Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Droughts, Floods and Food
By PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times February 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage

We’re in the midst of a global food crisis — the second in three years. World 
food prices hit a record in January, driven by huge increases in the prices 
of wheat, corn, sugar and oils. These soaring prices have had only a modest 
effect on U.S. inflation, which is still low by historical standards, but 
they’re having a brutal impact on the world’s poor, who spend much if not 
most of their income on basic foodstuffs.

The consequences of this food crisis go far beyond economics. After all, the 
big question about uprisings against corrupt and oppressive regimes in the 
Middle East isn’t so much why they’re happening as why they’re happening now. 
And there’s little question that sky-high food prices have been an important 
trigger for popular rage.

So what’s behind the price spike? American right-wingers (and the Chinese) 
blame easy-money policies at the Federal Reserve, with at least 
onecommentator declaring that there is “blood on Bernanke’s hands.” 
Meanwhile, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France blames speculators, accusing 
them of “extortion and pillaging.”

But the evidence tells a different, much more ominous story. While several 
factors have contributed to soaring food prices, what really stands out is 
the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural 
production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing 
we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our 
climate — which means that the current food price surge may be just the 
beginning.

Now, to some extent soaring food prices are part of a general commodity boom: 
the prices of many raw materials, running the gamut from aluminum to zinc, 
have been rising rapidly since early 2009, mainly thanks to rapid industrial 
growth in emerging markets.

But the link between industrial growth and demand is a lot clearer for, say, 
copper than it is for food. Except in very poor countries, rising incomes 
don’t have much effect on how much people eat.

It’s true that growth in emerging nations like China leads to rising meat 
consumption, and hence rising demand for animal feed. It’s also true that 
agricultural raw materials, especially cotton, compete for land and other 
resources with food crops — as does the subsidized production of ethanol, 
which consumes a lot of corn. So both economic growth and bad energy policy 
have played some role in the food price surge.

Still, food prices lagged behind the prices of other commodities until last 
summer. Then the weather struck.

Consider the case of wheat, whose price has almost doubled since the summer. 
The immediate cause of the wheat price spike is obvious: world production is 
down sharply. The bulk of that production decline, according to U.S. 
Department of Agriculture data, reflects a sharp plunge in the former Soviet 
Union. And we know what that’s about: a record heat wave and drought, which 
pushed Moscow temperatures above 100 degrees for the first time ever.

The Russian heat wave was only one of many recent extreme weather events, 
from dry weather in Brazil to biblical-proportion flooding in Australia, that 
have damaged world food production.

The question then becomes, what’s behind all this extreme weather?

To some extent we’re seeing the results of a natural phenomenon, La Niña — a 
periodic event in which water in the equatorial Pacific becomes cooler than 
normal. And La Niña events have historically been associated with global food 
crises, including the crisis of 2007-8.

But that’s not the whole story. Don’t let the snow fool you: globally, 2010 
was tied with 2005 for warmest year on record, even though we were at a solar 
minimum and La Niña was a cooling factor in the second half of the year. 
Temperature records were set not just in Russia but in no fewer than 19 
countries, covering a fifth of the world’s land area. And both droughts and 
floods are natural consequences of a warming world: droughts because it’s 
hotter, floods because warm oceans release more water vapor.

As always, you can’t attribute any one weather event to greenhouse gases. But 
the pattern we’re seeing, with extreme highs and extreme weather in general 
becoming much more common, is just what you’d expect from climate change.

The usual suspects will, of course, go wild over suggestions that global 
warming has something to do with the food crisis; those who insist that Ben 
Bernanke has blood on his hands tend to be more or less the same people who 
insist that the scientific consensus on climate reflects a vast leftist 
conspiracy.

But the evidence does, in fact, suggest that what we’re getting now is a 
first taste of the disruption, economic and political, that we’ll face in a 
warming world. And given our failure to act on greenhouse gases, there will 
be much more, and much worse, to come.