BLEAK FUTURE?: A new report estimates that climate change will result in 25 million more malnourished children by 2050.
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The people of East Africa once again face a devastating drought this year: Crops wither and fail from Kenya to Ethiopia, livestock drop dead and famine spreads. Although, historically, such droughts are not uncommon in this region, their frequency seems to have increased in recent years, raising prices for staple foods, such as maize.
This scenario may simply be a taste of a world undergoing climate change in the mid–21st century, according to a new report from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a Washington, D.C.–based organization seeking an end to hunger and poverty through appropriate local, national and international agricultural policies. By IFPRI's estimate, 25 million more children will be malnourished in 2050 due to the impact of climate change on global agriculture.
"Higher temperatures and changes in precipitation result in pressure on yields from important crops in much of the world," says IFPRI agricultural economist Gerald Nelson, an author of the report, "Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security: Impacts and Costs of Adaptation to 2050". "Biological impacts on crop yields work through the economic system resulting in reduced production, higher crop and meat prices, and a reduction in cereal consumption. This reduction means reduced calorie intake and increased childhood malnutrition."
Nelson and his colleagues, working with funding from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, estimated global agricultural impacts by pairing IFPRI's own economic models for crop yields with climate models for precipitation and temperature from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research and Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. Assuming a world that is slow to adapt to climate change and focused on regional self-reliance, the researchers found that children in the developing world—which are the countries expected to provide the bulk of population growth to nine billion or more by mid-century—will be hardest hit.
"It's not economic development that matters in this case, it's the location on the surface of the Earth," Nelson notes. Without better crop varieties or other agricultural technology improvements, irrigated wheat yields, for example, will fall at least 20 percent by 2050 as a result of global warming, and south Asia as well as parts of sub-Saharan Africa will face the worst effects.
Even without climate change, population pressure alone will cause a spike in food prices without intervention, according to IFPRI's economic model. For example, without climate change, wheat prices might rise from $113 per metric ton in 2000 to $158 per metric ton in 2050—an increase of 39 percent. Similarly, rice prices would soar by 62 percent, maize by 63 percent. But factoring in climate change will boost wheat prices by at least 170 percent and rice by a minimum of 113 percent; the cost of maize will be at least 148 percent higher than at the turn of the century by mid-century.
Nor will the developed world go unscathed. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science in August noted that corn, soybean and cotton yields in the U.S. will drop precipitously because of additional days where the temperature is above 30 degrees Celsius.
Part of the problem is that the benefits of better plant growth, thanks to higher carbon dioxide concentrations (plants use CO2 for photosynthesis) are more than offset by the impact of higher temperatures and differing precipitation. "If you grow a plant in a bell jar in a lab and increase the CO2 inside, the plants will perform better. [But] will those results translate into farmer's fields? Evidence that we've been getting from farmer's fields suggests perhaps not," Nelson says. And that means fewer calories per person would be available in 2050.
To prevent this agricultural crisis, Nelson estimates, would require an investment of at least $7 billion per year in the most affected countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America for increased agricultural research into, for example, drought-resistant crop varieties. "Crop and livestock productivity–enhancing research, including biotechnology, will be essential to help overcome stresses due to climate change," the report's authors wrote.
These areas will also need expanded rural road and irrigation infrastructure as well as improvements to the efficiency of that irrigation.
Climate change's glacial meltwaters will not aid such irrigation projects. "The glaciers, particularly in the Himalayas, may disappear and cause some of the major rivers to become much more variable, which will have negative effects on yields in south Asia," Nelson notes. At the same time, traditional seed varieties and livestock breeds that might provide a genetic resource to adapt to climate change are being lost.
Crop diseases and insect pests will also thrive in a hotter or more humid climate, and the report does not take into account issues such as current agricultural lands swamped by rising sea levels. "These are conservative estimates," Nelson adds. "Some elements we left out could make those numbers even higher."
