Tagged: Climate change
A visual guide to global food challenges
The World Resources Institute has complied 18 infographics that provide an overview of some of the major challenges confronting humanity’s food supply. As Janet Ranganathan explains,
The world is projected to hold a whopping 9.6 billion people by 2050. Figuring out how to feed all these people—while also advancing rural development, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and protecting valuable ecosystems—is one of the greatest challenges of our era.
So what’s causing the global food challenge, and how can the world solve it? We begin to answer these questions through a series of graphics….
From climate change to biofuels, from increasing meat consumption (see below) to food waste, many of the big issues are clearly laid out. Check out the post here.
Prepping the American farm for climate change
Photo by MyEyeSees via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Researcher Gary Paul Nabhan had an op-ed in The New York Times on Sunday with some important suggestions for how we ought to be preparing —from the perspective of agricultural policy—to withstand the effects of a warming climate. It’s a great piece, and has me intrigued about his new book, Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land: Lessons From Desert Farmers in Adapting to Climate Uncertainty. For example, he writes in his essay that
Fortunately, there are dozens of time-tested strategies that our best farmers and ranchers have begun to use. The problem is that several agribusiness advocacy organizations have done their best to block any federal effort to promote them, including leaving them out of the current farm bill, or of climate change legislation at all.
One strategy would be to promote the use of locally produced compost to increase the moisture-holding capacity of fields, orchards and vineyards. In addition to locking carbon in the soil, composting buffers crop roots from heat and drought while increasing forage and food-crop yields. By simply increasing organic matter in their fields from 1 percent to 5 percent, farmers can increase water storage in the root zones from 33 pounds per cubic meter to 195 pounds.
And we have a great source of compostable waste: cities. Since much of the green waste in this country is now simply generating methane emissions from landfills, cities should be mandated to transition to green-waste sorting and composting, which could then be distributed to nearby farms.
Find the full piece here.
Goodbye grasslands, hello corn and soy
Tom Philpott at Mother Jones posted a highly informative piece yesterday about the conversion of grasslands to corn and soy farms in states like the Dakotas and Iowa. Summarizing the findings of a new scientific paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, he writes that
All told, nearly 2 million acres of grassland—an area nearly the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined—succumbed to the plow between 2006 and 2011, [the researchers] found. Just 663,000 acres went from corn/soy to grassland during that period, meaning a net transfer of 1.3 million acres to the realm of King Corn.
The territory going under the plow tends to be “marginal,” the authors write—that is, much better for grazing than for crop agriculture, “characterized by high erosion risk and vulnerability to drought.”
When farmers manage to tease a decent crop out of their marginal land, they’re rewarded. But if the crop fails, they’re guaranteed a decent return.
So why would farmers plow up such risky land? Simple: Federal policy has made it a high-reward, tiny-risk proposition. Prices for corn and soy doubled in real terms between 2006 and 2011, the authors note, driven up by federal corn-ethanol mandates and relentless Wall Street speculation. Then there’s federally subsidized crop insurance, the authors add. When farmers manage to tease a decent crop out of their marginal land, they’re rewarded with high prices for their crop. But if the crop fails, subsidized insurance guarantees a decent return. Essentially, federal farm policy, through the ethanol mandate and the insurance program, is underwriting the expansion of corn and soy agriculture at precisely the time it should be shrinking.
For the full post, which offers great links (including one to the PNAS article) and explains why this loss of grasslands is problematic, head here.
Habitat loss occurs when native grassland is “broken,” or plowed for crop production (this is frequently called sodbusting). Similarly, pastureland, which is more intensively managed forage land that may have been previously cropped but is now used for grazing, is often plowed and put into crop production. Most often, the grassland being converted in the Prairie Pothole Region is land that had been used to graze livestock or deemed unsuitable for growing crops. Caption and image by NWFblogs via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Food for 9 Billion: Eating with climate change in mind
In the December holiday hubbub, I missed 2012’s final installment in the great yearlong public media project, Food for 9 Billion. It’s a deceptively simple piece that manages to encapsulate many of the complexities in being a conscientious eater in the modern world. Jon Miller, executive director of Homeland Productions, goes shopping with (the awesomely named) chef Spike Gjerde and Roni Neff, an expert on the connections between climate change and our food systems.
