Amid surging food prices worldwide, and institutions such as the World Bank warning of a global food crisis, Kazakhstan has decided to ban wheat exports until September. The reason for Kazakhstan’s move is to curb domestic inflation, in part spurred by growing wheat prices.

The question right now is whether the government will also ban the export of wheat from previously signed contracts. Analysts have voiced their concern that the impact on global prices of such a move could be significant.

The other four Central Asian countries all import Kazakh grain, and the poor in all countries have been hit severely by recent price surges. Vadim reported from Tajikistan:

We already buy one non (round bread) for two somonis (almost 60 cents). Last week it cost 1 somoni and one year ago it cost 20 dirams (1 somoni = 100 dirams).

RFE/RL reports:

Kazakhstan is the breadbasket of Central Asia, and the only state in the region that exports grain, about 50 percent of the 21 million tons it says it harvested last year. According to Stratfor, Kyrgyzstan imports 214,000 tons of grain from Kazakhstan; Tajikistan 216,000 tons; Uzbekistan 117,000 tons; and Turkmenistan 2,400 tons.

Central Asian countries have few alternatives to Kazakh grain. Transportation costs often make grain from elsewhere prohibitively expensive, while growing more grain of their own is not a viable option. Much of the land in Kazakhstan’s four southern neighbors is used to grow cotton, and the cropland that exists is incapable of providing enough grain for the bread needed for the roughly 45 million people living there.

Although banning the export of wheat during the planting season is not uncommon practice as the RFE/RL article says, the Kazakh export ban is nevertheless worrying for other countries in the region. Much of the region’s southern arable land is primarily used for growing cotton and cannot easily be converted into growing food crops.

Let’s hope that global food price inflation will come down during this year so that the Kazakh export ban really only has to last until September.