Twenty-five million more children will go hungry by the middle of this century, as climate change leads to food shortages and soaring prices for staples such as rice, wheat, maize and soya beans, a report released on Wednesday said.
If global warming goes unchecked, all regions of the world will be affected, but the most vulnerable — south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa — will be hit hardest by failing crop yields, said the report prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.
The children of 2050 will have fewer calories to eat than those in 2000, the report says, and the effect would be to wipe out decades of progress in reducing child malnutrition.
The grim scenario is the first to gauge the effects of climate change on the world’s food supply by combining climate and agricultural models.
Spikes in grain prices last year led to rioting and unrest across the developing world, from Haiti to Thailand. Leaders at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh last week committed US$2 billion to food security, and the UN is set to hold a summit on food security next month, its second since last year’s riots.
But UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is pressing the World Bank and other institutions to do more. He said the industrialised world needed to step up investment in seed research and to offer more affordable crop insurance to the small farmers in developing countries. Though prices have stabilized, the world’s food system is still in crisis, he said at the weekend.
“Ever more people are denied food because prices are stubbornly high, because purchasing power has fallen due to the economic crisis, or because rains have failed and reserve stocks of grain have been eaten,” he said.
Even without global warming, rising populations meant the world was headed for food shortages and food price rises.
“The food price crisis of last year really was a wake-up call to a lot of people that we are going to have 50 percent more people on the surface of the Earth by 2050,” said Gerald Nelson, the lead author of the report. “Meeting those demands for food coming out of population growth is going to be a huge challenge — even without climate change.”
After several years in which development aid has been diverted away from rural areas, the report called for US$7 billion a year for crop research, and investment in irrigation and rural infrastructure to help farmers adjust to a warming climate.
“Continuing the business-as-usual approach will almost certainly guarantee disastrous consequences,” Nelson said.
The G20 industrialized nations last week began discussing how to invest some US$20 billion pledged for food security earlier this year.
Some regions of the world outlined in the report are already showing signs of vulnerability because of changing rainfall patterns and drought linked to climate change. The British development charity Oxfam on Tuesday launched a US$152 million appeal on behalf of 23 million people hit by a severe drought and spiraling food prices in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Uganda. The charity called it the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa for a decade, and said many people in the region were suffering from malnutrition.
However, southern Asia, which made great advances in agricultural production during the 20th century, was also singled out in the institute report for being particularly at risk of food shortages. Some countries, such as Canada and Russia, will experience longer growing seasons because of climate change, but other factors — such as poor soil — mean that will not necessarily be translated into higher food production.
The report was prepared for negotiators currently trying to reach a global deal to fight climate change at the latest round of UN talks in Bangkok. It used climate models prepared by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia to arrive at estimates of how changes in growing seasons and rainfall patterns would affect farming in the developing world and elsewhere.
Without an ambitious injection of funds and new technology, wheat yields could plunge by more than 30 percent in developing countries, setting off a catastrophic rise in prices. Wheat prices, with unmitigated climate change, could rise by between 170 percent and 194 percent by the middle of this century, the report said.
Rice prices are projected to rise by 121 percent — and almost all of the increase will have to be passed on to the consumer, Nelson said.
The report did not take into account all the expected impacts of climate change — such as the loss of farmland because of rising sea levels, a rise in the number of insects and in plant disease, or changes in glacial melt. All these factors could increase the damage of climate change to agriculture.
Others who have examined the effects of climate change on agriculture have warned of the potential for conflict. In a new book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilising to Save Civilisation, published on Wednesday, Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, warns that sharp declines in world harvests because of climate change could threaten the world order.
“I am convinced that food is indeed the weak link,” he said.
Brown saw Asia as the epicenter of the crisis, with the latest science warning of a sea level rise of up to 6 feet (1.83m) by 2100. With even a 3-feet rise, Bangladesh could lose half of its rice land to rising seas; Vietnam, the world’s second-largest producer of rice, could also see much of the Mekong Delta under water.
Wheat and rice production would also fall because of acute water shortages, caused by past over-pumping and the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, which currently store water that supplies the region’s main rivers: the Indus, Ganges, and Yangtse.
“The potential loss of these mountain glaciers in the Himalayas is the most massive projected threat to food security ever seen,” Brown said.
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