Podesta, Caldwell: “Lasting gains in agricultural productivity will require … action to confront climate change.”
Prices of basic foodstuffs like buckwheat and flour have soared in Russia over the past month as the effects of its worst ever drought hit supplies, statistics showed Wednesday….
Most alarmingly, the price of Russian staple buckwheat — enjoyed by generations for breakfast or as an accompaniment to meat — rose a very sharp 8.6 percent in the space of the week.
So Seed Daily reported Wednesday. Last year, Lester Brown and Scientific American asked “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”
CAP’s John D. Podesta and Jake Caldwell have a new piece in Foreign Policy,”The Coming Food Crisis,” which I excerpt below:
There was already little margin for error in a world where, for the first time in history, 1 billion people are suffering from chronic hunger. But the fragility of world food markets has been underscored by the tragic events of this summer.
The brutal wildfires and crippling drought in Russia are decimating wheat crops and prompting shortsighted export bans. The ongoing floods and widespread crop destruction in Pakistan are creating a massive humanitarian crisis that has left more than 1,600 dead and some 16 million homeless and hungry in a region vital to U.S. national security. These and other climate crises trigger widespread food-price volatility, disproportionately and relentlessly devastating the world’s poor.
Less noticed has been the spiking price of wheat — up 50 percent since early June. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization recently cut its 2010 global wheat forecast by 4 percent amid fears of a scramble among national governments to secure supplies. As wheat prices climb, demand for other essential food crops such as rice will increase as part of a knock-on effect on world food markets, driving up costs for consumers. In particular, Egypt and other countries that depend heavily on Russian wheat might see dramatic price increases and unrest in the streets.
Fortunately, there are signs we will likely avoid a repeat of the 2007-2008 food crisis, when prices jumped as much as 100 percent and led to deadly riots in Port-au-Prince and Mogadishu. This year, bumper crops in the United States, alongside replenished wheat stocks globally, may be adequate to offset shortages due to the fires in Russia. But these short-term measures should not lull us into complacency or a false sense of confidence. We still have neither a strategy nor a solution to ending global hunger.
In the short term, the United States must implement U.S. President Barack Obama’s promise to commit $3.5 billion to food security assistance….
Looking beyond the immediate crisis, the United States and other developed countries must renew long-neglected investments in agriculture assistance across the developing world, targeting small farmers as the fundamental drivers of economic growth. In Africa, for example, agriculture employs more than 60 percent of the labor force and accounts for 25 percent of the continent’s economic output. And yet, Africa continues to struggle: Nearly 10 million people in the northern Sahel region are suffering from extreme hunger, and most countries still lack adequate investment in agricultural and road infrastructure to facilitate the development of value-added products and new markets.
While the United States provides more than half of the world’s food aid, agriculture assistance today stands at only 3.5 percent of overall U.S. development aid, down from 18 percent in 1979. Not surprisingly, agricultural productivity growth in developing countries is now less than 1 percent annually.
We must also improve how this assistance is targeted. We can reap lasting results by focusing on soil and water conservation and improved crop varieties rather than carbon-intensive fertilizers. Scientific research and appropriate biotechnology can deliver significant crop yield gains and water savings if conducted in a safe and transparent manner. We also must invest in women, who represent up to 80 percent of the food producers in many developing countries, but frequently lack the support and services that will allow them to reinvest hard-earned agricultural gains into health and education for their families….
The Group of Twenty leading developed and developing nations must uphold their pledges of $22 billion to enhance global food security by sending real money out the door. The multilateral Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, a new global partnership funded by commitments from the United States, Canada, South Korea, Spain, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is to be commended for issuing $224 million in initial grants to help increase food security and reduce poverty in five developing countries.
But lasting gains in agricultural productivity will require something more — action to confront climate change. Food shortages resulting from severe crop losses will occur more frequently and take longer to recover from as more people become vulnerable to extreme weather events like the droughts and flooding we see today in Russia and Pakistan. The World Bank predicts that developing countries will require $75 billion to $100 billion a year for the next 40 years to adapt to the effects of climate change on agricultural productivity, infrastructure, and disease.
