Climate change is going to affect our food supplies - arguably it already has, as wheat production was adversely affected by unseasonable damp weather (Scotland 2004) and unusually hot weather in Europe (2003). It has been said that bad harvests here and there are being offset by better ones somewhere else (eg wheat vs soybeans in the US 2006), but now the poor harvests seem to be showing up in crop prices:
Why is the price of bread important? - BBC News
Why wheat is luring the breadwinners - Guardian Unlimited
The BBC article doesn't explicitly mention climate change but I'm positive the reference to poor overseas harvests means the bad harvest in Australia.
Also:
Warming Could Cut China Grain Crops by over a Third - Planet Ark
I am not an expert in economics or politics and I wonder what the forum thinks will happen as supplies get tighter. Will we see states eschewing globalisation in favour of protectionism? Or will we see a spreading of the African model where starving people grow crops they can't afford to eat for export to people with more money? Will governments eventually impose rationing, if so, how will they source the food? Which countries are presently self-sufficient in food? Your thoughts please...
OisÃn
hello canada !
yes. it's all real.
i think i found out about the recent news about this on your news website :-
http://www.climatechangenews.org
and i found the very instructive map on here :-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6200114.stm
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/05/americas-breadbasket-moves-to-canada
the cornbelt in the united states is moving north.
yes. the wheat crop has been affected. yes. the big ethanol plan is impacted.
yes. the competition between food and fuel has begun.
and the investors are circling like sharks on the wheat market :-
http://money.guardian.co.uk/investments/alternativeinvesting/story/0,,1983663,00.html
more food news
Drought to slash summer crop production - West Australian
The drought will slash Australia's summer crop production to its lowest level in more than 20 years. After running a scythe through the winter grain harvest, the big dry is set to take a huge toll on water-intensive summer crops like cotton and rice.
The federal government's rural economic forecaster, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE), says summer crop production will fall 59 per cent in 2006-07 to 1.9 million tonnes - the smallest haul since 1982-83.
Rice production will plummet 90 per cent to just 106,000 tonnes, and cotton production will be down 42 per cent at 250,000 tonnes. ABARE is tipping grain sorghum production to fall 51 per cent to 996,000 tonnes.
The science of lost food production
So, now we have scientific evidence of crop loss :-
http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=12793&channel=0
Farmers count cost of climate change: $5bn in lost crops (21 March 2007)
American researchers have estimated that the impact of climate change on the productivity of cereal farms around the world has cost the global economy US$5bn over 20 years.
Rising temperatures between 1981-2002 have resulted in harvests of wheat, corn and barley being 800 million tonnes less than they might otherwise have expected to have been, say academics from the Carnegie Institution and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
According to the researchers their paper, published this week in online science journal Environmental Research Letters, brings home the fact that the effects of climate change are already being felt and its impact is economic as well as environmental.
"Most people tend to think of climate change as something that will impact the future," said Christopher Field, co-author on the study and director of Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, California.
"But this study shows that warming over the past two decades has already had real effects on global food supply."
The study is the first to estimate how much global food production has already been affected by climate change. The researchers compared yield figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization with average temperatures and rainfall in the major growing regions.
They found that, on average, global yields for several of the crops responded negatively to warmer temperatures, with yields dropping by about 3-5 percent for every degree Fahrenheit the mercury crept up the thermometer.
Average global temperatures increased by about 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit during the study period, with even larger changes in several regions.
"Though the impacts are relatively small compared to the technological yield gains over the same period, the results demonstrate that negative impacts are already occurring," said Mr David Lobell, lead author of the study and a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The researchers focused on the six most widely grown crops in the world: wheat, rice, maize, soybeans, barley and sorghum. These crops account for over half of the total food consumed by humans and almost three quarters of the feed given to livestock.
The main value of this study, the authors said, was that it demonstrates a clear and simple correlation between temperature increases and crop yields at the global scale.
But they also argued that it showed that investment into climate adaptation in agriculture would save the global economy billions of dollars, as well as millions of lives.