John Michael: Increasing Climate Change, Rising Food Prices

UN-sponsored climate talks are in their final days in Durban, South Africa. Among issues discussed there is how to address the “gigatonne gap.” Currently, the Earth is set to exceed 44 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions by 2020, which will cause global temperatures to rise by at least 2 degrees centigrade. Though it doesn’t seem like much, an Earth two degrees warmer will suffer from more heat waves and droughts, along with more rainfall and flooding; and, as a changing climate alters the environment, the extinction of plant and animal species will follow. "We are going to get 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) warming,’ [admitted an expert interviewed by the CSM]. ‘I think the big question is whether we are going to get ultimately 5 or 6 degrees C (9 to 10.8 degrees F), which would be an unmitigated catastrophe."

But the world is already facing the effects of climate change. During my stay in Taganga, a resort town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, scuba divers were describing the whole-scale bleaching of coral reefs that only a year before had been major tourist attractions. Farmers outside of Otavalo, an Ecuadorian city in the Andes, often complained to me this summer of shifting weather patterns that were ruining crops before they could be harvested. 

The effects of climate change on agriculture have become a worldwide concern, appearing frequently in the media. “Price spikes have been driven by extreme weather events such as last year's drought, heat wave and fires in Russia which sent world grain prices soaring by up to 85 per cent, and this year's monsoon floods in South East Asia which pushed up the price of rice by between 19 per cent and 30 per cent in Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand.” 

While the surge in food prices is often attributed to various factors, like expanding cultivation of bio-fuels, or the manipulation of market prices, always included in the list is the extreme weather caused by climate change. The effects can seem small, like the local extinction of mussel beds, brought on by warming waters, which expose them to starfish, their natural predators. Others can seem heart-breakingly out of our control, like the droughts that motivated African farmers to protest in Durban last week. "We are getting a lot of difficulty and suffering with water,’ said 75-year-old Betty Nagodi, from an arid region of northern South Africa. ‘Now we don't know when it will rain. And then when it does, the hail knocks down all the tomatoes, butternut and other things,’ she said, fanning herself under the shade of a towering acacia.”

Nowadays, most experts see a warming world as inevitable. And as weather patterns change, so will environments, leading to volatility in food markets worldwide. So, barring any great technological breakthroughs, food insecurity could become a common feature of life in the future. (Incidentally, already 14.5% of the US population deals with food insecurity; to find out how you can help stop this, check out Feeding America.)

 What can we do to offset this trend? Well, the first step appears to be the easiest: stop wasting food. According to some figures, as Americans we waste 40% of the food we harvest. I like to think that our wastefulness stems in large part from ignorance: we’re accustomed to food just appearing in a grocery store, and so we purchase it without thinking of how it’s produced. A Huffington Post blog has a great graphic by Resource Media that displays information on how typical Thanksgiving foods “battled the elements in 2011.” (From the graphic: “This year is going to be a total loss… All that effort, all that money, the labor to weed it, fertilize it, irrigate it, and then to get nothing from it, that’s what kills you.”)

An interesting glance at what the future might look like is found on FAO’s Washington blog. Window farming, which employs hydroponics to turn your standard urban apartment window into a vegetable garden, is being pitched as the wave of the future in a TED video posted there. Additionally, urban farms appear to be on the rise. You can watch a video about them here in an earlier Paleoterran post.

John Michael