This year, we may be able to limit the damage to a single supply shock in Russia and Eastern Europe. But even in the best of times, our global food system is stretched to the breaking point by the ever-present challenges of population growth, increased demand from changing diets, higher energy costs, and more extreme weather. Experts at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimate global agricultural productivity must double by 2050 to keep pace with increased demand. Unless we take immediate action, we are destined to race from food crisis to food crisis for generations to come, with grim consequences for the world’s poor and our own national security.
John D. Podesta is the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress (CAP) and was White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton. Jake Caldwell is the director of policy for agriculture, trade, and energy at CAP.
Related Post:
- Must-hear podcast: Lester Brown on Rising Temperatures and Rising Food Prices
- Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.”
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
The coming global food crisis will be made worse in the USA if drought and reduced rainfall accelerate in the corn belt stretching from Indiana west to Iowa- and Eastern Nebraska- the wheat belt from eastern North Dakota south to Nebraska and western Iowa.
The 98th longitude line has long been the transition between regions to the west which receive 20″ of rain or less- and regions to the east receiving more then 20″.
With CC the areas receiving less then 20″ of rain per year will very likely shift much further east- while the region adjacent to longitude 98 W likely to become sub humid, or semi arid.
A 3 degree C rise in temperature (by the late 21st century) will likely make a great majority of the agricultural heartland from about 86W (Central Indiana) to 98W becoming semi desert.
If a 3 degree rise is realized- then the agricultural heartland as we have known it will begin to resemble what the region was in the mid Pliocene – a dust bowl/semi desert stretching from just west Indianapolis & Chicago west to the foothills of the Rockies. From latitude 35N to the Canadian border 49N.
The Indus valley this morning as seen by the Terra satellite , 1 pixel = 4 km -
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?2010239/crefl1_143.A2010239061000-2010239061500.4km.jpg
——————
If you click the the 250 meters = 1 pixel , and look at the clouds at the bottom of the image, you can see the flood spreading out along the coastal plain.
ISLAMABAD | Fri Aug 27, 2010 4:46am EDT
ISLAMABAD Aug 27 (Reuters) – About one million more people have been displaced in Sindh over the last 48 hours as devastating floods continue to spread across south Pakistan, the United Nations said on Friday.
The U.N. earlier said that about six million had been forced out of their houses by the floods that began nearly a month ago.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSGE67Q0DB20100827
ShelterBox -
‘Within the next few weeks we will have sent out enough shelter for over 6,000 families. But we’re also responding to the second priority which is getting clean water to those who need it most by upping the number of water filtration units we send out to 20,000.’
http://www.shelterbox.org/news.php?id=420
Every nickle donated here goes straight to ShelterBox -
http://www.justgiving.com/Colorado-Bob
Another component to the agricultural heartland is the disappearance of sea ice in the arctic
see
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727751.300-arctic-ice-less-than-meets-the-eye.html
Egypt hit by power cuts amid Ramadan heat wave
The power cuts, as well as high food prices and water shortages, will worry the government ahead of parliamentary elections due later this year, she adds.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11107458
Cairo Airport, Egypt (Airport)
Updated: 55 min 1 sec ago
Haze
98 °F
So the smart thing to do is to shutdown big tractors and do carbon free crops. The EPA won’t allow large farms. The left hates “corporations” Big is bad. The sierra club is fighting against domestic food production.
Many credible experts believe we hit “peak oil” in 2005-2007, some credible experts believe “peak coal” will happen in 2011-2013. Have we hit “peak food” now? If so there can be no long-term solutions other than birth control and vastly improved distribution of excess food from the developed countries to the needy.
Oh, so to be unemployed is to be an outlet to
frustration as to why so many can’t keep the
promises they make to Governments and to the
governed.
