Food Supply Hangs in the Balance

The
current devastating drought in East Africa, where millions of people
are on the brink of starvation, is a window on our future, suggests a
new study looking at the impacts of climate change.

A
farmer carries dried corn outside Jalapa, Guatemala September 26, 2009.
Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom declared a state of "calamity" over
food supply in Guatemala, where a prolonged dry spell has reduced the
harvest of staples like maize and beans by up to 50 percent. Not
isolated to Guatemala, the food supply crisis is a global, and without
radical improvements in the food supply system, things could get much
worse. (REUTERS/Daniel LeClair)

"Twenty-five million more children
will be malnourished in 2050 due to effects of climate change," such as
decreased crop yields, crop failures and higher food prices, concluded
the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) study.

"Of
all human economic activities, agriculture is by far the most
vulnerable to climate change," warned the report's author, Gerald
Nelson, an agricultural economist with IFPRI, a Washington-based group
focused on global hunger and poverty issues.

The report,
"Quantifying the Costs of Agricultural Adaptation to Climate Change",
may be the "most comprehensive assessment of the impact of climate
change on agriculture to date", as IFPRI claims, but researchers
concede that there is no current way to quantify all of the future
repercussions of changing weather patterns on the food supply.

A
critical component of agriculture is knowing the best time to plant
seeds, for example. Farmers rely on their past experience and weather
records. But one of the most robust science findings is that climate
change has and will produce significant increases in weather
variability.

This means extremes like droughts or floods will
happen more often or last longer, and extreme temperature shifts are
more likely. The past is no longer a reliable guide for farmers because
the fundamental conditions in the atmosphere have been altered - far
more heat is being trapped in the atmosphere today because of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases than at any time since the dawn of
agriculture.

Nelson told IPS that the IFPRI report is a
"conservative estimate" of the potential impacts and does not include
impacts of pests and disease, loss of farmland due to rising sea levels
or loss of water from melting glaciers.

The enormous glacier
system of the Himalayas-Hindu Kush and high-elevation Tibetan Plateau
are the main source of water for 1.3 billion people in Asia. Recent
studies as reported by IPS revealed that these glaciers are shrinking
faster than anywhere on the planet and could melt away by 2035,
according to the International Commission on Snow and Ice in Kathmandu,
Nepal.

"There's been a super-rapid decline in the glaciers of the
region," Charles Kennel of the University of California San Diego
Sustainability Solutions Institute told IPS previously.

A similar
situation is now evident in South America, where massive glaciers that
provide water for tens if not hundreds of millions of people are
melting away.

Moreover, the IFPRI study does not look at future
expansion of biofuel, bioenergy crops or tree plantations that will
occupy some of existing food production land.

Even without those
additional and considerable pressures on global food production, the
IFPRI report estimates that by 2050, irrigated wheat yield will have
fallen by 30 percent and irrigated rice by 15 percent.

Food
prices would be normally be expected to rise over a period of 40 years,
but with climate change, prices will skyrocket: wheat by 170 to 194
percent, rice 113 to 121 percent, and maize 148 to 153 percent higher.

Developing
countries will be hit hardest by climate change, and will face bigger
declines in crop yields and production than industrialised countries,
the study found. The negative effects of climate change are especially
pronounced in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

"Agriculture is
extremely vulnerable to climate change because farming is so
weather-dependent. Small-scale farmers in developing countries will
suffer the most," noted report co-author Mark Rosegrant, director of
IFPRI's Environment and Production Technology Division.

However,
much of this scenario can be avoided with action on climate change and
"seven billion U.S. dollars per year of additional investments in
agricultural productivity to help farmers to adapt to the effects of
climate change", Nelson said.

These investments would be for
agricultural research, improved irrigation, and rural roads to increase
market access for poor farmers, he said. Public agricultural research
has suffered serious declines in funding for the past decade and more,
according to many experts.

Currently, the entire global budget of
the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)
is less than half a billion dollars, said Nelson.

Founded in
1971, CGIAR is a global alliance of researchers, governments and civil
society groups that mobilises science to benefit the poor.

"In the past, if investments in agricultural research are made they directly result in productivity boosts," Nelson noted.

Government
investment is needed to provide public goods like improved crops, more
efficient irrigation systems and infrastructure, he said, cautioning
against "one-size fits all" solutions.

Agriculture is location-specific and it is "far more complicated than rocket science", he added.

Nelson
is a supporter of small-scale traditional agriculture, which was also
the overall finding of the three-year International Assessment of
Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) in 2008.

"Traditional
agriculture should be supported and its techniques widely shared when
it works - not just because it's traditional," he said.

Future
food security is much more than seeds and yields. For 30 years,
industrialised agricultural nations in Europe and North America have
dumped heavily subsidised foods on poor countries with devastating
impacts on local food systems, says Michel Pimbert, director of the
agriculture and biodiversity programme at the London-based
International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

Such
national and international policies need to be changed to favour "food
sovereignty", meaning diverse, local, autonomous food systems, Pimbert
told IPS.

IFPRI's call for a seven-billion-dollar investment will
not guarantee that all negative impacts can be overcome, acknowledged
Nelson, "But business as usual will guarantee disastrous consequences
for the human race."