Climate Warming Means Food Shortages, Study Warns
Date: 12-Jan-09
Country: US
Author: Cheryl Ravelo
Climate Warming Means Food Shortages, Study Warns Photo:
Cheryl Ravelo
A worker pours out imported rice from a sack so it can be repacked and sold
at subsidised prices inside a national Food Authority warehouse in Taguig
City, metro Manila June 17, 2008.
Photo: Cheryl Ravelo
WASHINGTON - The warming climate is likely to put stress on crops and
livestock alike and could cause serious food shortages for half the world's
population, U.S. researchers predicted on Thursday.
The worst effects will be in the regions where the poorest people already
live -- the tropics and subtropics, the researchers wrote in the journal
Science. But temperate regions will see very warm average temperatures, they
added.
"In temperate regions, the hottest seasons on record will represent the
future norm in many locations," David Battisti, a University of Washington
atmospheric sciences professor, and Rosamond Naylor, director of Food
Security and the Environment at California's Stanford University, wrote in
their report.
The two combined direct observations with data from 23 global climate
models.
They found a greater than a 90 percent probability that by 2100,
growing-season low temperatures in the tropics and subtropics will be higher
than the highest current temperatures.
"We are taking the worst of what we've seen historically and saying that in
the future it is going to be a lot worse unless there is some kind of
adaptation," Naylor said.
There have been some recent tastes of what is to come, such as a heat wave
that struck Europe in summer 2003 and resulted in deaths and reduced food
production, they said.
Record temperatures hurt key crops including maize and fruit and accelerated
crop ripening by 10 to 20 days. Livestock were stressed, the soil was dryer
and more water was used in agriculture, they said.
Italy experienced a record drop in maize yields of 36 percent from a year
earlier, and in France maize and fodder production fell by 30 percent, fruit
harvests declined by 25 percent and wheat harvests declined by 21 percent,
they wrote.
"I think what startled me the most is that when we looked at our historic
examples there were ways to address the problem within a given year. People
could always turn somewhere else to find food," Naylor said. "But in the
future there's not going to be any place to turn unless we rethink our food
supplies."
Battisti said 3 billion people live in the areas that will be worst
affected. The researchers urged investment in development of crop varieties
that can withstand higher heat.
"You are talking about hundreds of millions of additional people looking for
food because they won't be able to find it where they find it now," he said.
"The stresses on global food production from temperature alone are going to
be huge, and that doesn't take into account water supplies stressed by the
higher temperatures."
(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
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