Source: Financial Times, 31st May 2011

For believers in unfettered global trade, there is an unfortunate outcome to Russia's ten-month ban on grain exports, which expires on Wednesday. At least as far as Russia was concerned, it worked. Not only did the restriction cause domestic prices to collapse, helping to restrain one of the highest rates of inflation in the developing world, but it also averted a mass cull of livestock. That, after all, was the main fear arising from the terrible harvest: that poor farmers facing higher feed costs would start to slaughter herds, threatening the nation's aim of 85 per cent self-sufficiency in meat by 2015.