UXBRIDGE, Canada, Oct 2 (IPS) - 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.
"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.