“Scientific research and appropriate biotechnology can deliver significant crop yield gains and water savings”
It’s called biochar tech. Genetically modified crops do not deliver and threaten health in the long run.
___
we selected new pairs from their cubs and continued to feed them as before. These pairs’ growth rate was slower and reached their sexual maturity slowly. When we got some of their cubs we formed the new pairs of the third generation. We failed to get cubs from these pairs, which were fed with GM foodstuffs. It was proved that these pairs lost their ability to give birth to their cubs http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/04/16/6524765.html
“Fortunately, there are signs we will likely avoid a repeat of the 2007-2008 food crisis”
Which resulted from Wall street trade?
You aren’t facing the issue of food security unless you talk about meat. Each plate of meat takes the same inputs – both land and carbon – that would produce around 10 plates of vegetarian food (though of course circumstances can vary that from 3 to 30). And that’s precisely the point; by using more resources, meat creates an artificial scarcity of food, driving up profits for producers. (That goes for dairy, farmed fish, and even to some extent eggs as well.
There’s nothing wrong with eating meat once or twice a week. But I’m a vegetarian, mostly because don’t have the energy to explain to pushy meat-eaters “yes, I do eat meat, but right now I’d prefer not to.”
You can only prepare in the short term with planting, diversity, habitat security, ecosystem security, biochar, spreading of agri through different climax. But in the long run if we stay on the destructive path this will not create food security. If we do not start removing carbon from the atmosphere and stopping emitting – the earth will lose the ability to feed billions.
You do not need artificial population growth experiments – because climate change has the potential to kill off more humans in a shorter time frame. Climate change threatens the survival of the species – if we do not act pretty soon we will have a situation when population decline becomes a real issue. Not enough workers to combat climate change. Lovelock suggest that all farmers worldwide use biochar to sequester carbon – to fix the CC threat.
Monsanto GM-corn harvest fails massively in South Africa
South African farmers suffered millions of dollars in lost income when 82,000 hectares of genetically-manipulated corn (maize) failed to produce hardly any seeds.The plants look lush and healthy from the outside. Monsanto has offered compensation.
Monsanto blames the failure of the three varieties of corn planted on these farms, in three South African provinces,on alleged ‘underfertilisation processes in the laboratory”. Some 280 of the 1,000 farmers who planted the three varieties of Monsanto corn this year, have reported extensive seedless corn problems.
Urgent investigation demanded http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/270101#tab=comments&sc=0&contribute=&local=
ToddInNorway: Perhaps we have hit “peak food”, if you count livestock food. But luckily, as long as we can shift from feeding pigs and cows to feeding people, we won’t hit “peak people food”. That gives us a much-needed margin to adapt.
The real food crisis
Bayer admits GMO contamination out of control http://www.naturalnews.com/028585_GMOs_Bayer.html
Eventually, Canada is going to be a significant “breadbasket.”
Marion Delgado, #16 “Eventually, Canada is going to be a significant “breadbasket.””
People forget about the climate weirding – the chaos of shifting climate patterns and the resulting collapse of life strains. Insect plaques, fungus, bacteria, unreliable weather patterns (precipitation) will make any “basket” an adventure. What will happen to the pine beetle – this little bug will adapt too.
To Peter in reference to #1.
I approach the climate issue from food security when I talk to people because I live in the midwest and sea level rise does not resonate with people here.
Do you have links to peer-reviewed literature supporting your comments that you could share with me?
Thanks
Oh yeah, the pine beetle.
For months a log cutter and hauler parked his
truck full of pine bark beetle infested wood,
changed daily, next to old growth pine. Then
the timber harvester who had his real job at
the UofF made his determined bid for the dying
forest. Another amazing partnership between
Gov. and private industry.
When the light came on at night where the driver
parked his timber truck at the convenience store,
the bugs were flying so thick.
#7 Duane Smith–the EPA won’t allow large farms??? What is your source?
Oh No Again!
Joe/CP, I’d suggest covering Dot Earth’s latest — “On Harvard Misconduct, Climate Research, and Trust” — and giving it due critique. I’ll be happy to chip in.