Even those areas that will benefit from a changed climate, such as a potential expansion in regional climates amenable to certain crops in Canada, for example, will not solve the problem. "The problem is you'd have to grow corn on some pretty rocky soils," Nelson explains. "It's not clear that you'd get more production even if climate favors them."
And expanding agriculture to feed more people may simply exacerbate climate change. Deforestation, largely driven by conversion to cropland, accounts for roughly 16 percent of global emissions of the carbon dioxide warming the atmosphere.
There is hope, of course. IFPRI's fellows in the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research system are developing, for example, drought-tolerant or heat-resistant varieties of staple crops such as wheat and rice. And various efforts such as the Millennium Villages in East Africa may speed adaptation. Already, the Kenyan village of Sauri has boosted maize yields with the help of an influx of donor cash. And some Indian farmers in the state of Bihar have begun to plant hybrid rice strains because they are drought-tolerant and can be planted on lands that were previously difficult to successfully cultivate.
"Agriculture is the sector most likely to be affected by changes in climate of all sectors of society," Nelson adds. "Investment will not guarantee that all negative impacts can be overcome, but business as usual will guarantee disastrous consequences for the human race."
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29 Comments
Add CommentPlease take a remedial course in English.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe headline should be:
"How Will Climate Change Affect World Food Supplies"
Doom and Gloom! Catastrophie! Rice prices going up 113% over 50 years!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWait a minute, that's only a 1.52% annual increase.
But, you say, wheat prices will be up 170%. That's horrible!
Well, actually that's only an annual increase of 2.01%.
I guess the annual increase figures, which mean a lot more to the average person than a 50 year compounded figure, don't have quite the same impact and wouldn't give the article the proper slant. And it wouldn't quite support the final statement: "...business as usual will guarantee disastrous consequences for the human race".
The greenhouse effect should increase temoperatures increasing the cloud cover increasing the amount of moisture in the atmosphere and increasing rainfall? Why the predicted drought. Higher temperatures and higher rainfall must mean more crops growing faster. Maybe the type of crop will change, but I can't see why the overall amount of food produced being reduced, combined with better crops and farming methods why would the amount of food be reduced. Some regions may have more droughts, but I doubt it. Prehistory shows that rainfall drops in ice ages and increases in warm periods?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article fails to take into account the exponential rise in the population that will really contribute to future issues such as food, climate,energy,water.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis has been said before, but maybe it will have some beneficial effect "this time".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this" MOVE OUT OF THE DESSERT!"
Soccerdad, maybe 1.52% or 2.01% annual increase seems like very little to you, but then no one in the food security game is actually worried how 'only think of themselves' Americans like yourself will weather the storm. You're probably making 50 to 100 times more per year than the typical citizen of the countries that climate change will affect the most and because of that you see this as a minor problem of economics, perhaps buy less litres of soda per week to make up the difference. And there is a reason this article started out discussing Kenya and not Maryland. For the food insecure nations the issue isn't just rising prices as you apparently interpreted it, it's also that slightly more worrisome question 'will there be food to buy?'
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPat - the logic seems correct enough to me but not all science agrees, these answers are still fuzzy http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-change-and-clouds
@Ron-The-Elder: " MOVE OUT OF THE DESSERT!"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut I haven't had my main course yet.
Assuming you mean "desert" (the geographical feature) and not "dessert" (the sweet you have after dinner):
You willing to take the refugees? The US has a bad enough time with economic refugees from south of the border, who, given their ethnic heritage, probably have more right to be in the US than most European immigrants and their offspring. Want a few million Sudanese, Libyans, or random west Africans?
Ah. I thought that's what you might say.
joef,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe supply of food is built into the price. Such a modest rate of increase of price does not indicate a serious shortage.
As to predicitions of doom and gloom in the article, I have a few to share. These are actually from 1970, almost 40 years ago when the population was roughly half of that today.
"By&[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.
