The destruction of the Kakhovka dam will cut off the water supply to hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland, Ukraine’s agriculture ministry has warned, underlining the devastating impact of the disaster on an already hard-hit cornerstone of the country’s economy.

Ukraine’s agricultural sector, which has been a key link in the world’s grain supply, has in the past year had its harvests paralyzed by land mines, fires and Russian rockets.

The damage from Tuesday’s dam disaster will affect farmlands that before the war yielded millions of tons of grain and oil crops, worth about $1.5 billion, the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday, in what it called a preliminary assessment.

Now, 94 per cent of the irrigation systems in the Kherson region, 74 per cent in Zaporizhzhia and 30 per cent in Dnipropetrovsk will be left without a source of water, it said.

“The fields in the south of Ukraine may turn into deserts as early as next year,” it said.

The water shortage will not be limited to farmland, but will also affect drinking water supplies in populated areas. President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Wednesday in a post on the Telegram messaging app that “hundreds of thousands of people have been left without normal access to drinking water” by the dam disaster.

The ministry predicted that about 25,000 acres of agricultural land on the east bank of the Dnipro river, which is held by Ukraine, would be flooded. The flooding on the west bank of the river, which is under Russian occupation, will be much more severe, it said.

The ministry said that the fishing industry would also be affected.

New York Times News Service