Sigh,
Jeff
At some point, we will have to start thinking about limiting population growth. Yes, it’s controversial; yes it comes dangerously close to having big brother meddle in individual decisions; and yes, it faces opposition from major religious groups.
But it is becoming increasingly clear that even with a technological revolution we cannot sustain a population of 9.5 billion at any reasonable standard of living, particularly as defensive expenditures brought on by climate change demand ever increasing shares of capital and human ingenuity.
When Russian fires are routine, and Katrinas are annual events, we will not be able to innovate our way to a generalizable higher standard of living.
At some point we must begin to do the necessary, even if it’s hard. And it’s looking to me like limiting population growth is one of the necessary things we must tackle.
.” But luckily, as long as we can shift from feeding pigs and cows to feeding people, we won’t hit “peak people food”. ”
Yes. The amount of grain/water to produce one pound of meat is very high. Use that grain to feed people.
I have read repeatedly according to the world food program, that 24, 0000 children starve to death every day right now.
And this is during a period, when there has been enough food to feed everyone, if the will to do so was there.
It’s very strange, watching all of the worst forecasts of ecological collapse and destruction,
being fulfilled right in front of you.
Good one, Peter Mizla. The San Joachin Valley is also toast, as well as Arizona agriculture. Reduced snowpack and major salt intrusion from overirrigation (see Iraq and North Africa)
Shout out for a book, “Dirt, The Erosion of Civilizations” by David R. Montgomery. From before the Roman Empire to the present day poor farm practices have brought down civilizations and will continue to do so. A strong case can be made that the American Civil War was largely caused by poor farm management assisted by slave labor as well. Many insights into the rise and fall of civilizations. And guess what, we still have not learned our lessons.
Near term food stress from heatwaves and fires, further off will be from sea level rise. (flooding and salination of areas that do not flood) So much of our farmland is within a few feet of sea level. (lots – estimates vary)
Some nice charts and good background at: http://epa.gov/climatechange/effects/coastal/SLRLandUse.html
Re: population growth.
Yeah, my wife and I have held ourselves to 1 kid. I’m sure that there are at least hundreds of thousands like us.
But any authority has to be very, very careful about how it promotes this. If some meddlesome program impacts poor people, I believe that it will inevitably backfire, because people aren’t stupid or sheep. Therefore, the primary anti-population-growth programs should be raising women’s educational level, and reducing infant mortality (which has the well-established effect of reducing compensating hyperfertility).
While justified pessimism about infant mortality is a major cause of overfertility, there’s a few other causes which would make for political hot potatoes. For instance, there are a number of religious sects which aggressively encourage fertility; it might be nice to confront or undermine these, but there’s no way I can see to safely negotiate that political minefield. There’s also evidence that, for poor farmers, optimism about a steadily-improving future increases fertility; but it would be monstrous to therefore give them grounds for pessimism, and politically impossible to say “OK, let’s do land reform, but in as quick, closed-end a fashion as possible, and without any long-term-optimism-inspiring rhetoric”. So basically, I think that until you’ve gotten all possible mileage out of female education and lower infant mortality, you can’t even begin to address either of these, let alone set mandatory fertility limits.
Population Growth? This is indeed a tricky issue. While I fully agree that poor female education is a win,win for both the individual as well as society,there is an area that also needs attention and should be addressed. That is over consumption by the rich. Many folks in the first and second world have a carbon stomp or a thousand or even 10,000 first world individuals. I believe it is safe to assume that most of these carbon stompers are educated thou un-accepting of their personal impact. Reaching a million people in this category and encouraging sustainable lifestyles could be the equivalent to removing a billion to 10 billion off the planet. Humanly!
Talk about your “double ethical bind” — the best way to slow population growth is to increase prosperity in developing nations. But doing that involves increasing the per capita energy those populations have available. Doing that without increasing CO2 is no mean feat.
