the ‘Quad’ summit to be held in Tokyo on the same day. “I’ll just say that food security will be a topic of conversation at the Quad,” Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told journalists on board the Air Force One en route to Tokyo.

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Sullivan is accompanying Biden on his tour to Tokyo, where the US President will hold bilateral meetings with the prime ministers of Japan, Australia and India, apart from joining them in the second in-person summit of the ‘Quad’ – a coalition of the four nations. He was asked by a journalist if Biden would nudge Modi to ease restrictions on export of wheat from India.

“It won’t be a new conversation,” Sullivan said when he was asked if Biden and Modi would discuss the Russia-Ukraine conflict. “It will be a continuation of the conversation they’ve already had about how we see the picture in Ukraine and the impacts of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine on a wider set of concerns in the world, including this food security concern,” he added, referring to earlier exchanges between the two leaders on the issue. “So, they’ll talk all of that through...and I expect that this will similarly be constructive and straightforward.”

Biden’s Secretary of Agriculture, Thomas Vilsack, already expressed “deep concern” over India’s move to restrict export of wheat. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the permanent representative of the US to the United Nations, said in New York that any restriction on exports would exacerbate the global food shortages. The Group of Seven industrialized nations also denounced India’s move to restrict export of wheat, stating that such measures would worsen the global food crisis caused by supply disruption due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

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India, however, turned the table on the western nations, accusing them of disregarding principles of equity, affordability and accessibility in the case of the anti-Covid-19 vaccines and asking them not to do the same again while dealing with global food shortages. It argued that the restrictions imposed on export of wheat on May 13 was aimed at managing its own food security and supporting the needs of neighbouring and other vulnerable developing countries.

“We have been extremely clear that you know, the principal and the needs of food security in India are paramount for us, yet at the same time, we have also been very careful and calibrated in ensuring that the needs of the vulnerable economies, the economies that are vulnerable to the risks of the food security, wherever possible, are met,” Foreign Secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra told journalists in New Delhi, explaining the Modi Government’s rationale in restricting export of wheat.

To blunt the global criticism, India sent out words that it would grant “exemptions on case-to-case basis” to allow export of wheat to its “neighbours and friends around the world”. The government already gave the go-ahead for export of 61500 MT of wheat to Egypt.