Since summer, signs of severe food insecurity — droughts, food
riots, five- to tenfold increases in produce costs — have erupted
around the globe. Several new reports now argue that regionally
catastrophic crop failures — largely due to heat stress — are
signals that global warming may have begun outpacing the ability of
farmers to adapt.
Some
one billion people already suffer serious malnutrition. That
number could mushroom, the new reports argue, if governments big and
small don’t begin heeding warning signs like spikes in the price of
food staples.
Severe summer droughts in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan ravaged
2010 cereal yields. When Russia, the fourth largest wheat exporter,
imposed an export ban in August, international markets responded
with price spikes. Having sold around 17 million metric tons on
world markets in 2009, Russia’s 2010 wheat exports are expected to
fall closer to 4 million metric tons, according to a November
Food Outlook report by the
United Nations Food
and Agricultural Organization, or FAO. (Russia’s export ban is
slated to remain in effect until next July.)
Overall,
FAO reports, food imports by the world’s poorest nations are
expected to cost 11 percent more in 2010 than a year earlier — and
20 percent more for some low-income food-importing countries. FAO
predicts the total cost of 2010 food imports will be roughly $1
trillion — a near-record level. Contributing to the problem is a 2
percent drop in global cereal yields; earlier this year 2010 cereal
production had been expected to post a 1 percent gain.
Food prices offer a good proxy for agriculture’s health, notes
Gerald Nelson, an economist with the
International Food
Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. Rising prices
signal increasing resource scarcity, he explains, which can be
triggered by expanding populations, growing incomes (because people
can afford more and better food) and declining crop yields.
Recent food-price shocks and yield shortfalls initially surprised
analysts, note IFPRI’s Derek Headey and Shenggen Fan in a November
18
report. Government officials had been lulled into complacency by
decades of falling food costs. But prices bottomed out around 2000
and have since begun climbing in response to commodities speculation
and a string of poor harvests, the pair notes.
Nelson and his colleagues have now used computer models to get
some grasp on how crop yields and prices might respond, several
decades out, to Earth’s continuing low-grade fever.
The team considered three scenarios of income and population
growth that might reasonably be expected to occur between 2020 and
2050. Then they applied four “plausible” climate scenarios with
warmer temperatures and anywhere from slightly to substantially
wetter weather. They also included an “implausible fifth scenario of
perfect mitigation (a continuation of today’s climate into the
future).”
The resulting 15 scenarios all indicated that in contrast to the
20th century, when food prices fell, the 21st century would see
prices rise. Probably by a lot.
Even with today’s climate, food prices would rise over the next
40 years in response to pressures from growing populations and
incomes. Rice prices, for instance, would increase roughly 11 to 55
percent. Throw in additional warming and prices can rise
substantially more — a minimum of 31 percent for rice and perhaps a
doubling for corn.
The analyses clearly point to “climate change as a
threat-multiplier,” concludes Nelson. His team unveiled its findings
December 1 in a report prepared for release at the
United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Cancun,
Mexico.
Lighter wallets are hardly the most dire fallout of rising food
costs. An
analysis that Nelson’s group issued last year projected that
food affordability by 2050 will likely trigger a decline in intake
throughout the developing world — with people downing fewer calories
than was typical in 2000. This could hike child malnutrition rates
20 percent above what would occur in the absence of climate change,
Nelson’s group concluded.
Investments could be made to offset the negative impacts of
climate on agriculture and childhood malnutrition. But they’d be
high, IFPRI estimated: more than $7 billion annually.
Last year’s greenhouse-gas releases have been fueling pessimism
that nations will be able to brake their emissions trajectories
soon. Owing to the global recession, people had expected 2009
greenhouse gas releases to drop precipitously, notes climate
scientist Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter in
England. “Global emissions did decrease 1.3 percent, but that’s only
equivalent to four days of emissions.”
Despite a sharp downturn in the economies of major industrial
countries, China and India both experienced healthy climbs in income
during 2009 and in the fossil-fuel emissions that powered those
economic gains. Right now, world greenhouse emissions are again
rising, and appear on track in 2010 to climb more than 3 percent,
Friedlingstein’s team reported online in Nature Geoscience
on November 21.
“The globe essentially faces a daunting task in terms of climate
change,” notes Bruce Campbell, director of a Copenhagen-based
climate and food program of the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research. Worldwide rates of hunger and malnutrition
are already “unacceptable,” he notes. Yet despite climate’s immense
impacts on food production, agriculture remains largely ignored in
international negotiations of climate and emissions policies.
“What we’re hoping,” Campbell says, “is that agriculture gets put
on the agenda.”
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