Nature will set mandatory fertility limits. Who will feed all these infants as the median age for poor and war torn humans approaches 10 years old? I think it’s below 16 years now in parts of Africa. But it’s 28.4 for the world according to the CIA factbook. It’s almost as though we equate ‘civilized’ with higher median age subconsciously. The median age in much of Europe is above 35 as os the US (36.8).
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2177.html
I googled ‘world population median age’ to get that link lest anyone think I visit that site often.:-)
Chris Winter, @ 29. That is why sustainable energy developing is so important. Combine that with giving the unproductive masses access to sustainable agriculture and Bio-Char sequestration and these folks can in fact help heal the planet. We must look at the masses as a resource, not a problem to be dealt with.
Without increasing CO2, or flooding the people off their land with dams, or… Indeed, not easy.
Yes, famine is usually the cause of the collapse of civilization. If BAU [Business As Usual] continues, the Earth’s land surface reaches 70% desert in 2051, 41 years from now. Barton Paul Levenson did the computation.
Reference: “The Long Summer” by Brian Fagan and “Collapse” by Jared Diamond. When agriculture collapses, civilization collapses. Fagan and Diamond told the stories of something like 2 dozen previous very small civilizations. Most of the collapses were caused by fraction of a degree climate changes.
Business As Usual production of CO2 should be called what it is: Genocide. And far worse than the Holocaust because Billions of people will die.
Could we get some action by the Senate yet?
“agriculture assistance” isn’t going to work for long. Only mitigation of Global Warming will work, and it has to be extreme and immediate.
Richard #8
this also may prove helpful
http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/nationalassessment/overviewmidwest.htm#Agricultural%20Shifts
I find it interesting that crop shortages on the business networks are reported as nothing more than a commodity buying and selling opportunity. A well fed nation goes blindly into the night thinking all is well.
I’ve never seen a garden growing at the city dump. Don’t throw away your seed, plant them — somewhere.
Surely the most important thing to do is to stop people having children, by any humane means possible. The article above says “Scientific research and appropriate biotechnology can deliver significant crop yield gains and water savings if conducted in a safe and transparent manner.” – well that’s fine, no-one wants people to starve to death, but if we don’t very quickly halt and then reverse population growth, today’s noble efforts to keep people fed and alive and bearing children will just mean that there are even more people starving to death in the future (since infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible).
If we really are at ‘peak civilisation’, in ecological overshoot, with the world’s resources per capita on the downward slope, then we have to think about how many people the planet will be able to support in decades to come. Most of the people living today will be dead quite naturally in (say) 80 years anyway, regardless of what we do, so even if the Earth’s carrying capacity for humans in 2090 is only 1 billion, we could potentially still make it to then without billions of people dying prematurely and horribly, if only we would dramatically reduce human reproduction so that the population declines by ‘natural wastage’ rather than by starvation.
Given that this seems to be the most rational scenario, and the one which involves the least human suffering, it probably won’t happen!
As several people have pointed out above, we feed enough grain to livestock in the U.S to feed something like a billion people. The Russians also feed a lot of their grain to livestock. So, it’s an inequity problem, and a non-cooperation problem, as much as it is a real food shortage.
Yes, the food shortage of 2007-2008 was caused by excessive Wall Street speculation. The corporate media of course used this fake shortage to trash biofuels in the controlled corporate press, as supposedly competing for farmland.
About the Arctic melting disrupting wheat farming in the Midwest:
From the New Scientist article linked to in post #7 above:
Our greed for Arctic oil is the reason we don’t have a climate bill, IMO. Our financial elites want to drill for oil under our current Arctic sea ice in the summer, I am convinced. So, they are willing to throw the farmers to the climate wolves, over greed for oil.
About the Pakistani floods, it looks to me like the Indus river is regaining the size and flow that it had in earlier warm periods. So, expect Pakistani floods on a continuing basis, I think. Scientists are debating whether this is true, but having seen how global warming is occurring with stunning speed, this seems like a good bet.
