While many people still refuse to believe that global warming is real, the evidence for it continues to slowly grow, bringing frightening consequences – massive food shortages around the world, and skyrocketing prices for what food there is.
Stock photo.
This is especially true for staple crops, like wheat and corn. For most major agricultural countries, rising temperatures have had a damaging effected crop yields, resulting in below normal levels, especially of wheat and corn, said a new study by Stanford University.
David Lobell, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of environmental Earth science at Stanford, said that he and his colleagues examined the temperature and rainfall records of major crop-growing countries over the last 30 years and did a comparative analysis of their crop yields.
The researchers found that global wheat production was 5.5 percent lower than what it would have been had climate remained stable. They also found that global corn production was lower by almost four percent.
Russia, India, and France suffered the greatest drops in wheat production relative to what they might have had without global warming. The largest comparative losses in corn production were seen in China and Brazil.
“Yields in most countries are still going up, but not as fast as we estimate they would be without [these] climate trends,” Mr. Lobell told the Stanford Report.
So far, North American countries seem to have largely escaped these trends of crop declines. “It appears as if farmers in North America got a pass on the first round of global warming. That was surprising given how fast weather has been changing in agricultural areas around the world as a whole,” he added.
Mr. Lobell also warns that “given the relatively small temperature trends in the U.S. Corn Belt, it shouldn’t be surprising if complacency or even skepticism about global warming has set in, but this study suggests that would be misguided.”
Since the 1950s, the average global temperature has increased at a rate of roughly 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade. An increase in this rate of temperature change would make it unlikely that the United States would be able to continue to avoid crop declines similar to what other countries are seeing now, according to Mr. Lobell.
The world is currently in a very shaky situation as far as crop production and reserves are concerned. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said in a report this month that:
Although the early outlook for cereal production for 2011 is good, weather in the coming months will be critical. Production prospects for 2010 were extremely favorable at this time last year, but unfavorable weather conditions between July and October changed that outlook drastically.
Among all the cereals, maize is the most worrisome. This year we would need above-average, if not record yields in the United States for the maize situation to improve, but maize planting so far has been delayed considerably due to cool climate and wet conditions on the ground.
These crop declines have also resulted in higher food prices around the world, and are having a devastating effect on the poor. U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton told participants this month at a Food Security Event in Rome, Italy, that, “Global food prices are once again on the rise.
“The World Bank estimates that 44 million people have been pushed to poverty since just last June because of rising food prices.”
Clinton also suggested strategies that countries could take to help increase crop yields and lower prices, including “trying to be as targeted as possible, for example, developing more nutritious, drought-tolerant, disease-resistant crop varieties.” This means bioengineering, which can also have devastating consequences of its own.
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