Nelsons comment "It's not economic development that matters in this case, it's the location on the surface of the Earth," regarding climate change creating more hungry children is incorrect. All that matters is how much money you have...not where you live.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisS-dad,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgain I point out the relativity of your location to the point of the article. Global grains prices will have checked inflation rates by the production of food secure nations (like ours, where the benefit of a savings account allows you to label any increase in your basic foods cost as 'modest'). As I mentioned before, this is why the article is focused on Kenya and not the Eastern US. Go to Sub-Saharan Africa right now and tell me that agricultural security is not an issue and that a decimated national crop only modestly affects the price of living.
The gloom and doom comments of the '70s (and earlier)? Yup, thankfully they highlighted the issue of food shortages to come which spurred an injection of resources to mitigate the problem. It was called the Green Revolution and funny enough this article's is advocating the same course of action. But I guess we can't know if they were wrong in the 1970s unless we test your 'don't worry about it' theory for the future. After all, the worst case scenario won't affect your lifestyle any will it? That's what matters most.
Even if global warming does increase cloud cover and rainfall, we do not decide where it's going to fall. These places of drought will probably not see a drop more water - in fact, any water they have is likely to be evaporated and poured over the oceans or up in the more tropical areas.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSoccerdad,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother way to look at this is: If food costs 10% of your income and it goes up to 15%, that is an adjustment to be made. If food costs 80% of your income and it goes up to 120%, that's a problem. Just tossing out numbers, but I believe you can see my point.
Pat,
A slight ill in your logic. Clouds don't cause moisture; clouds are moisture. Clouds form where and when the air drops to a temperature below the saturation point. There is a thing called an intertropical convergence zone, where a lot of clouds form, that shifts position with radiation budget, which basically equates global mean temperature. It isn't so much that there will be more or less rain globally; it's more that where the rain falls will change.
example
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n7/abs/ngeo554.html
The 800 lb. gorilla is the developing world's lack of access to cheap energy. This affects their ability to grow food. The "green revolution" should be more accurately titled the "petroleum-based green revolution". At the turn of the 20th century, a farmer working in his field produced 3 calories of food energy for every calorie invested.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisToday, that ratio is 10:1.... the other way... for every 10 calories of energy invested, the modern farmer produces 1 calorie of food energy. This massive deficit is covered off through the use of fossil fuels, and the massive amount of food being produced. What makes modern agriculture capable of feeding the planet is fossil fuels, not bio-fuels, or windpower or positive thinking or hypocritical greenpeace activists flying around the world on 747's selling snake oil (although snake oil may be useful as a fuel source...).
Without access to cheap energy, people starve. Figure out how to make cheap abundant energy available to all and you will have peace in the middle east and end starvation and hunger.
Make energy more expensive through cap and trade or carbon credits any of the litany of misguided politically motivated movements and you will be handing the future over to despotic dictators and genocidal maniacs. In other words, it'll be business as usual. And the dictators and maniacs will love you for it.
The only article that soccerdad agrees with is Bering's gay male sex roles article. Otherwise he always disagrees with the science. Stick to your gay porn, soccerdad. Your opinion is valueless.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMAYBE,MIGHT BE, COULD BE, MIGHT CAUSE, this article and most of the comment posters are heaping B.S. on top of B.S. with NO REAL knowlage. There will not be 9 billion people. The global cooling already started WILL CAUSE disease and famine and this WILL BE made worse by badly informed government actions. Nothing new, this has happened many times before.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn typical progressive liberal drivel, you fail to fill in the rest of the story. It is the social activist environmentalist who is impacting the world food supplies. With imposing all this voodoo science onto the industrialized countries, and further pushing unnecessary regulations through government agencies like the EPA. Burdens of compliance are stuffed right down industrialized countries, and its agricultural industries to adopt or else regulations damaging to the profitability of those interests.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is no climate change being done by man-made sources. Other than perhaps very local establishments that are not using modern emissions reduction equipment.
But progressive liberalism and its holy mantra of environmental causes is damaging our internal security as industrial and agricultural nations. The burdens being placed on these securities is threatening our existence as a soverign society.
