Why look at plants during the war? Artist and researcher Iryna Zamuruieva writes about rapeseed, taking a long view of the political ecology of land relations in Ukraine and what it means for postwar social and ecological recovery.
There are many shades of yellow one sees from the train across Ukraine: corn, soybeans, sunflower, wheat, and, more recently, rapeseed. Rapeseed’s pale yellow, near-lemon hue flowers can be seen in most central regions, where the soil is neither too arid nor too swampy for it to be grown and harvested, in millions of tons annually. Its stem is sleek, with seed pods sticking out on all sides, flowers each having strictly four petals, in the shape of a cross.
In recent years, the rapeseed fields in Ukraine have nearly tripled in size, reaching 1.5 million hectares. In 2022, despite the beginning of the full-scale war, the country exported $1.55 billion’s worth of rapeseed, making it the world’s third-largest exporter of the crop. The reason behind this expansion is the consistent and high demand for feedstock by the EU countries, which import about 90 percent of Ukraine’s rapeseed. Rapeseed is mostly known for making cooking oil, but its cultivation in Ukraine has little to do with food.
Rapeseed has been tangled in the EU’s attempt to address climate change for nearly three decades. Like several other oil-rich plants—such as soya and palm—it can be turned into fuel for diesel engines. Rapeseed thus enters the EU climate stage as a supposedly clean, sustainable, and renewable energy source. However, an overview of EU energy statistics makes it clear that relying on such monocrop plantations to prevent climate collapse has not led to any significant decreases in fossil fuels over the past 30 years. If anything, it is causing more harm, albeit in less discernible ways.
There is nothing inherently wrong with rapeseed—the method, the scale, and the infrastructures of its cultivation are the problem. With more land in Ukraine used for monocrop rapeseed plantations, and a projected increase in the coming years, what is often omitted from political visions of an energy transition reliant on agrofuels is the amount of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers used to maintain high yields, as well as the social and ecological consequences. While the EU eventually made a policy U-turn on biofuel’s role in the energy transition, going from promoting to capping, its demand for oilseeds for cooking and agrofuel production remains a key driver behind Ukraine’s rapeseed expansion, with Poland, Romania, Germany, and Belgium the top importers.
The production, distribution, and usage of fertilizers in particular lead to high emissions of nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas that can trap heat 300 times more than carbon dioxide, thus escalating climate change. With 100,000 tons of pesticides entering Ukraine’s soil and eventually waters annually, their toxicity along with the absence of any legal pesticide-destruction facilities and the cross-border trafficking of counterfeit chemicals pose a severe threat to the country’s future as the human and ecological effects of these might take decades to manifest themselves.
Paradoxically, to look at the social and ecological effects of rapeseed plantations, we are forced to look away from the plant itself and back at those actors behind its growing presence in Ukrainian soils. The top three are subsidiaries of the United States’ ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) and Cargill, and of Switzerland’s Glencore. The rest include a mix of other foreign subsidiaries and large Ukrainian agricultural holdings such as NIBULON, COFCO, and MHP (Myronivsky Hliboproduct). Some looking at the politics of land in Ukraine also point to the domestic and EU political elites that foster an oligarchic agrofuel project, reinforcing injustices by turning vast swaths of Ukrainian land into a commodity and a raw-material provision ground, amenable to exhaustion.
Looking at rapeseed is an exercise not only in spatial but also temporal imagination. “This project should guarantee constant supply for our companies, because in Ukraine, as before, a large area of land is not used,” said Peter Schrum in 2007, the head of Germany’s Federal Association of Regenerative Mobility at the time. He explained its intention to rent 50,000 hectares of land in Ukraine to secure access to raw material for biofuel production.
A certain “before” is sometimes evoked as one particular starting point of arguments on the future of land relations in Ukraine: 1917 and the following decade, when the Bolsheviks abolished private property and began redistributing land among peasants with no compensation for the former landowners and persecution of those who refused or resisted forced collectivization. The image of this point in time creates a particular backdrop to the narrative around the land reform put into law by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2020, in which enforcement of the land market—the key purpose of the reform—was portrayed as the reversal of a century of historic injustice.
Ukraine’s government and environmentalists understandably draw the world’s attention to the ecological destruction Russia is committing at scale in the country. Its consequences are devastating, with about 30 percent of agricultural, “natural,” and residential land covered in land mines as well as chemical and physical pollution. Eruptions from aerial bombs and artillery shelling, mined territories, destroyed heavy military equipment, leakage of oil products, burned areas from fires, and mass tree, plant, and animal deaths are all evidence of the war-induced harm to the living worlds. Heavy metals like arsenic, copper, and lead are left behind from war actions and, like agricultural pesticides, they can accumulate in plants and the bodies of animals and travel across the food web, bringing toxicity to bodies near and far from the front line. However, understanding the ongoing environmental degradation requires seeing successive land reforms—to-ing and fro-ing between private and collective ownership—and ecological harm in a wider timeframe, not just through the most politically convenient recent point in history.
The difficult part of the story is that what is often referred to as “ecocide” might have an earlier starting date. Before the full-scale war, more than 20 percent of Ukraine’s agricultural land had already been degraded (agricultural land occupies 70 percent of the country) and about half a million tons of soil lost each year due to erosion. This is exacerbated by climate change, but it is largely due to continuous extractivist agriculture, during Soviet and independence times, that prioritize fast and large-scale production of export “cash crops,” like rapeseed, instead of taking care of the health of the soil, biodiversity, and ecological health in the long run.
There is no convenient “before” to go back to in the postwar recovery, and there is no way around learning to see many facets and feral effects of harm to life, be it because of the war or agri-logistics. While there are some voices in Ukraine working to prevent it from slipping back into the prewar agriculture model, many questions remain: who is and will be dealing with the toxicity left behind? What prospects does rapeseed have compared to forest-steppe plants like adonis vernalis? What places will become a priority and receive more resources for recovery? And how might this alleviate or exacerbate existing social injustices? How we imagine and construct answers to these questions will depend on how we collectively understand the long and political history of environmental degradation.
Korrespondent.net, “German biofuel producers intend to lease Ukrainian lands” (in Ukrainian). October 3, 2007, https://ua.korrespondent.net/
Ecoaction – Centre for Environmental Initiatives, “The impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine on the state of the country’s soil Analysis results,” May 16, 2023, https://en.ecoaction.org.ua/
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), “FAO kicks off project aimed at tackling land degradation in Ukraine,” May 10, 2018. https://www.fao.org/
Iryna Zamuruieva is an artist, activist, cultural geographer, and independent researcher. She was a fellow at the IWM in 2024.
