Financial, Climate Crises Threaten Food Supply

You may have heard that the financial system is collapsing and that our climate is doing poorly.

Both stories mean bad news for eaters everywhere.

As Brett Parris illustrates, sea level rises and shifting rainfall patterns are going to join a demon's brew of population displacement, species extinction, and direct temperature stresses. He shared some of these likely scenarios from the IPCC's 2007 predictions.

Africa: By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to an increase of water stress due to climate change. ... This would further adversely affect food security and exacerbate malnutrition in the continent. In some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50% by 2020.

Asia: ... Freshwater availability in Central, South, East and Southeast Asia is projected to decrease due to climate change which could adversely affect more than a billion people by the 2050s. It is projected that crop yields could increase up to 20% in East and Southeast Asia while they could decrease up to 30% in Central and South Asia by the mid-21st century.

As you may have heard, those 2007 scenarios are now thought to be on the optimistic side. One of their likely predicates was a one meter sea level rise by end of the century, which Parris notes would displace over 145 million people. Two meters is now considered likely.

James Howard Kunstler then notes that our concentrated, highly leveraged farming industry is vulnerable to financial shocks in ways that a more diverse, small-scale model of farming wouldn't be.

A farm where seeds are saved, livestock are allowed to breed like animals do, and the machinery didn't need to be financed over many years, that farm could still have its problems. Yet it wouldn't be quite so affected by the credit markets.

According to leading figures in the banking industry, farm loans aren't a problem yet, as Kunstler suggests they might soon become. The rural economy is referred to as a less bleak spot in the general economy, with credit only "tightening", as opposed to what we see happening in other sectors. Yet even though farmers are facing the same problems everyone else is, they haven't gotten the same kind of loan restructuring assistance.

Further, farm policy analyst Elanor Starmer also notes that even in recent years when farm product prices have been high, farms have been doing poorly, and an increasing buzz of stories around the country support that. A Colorado farming credit cooperative is reporting declining incomes and higher outstanding debt among its members. Many Wisconsin farmers are having to switch careers and some are facing foreclosure. Then consider this, from the story of a Texas dairy farmer who can't even afford to sell out:

A Waco shopper paying around $3.50 a gallon for milk might not guess it, but dairy farmers have seen the wholesale price of milk plummet in recent months.

[... John Cowan, executive director of the Texas Association of Dairymen,] expects the typical dairy farmer this month will get about 86 cents per gallon for milk but pay about $1.45 per gallon to produce it.

“The prices received for their product are so far below the cost of producing milk,” he said. “I’m seriously concerned that if this recession continues another six months, we could see 10 percent go out of business. . . . What we’re going to see in the next few months is a gloomy picture of farmers going out of business and taking their stock to the market.” ...

Under pressure from this double-barrelled threat, and while it will be difficult, I have to weigh in on George Monbiot's side that we still have to try to fix it. Emphasis mine.

... The world won't adapt and can't adapt: the only adaptive response to a global shortage of food is starvation. Of the two strategies it is mitigation, not adaptation, which turns out to be the most feasible option, even if this stretches the concept of feasibility to the limits. As Dieter Helm points out, the action required today is unlikely but "not impossible. It is a matter ultimately of human wellbeing and ethics".

Yes, it might already be too late - even if we reduced emissions to zero tomorrow - to prevent more than 2C of warming; but we cannot behave as if it is, for in doing so we make the prediction come true. Tough as this fight may be, improbable as success might seem, we cannot afford to surrender.

The increased carbon dioxide effects we're experiencing today were locked in a decade or more ago, and their effects are probably going to remain for a thousand years at least. It sounds bad. Terrible scrape. Rock and a hard place.

But maybe we'll figure something out, yeah? I mean, we're just sort of hanging around hoping the world won't end, have we really got anything better to do ;)

(Photo credit: Stuti ~ on Flickr.)