Rostov's agricultural emergency

Rostov’s agricultural emergency is not an isolated weather story but a junction at which climate stress, sanctions-era fragility, labour and fuel shortages, and wartime policy collide. In late September 2025, Moscow elevated Rostov Oblast’s earlier regional drought measures to a federal-level agricultural emergency after months of withered fields and failed reseeds, allowing expanded compensation and central support. Local officials now expect the oblast’s smallest harvest in a decade, with volumes down roughly one-fifth, and analysts note that neighbouring Stavropol could displace Rostov as Russia’s leading wheat region for the first time since 2015.

Through the summer, the signals were already clear. Harvest progress across Russia lagged badly, with July figures showing grain collected at roughly a quarter of the prior year’s pace and yields sliding from about 41 to 31 quintals per hectare. The worst shortfalls were in the southern belt and the North Caucasus—regions such as Rostov that are typically the first to bring in the crop and set the season’s tone. Rostov itself warned in July that drought could cut its output by about 20 per cent; by month’s end, press and consultancy reporting converged upon the same conclusion.

Drought is the trigger; vulnerability is the accelerant. Three war-related pressures have made Rostov’s shock harder to absorb and have pushed a local emergency toward a national agricultural squeeze.

First, inputs and machinery. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Western suppliers have suspended shipments and sanctions have tightened access to modern machinery, parts and software. Domestic production and grey market imports fill some gaps, but the result is costlier, slower and less reliable servicing of combines, tractors and seeders—the very kit a drought year demands to exploit narrow harvest windows. Russia’s own data and independent research point to steep drops in agricultural machinery output and sales in 2025, and to persistent bottlenecks in spare parts. The seed side is no less exposed: Russia has long depended on imported high-performance hybrids for crops such as sugar beet and maize; quotas and politics have oscillated, but the underlying dependence has not vanished. By late 2024, official figures showed seed imports down almost 60 per cent year-on-year even as the government selectively raised quotas for sugar beet seed from ‘unfriendly’ countries—an implicit admission that substitution remains essential.

Second, fuel and logistics. A drought-stressed harvest is energy-intensive: more passes, more hauling, more drying. Yet 2025 has brought repeated Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian refineries and fuel infrastructure, thinning gasoline availability and tightening diesel balances in multiple regions. Traders and officials describe refining cuts and regional shortages; analysts report rising premiums that filter quickly into farm gate costs. Even temporary price spikes during peak fieldwork undermine margins and delay operations, particularly for independent farms without captive fuel supply.

Third, labour. Mobilisation, emigration and the chilling effect on migrant inflows have left Russia with a structural worker deficit that authorities themselves quantify in the millions. Agriculture is amongst the sectors feeling the pinch, with estimates of hundreds of thousands of unfilled positions this year. Skilled seasonal labour—operators able to keep older or improvised machinery running under pressure—has become scarcer just as equipment is harder to maintain.

These constraints do not merely depress Rostov’s numbers; they also limit Russia’s ability to offset Rostov’s shortfall elsewhere. Stavropol’s better moisture profile may lift its relative standing, but nationwide harvest data through mid-summer pointed to a markedly slower grain campaign and weaker early yields. International and Russian outlets have already chronicled a sharp mid-year lag and warned that 2025’s wheat and coarse-grain volumes may slip from recent highs, with export availability correspondingly tighter. FAO’s (the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) mid-year brief still envisaged solid cereal exports on the back of carry-in stocks, but that forecast preceded the full brunt of the southern drought and remains sensitive to late-season weather and logistics.

The war against Ukraine is entangled with these agricultural stresses in other, more direct ways. Russia’s sustained campaign against Ukrainian ports and storage has repeatedly raised maritime insurance and re-routed flows, while Ukraine’s own adaptations—Danube corridor expansion, coastal convoys—have preserved global supply but with volatility. Each escalation tightens financing and raises risk premia for Black Sea origination generally, including Russian exporters. At the same time, Russia’s budget priorities and wartime taxation siphon capital from farm modernisation, grain-handling upgrades and irrigation renewal that could have blunted this year’s drought. The cumulative effect is a more brittle system in which a single season’s weather shock in a key oblast ripples farther than it should.

For Ukraine, the link runs the other way as well: the Kremlin’s attacks have devastated her own agriculture—mined fields, destroyed grain elevators, damaged machinery, and recurrent strikes on Odesa-region port facilities—but Kyiv has nevertheless restored significant maritime export capacity, underscoring that the balance of resilience between the two warring parties is not fixed. Damage assessments by international and Ukrainian institutions tally over eleven billion dollars in direct losses to Ukraine’s farm sector by end-2024, yet the country has kept grain moving. Russia’s choice to prosecute port and logistics warfare has therefore rebounded: it has not eliminated Ukrainian competition but has darkened the investment climate and raised costs for all Black Sea exporters, including Russia’s drought-hit south.

The consequences for Russian domestic politics and for global food security are subtle rather than sensational. Russia still holds large stocks from bumper harvests in 2022–23 and can draw down inventories; federal emergency status unlocks compensation that may curb farm bankruptcies; and exporters can recalibrate between Novorossiysk, Taman and river routes. Yet price and availability risks will concentrate in Russia’s south and in dependent downstream sectors—feed, poultry, and sugar—where imported inputs and energy costs already bite. For international markets, Rostov’s shortfall narrows the buffer that has cushioned global wheat prices since last year, particularly if coincident weather shocks strike other exporters.

If one takes three scenarios—first, a dry baseline in which Rostov’s drought reduces Russia’s overall grain harvest by roughly 10 to 12 million tonnes compared with 2024, but carry-in stocks of perhaps 25 million tonnes are available, then Russia might still ship about 45 million tonnes of cereals abroad in 2025–26, a decline but not a collapse. In a second scenario, the dry baseline is compounded by fuel constraints that delay harvest and transport, raising post-harvest losses by several million tonnes and increasing domestic feed diversion; under those conditions, exports could sink closer to 38–40 million tonnes. A third, more optimistic scenario (for Russia) assumes more normalised late-season weather in central Russia and Volga regions, but recognises continued sanctions-era constraints on machinery and seed. In this case, harvest volumes might recover part of the Rostov loss, allowing exports to stabilise in the upper 40s, but unlikely to return to the peaks of 2022–23. These scenarios are not forecasts but illustrations: they underline how climate stress interacts with war-induced fragility to shift Russia’s role as a reliable supplier from one season to the next.

In sum, Rostov’s emergency is a climate event amplified by war economy distortions. Sanctions and self-sanctioning (through depriving the agricultural sector of funds) have constrained the high-end machinery and seed ecology on which modern yields depend; oil refinery strikes and labour scarcity have raised operating friction; and Black Sea logistics have become a theatre of contestation that taxes all participants. The Kremlin can declare emergencies and write cheques; it cannot, in the near term, legislate rain, conjure skilled mechanics, or rebuild a sanctions-compatible agricultural supply chains. Unless these structural constraints ease, each new weather shock will propagate more widely through Russia’s food system—and through the Black Sea grain market that Ukraine, despite the war, still helps to anchor.