There is more social engineering going on inside the Green Agenda than improving the environment. The Green Agenda intrusions are devastating to the profitability of our way of modern life. If we follow the Green Agenda, our agricultural industries, such as farming will become so overwhelmed by added costs and extremely intrusive government interventions the farm as we know it will have to reverse modernization and go back to horse drawn ploughs. Energy will be so expensive, and undependable that rural users will not be able to power up today's modern farming machinery because it consumes to much energy as being recorded by those wonderful "Smart Meters" now being assigned by local utility companies.
Our society today will be the first society to reverse modernization and de-industrialize western democracies.
I don't think I said I agreed with it. I said the discussion there was more interesting than elswhere on the site.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd why do you have such an obsession with gay porn?? Just wondering.
It is commonsense that if the eyes see the eatable stuff the fingers grab it to stuff into mouth. Secondly any body with a good gastro-intestoinal tone will not say ever no to food.The way out is hide food from the angle of view and secondly swera not to take any drink or food or snack unless there is hunger in the mind and stomach is nearly empty.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do good deal of yoga and relatively old fellow in the late 60's. My digestion system is very virulent and luckily my eye sight is good in so far as the food and snacks go. So I am slightly obese. and diabetic for the last 15 yr. thrivikramji@gmail.com
why does this article only look to biotechnology as hope for the future? maybe because its a science magazine, or maybe because the organic movement doesn't involve as many long words, or as many highly-skilled, highly-paid professionals. i simply suggest that if young people of the world were taught how to grow food in harmony with the natural systems of the planet, they could sustain themselves by replacing the current system with more balanced forms community planning, organization, and local distribution.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn a general way, global warming in theory should equal increased evaporation leading to more clouds leading to more rainfall, somewhere. Global cooling and ice ages will be more generally typified by clear skies and less precipitation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article above rather confuses the picture because it implies that warming is causing the drought in Central Africa whereas the anecdotal reports I have seen complain of unusual cold temperatures causing crop failures.
You can't just wave the magic phrase "Climate Change" like a wand to explain everything. Intellectual honesty and rigor requires what kind of climate change is meant--hotter or colder? It does make a difference, as Cap and Trade rules enacted into law effectively will transfer a trillion dollars in wealth from some unlucky people to some favored people, so it is not a course to be taken lightly without a complete and accurate fact picture.
It's not so much climate change that is threatening agriculture in the third world, but american and european farm subsidies!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo where is the so-called free market? As has been said many times, Socialism is only for the rich...
More to the point, in Somalia the latest complaint is that cold temperatures have killed the harvests this Fall. A coming Ice Age also causes drought, by the way, because a cooler atmosphere does not take up as much water through the evaporative process, which is why both the Arctic and the Antarctic are quite arid places.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy proposition is this: we are a decade into the next Little Ice Age and dramatic cuts in human-produced carbon dioxide will only serve to make the climate colder (but only a tiny little bit because CO2 is not now and never has been one of the big dogs in climate change.
Wow, I didn't know that global warming was impacting us that badly yet!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisKatie Sams
I'd sure that be dependent on South Dakota and Iowa for my food supply, than on Brazil or Somalia. Sure, when things are going smooth in those countries they probably can grow cheap crops, but in the best case they will want higher living standards rapidly and that means agricultural prices will rise eventually anyway, plus things don't always go smooth in those countries.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSimple logic tells me that global warming, considering that 70% of the planet's surface is water, will increase evaporation, causing more rain, not less. As far as global warming of the arctic is concerned, it will increase arable land and growing season in the two largest countries in the world: Russia and Canada. There may be no need to panic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSimple logic tells me that global warming, considering that 70% of the planet's surface is water, will increase evaporation, causing more rain, not less. As far as global warming of the arctic is concerned, it will increase arable land and growing season in the two largest countries in the world: Russia and Canada. There may be no need to panic.
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Off course the food supplies will be effected or is depended on the climatic situation. Food been supplied in winter is only been supplied in winter not in other seasons. As a result of global warming, hot areas are being getting more hotter and cold areas are being getting more freezing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRegards,
Avelina
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