Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Food Supply Hangs in the Balance
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48689
by Stephen Leahy
Published on Friday, October 2, 2009 by Inter Press Service

UXBRIDGE, Canada - Rocketing food prices and hundreds of millions more 
starving people will be part of humanity's grim future without concerted 
action on climate change and new investments in agriculture, experts reported 
this week.

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)]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."