The IPCC was criticized for having a statement in the main report which suggested that the Himalayan glaciers could be mostly gone by 2035. These high altitude and high volume monsoon rains may provide a mechanism to make those predictions true, after all.
Regarding population, the problem is not about population so much as it is about carbon footprint. If we lived in arcologies, gave up our motor vehicles, and so on, our carbon footprints could essentially disappear.
With his final column in Scientific American, “The Deepening Crisis,” Dr. Jeffrey Sachs observes:
The column is available online at:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-deepening-crisis
In addition, Scientific American has an interactive feature: “How Much Is Left? The Limits of Earth’s Resources.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=interactive-how-much-is-left
‘Dirt’ is a great book.
It really opened my eyes to top soil.
Gord, do you have a link?
All i found is this “Dirt” movie trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKPcuwOOGqY
Icarus – what do you suggest? Uncontrollable GMO contamination with sterilization and other unknown side effects – threatening the entire population?
Earth could feed & handle a lot of people “like 20 billion or more” and the topic on over population is irrelevant, because it doesn’t matter actually. Even if there is not a single human CC is induced and accelerating.
What matters is HOW PEOPLE react within the boundaries of our habitat. Thus reducing Co2 footprints AND carbon removal – which requires a lot of workforce.
We are not on a path to over population, the species is heading for a major genetic bottle neck, from contamination and CC.
Financial-reform bill limits the speculation in ag commodity markets that sparked food crisis
While we lament the final death rattle of climate legislation, it’s worth noting that something non-hideous emerged from the ignominious halls of Congress last week. Buried within the financial reform bill signed into law by President Obama, there’s a set of provisions that evidently limit excessive speculation in agricultural commodity markets.
According to an analysis by the Minneapolis-based think tank Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the new law will make it much more difficult for Wall Street to turn the globe’s food markets into a casino for investors. http://www.grist.org/article/food-the-financial-reform-bill-limits-speculation-in-food-markets/
Leland Palmer, #40 “Regarding population, the problem is not about population so much as it is about carbon footprint. If we lived in arcologies, gave up our motor vehicles, and so on, our carbon footprints could essentially disappear.”
Exactly, and that’s why you have to define the emission scenario when talking population and resources. All the scenarios which highlight the “threat” of population growth are based on business as usual.
Hi Prokaryotes-
Yes, and we wouldn’t have to even give up our cars, exactly. Electric vehicles run on carbon negative electricity from BECCS, or just carbon neutral electricity from renewables, would allow us to continue with almost business as usual.
Houses could run on solar electricity, in sunny areas, and from other renewables in other areas.
If we have three trillion dollars to throw down a rathole in the Middle East, can’t we throw similar money at the climate problem?
Well, that’s why the first law has to be the environment security – planetary boundaries.
The war seems to originate from a long term strategy – which has become meaningless now with CC.
What you really want now are people using BECCS to offset past emissions from the “developed” nations. Failed states will just stick with fossil energy and higher birth rates (poor/low IQ = more offspring).
Dirt, the Erosion of Civilizations by David Montgomery.
http://www.amazon.com/Dirt-Civilizations-David-R-Montgomery/dp/0520248708
Should get you there Prokaryotes.
Would be interested to know of any biochar content of this book.
Biochar for environmental management:
science and technology – Dr. Johannes Lehmann, Stephen Joseph
http://books.google.at/books?id=w-CUty_JIfcC&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Prokaryotes: David does bring up the subject but so far it is not dealt with heavily. I am not quite thru with the book. On the other hand there are many insights that have made an impression on me. Well worth the read.
What exactly are GMO foods?
Recent research indicates that a growing number of human and livestock illnesses are linked to Bt crops.
91% of all soy, At least 60% of all corn, and 75% of processed foods contain unlabeled, genetically engineered, chemical toxins that have never been proven safe.
Also, most genetically modified plants only produce seeds that are sterile. And that could completely annihilate the world’s food supply. http://hubpages.com/hub/GMO-Food-Allergies