Climate Change = Food Crisis

Today is Blog Action Day here at Change.org, and all across this series of tubes we call the World Wide Web. At least 8,000 blogs, representing 140 countries and 12,000,000 readers, have registered their commitment to write about climate change today. And all of us Change bloggers are looking at how climate change relates the causes we write about.

So, climate change and food. Big topic. Biiiig topic, one that those of us in the chattering class usually approach from the climate side of the equation. As in: “all that industrial farming is ruining our world! Cows fart as much greenhouse gas as highways full of cars! Quick, to the farmer’s market!”

But what about the other side? What about the 25 million children that the UK’s Guardian newspaper reports will be hungry by mid-century due to climate-change-induced food crises? Our changing environment, the article states, will lead to food shortages and skyrocketing costs for everyday necessities like rice, wheat and maize.

A recent report that the International Food Policy Research Institute prepared for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank reveals that if we don’t rapidly mitigate global warming, poor countries in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will see crop yields fail and increasing numbers of children starve. This would, according to the Guardian, effectively “wipe out decades of progress in reducing child malnutrition.”

We’ve already had a window into that scary future. When grain prices shot up last year, developing countries across the globe were rocked by riots. A potential food crisis has become such a notable concern that world leaders took up the mantle at the recent G20 summit in Pittsburgh, committing $20 billion to shoring up food security. In November, the United Nations will convene its second summit on the issue since 2008’s riots.

Clearly climate change is not just a matter of a few more storms, a couple feet of sea-level rise or the extinction of a handful of animals. We’re talking about major global crisis and billions of starving people, brought on by changes that we know are coming and may still have the power to largely stop. Yet one more reason we need to get serious about reforming our own greenhouse-gaseous food system.

Photo courtesy of inzaki on flickr