Find the Marketplace audio story here (or transcript here), and then check out Neff’s four steps toward a climate-friendly diet.
Grilled oysters. Photo by kslee via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Cranberries and climate change
On the heels of my recent post about Wisconsin farmers—including cranberry growers—confronting climate change, yesterday the public radio program Marketplace ran a story considering what a warming planet means for cranberry crops, focusing on Massachusetts farmers. As Sarah Gardner reports,
Michael Hogan, CEO of A.D. Makepeace, a large cranberry grower based in Wareham, says for now cranberries are still a viable crop in Massachusetts. But climate change is making it much tougher to grow there.
“We’re having warmer springs, we’re having higher incidences of pests and fungus and we’re having warmer falls when we need to have cooler nights,” Hogan says.
Those changing conditions are costing growers like Makepeace money. The company has to use more water to irrigate in the hotter summers, and to cover the berries in spring and fall to protect them from frosts.
They’re also spending more on fuel to run irrigation pumps, and have invested heavily in technology to monitor the bogs more closely. It’s also meant more fungicides and fruit rot.
Head here for the full print and audio versions of the story, as well as photos.
Cranberry bog, Duxbury MA. Photo by Chris Devers via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Climate change to bring more than drought
Photo by duggar11 (Charles Duggar) via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
A recent article from Reuters warns of the dangerous to the global food supply due to climate change. As summarized in the piece’s introduction,
Food security experts working on a chapter in a U.N. overview of global warming due in 2014 said governments should take more account of how extremes of heat, droughts or floods could affect food supplies from seeds to consumers’ plates.
“It has not been properly recognised yet that we are dealing with a food system here. There is a whole chain that is also going to be affected by climate change,” Professor Dr John Porter of the University of Copenhagen said.
“It is more than just the fact that there are droughts in the United States that will reduce yields,” he said….
After harvest, floods could wash away roads or bridges, for instance, between fields and factories processing the crop. Or warehouses storing food could be damaged by more powerful storms. Such factors were likely to hit poor nations hardest.
The conclusion is equally direct and thought-provoking:
“It’s a distributional problem – there is enough food in the world. But the distribution doesn’t work,” said Bruce McCarl, a professor at Texas A&M University. Climate extremes could aggravate food price swings, he said….
“We may be hitting a point where it’s getting harder to get technological progress” in raising yields, McCarl said. Annual yield growth for U.S. corn had slowed to about 1.5 percent from stellar rates of about 3.5 percent in the early 1970s.
Porter said the world had so far escaped predictions that population growth would outstrip food production, most famously by English writer Thomas Malthus in 1798.
But he said the world now had triple goals of producing food for people, crops for biofuels and feed for animals, often raised for their meat. “In my view we can have two out of those three and not all three,” he said.
A shift towards more vegetarian diets would help, he said.
Check out the full piece here.
Corn crop could be a total loss
U.S. corn areas that are experiencing drought as of July10, 2012. Graphic by USDA World Agricultural Outlook Board, retrieved from Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Current drought conditions are wreaking havoc on farms. As Elizabeth Kolbert writes in The New Yorker,
It is now corn-sex season across the Midwest, and everything is not going well. High commodity prices spurred farmers to sow more acres this year, and unseasonable warmth in March prompted many to plant corn early. Just a few months ago, the United States Department of Agriculture was projecting a record corn crop of 14.79 billion bushels. But then, in June and July, came broilingly high temperatures, combined with a persistent drought across much of the midsection of the country.
“You couldn’t choreograph worse weather conditions for pollination,” Fred Below, a crop biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Bloomberg News recently. “It’s like farming in Hell.”
Rob Schultz reported the local version of this story last Friday for the Wisconsin State Journal:
As the drought in southern Wisconsin was re-classified as severe Thursday, much of the area’s corn crop could be lost if significant rain doesn’t fall here in the next seven days. And it looks like neither Mother Nature nor Uncle Sam are going to help.
“It’s pretty dire,” said Landmark Services Cooperative agronomist Joe Speich, who estimated 2 to 3 inches of rain was needed in the next week to salvage southern Wisconsin’s corn. Just 0.31 inches of rain has fallen since June 1, and the National Weather Service forecasts no drought-busting rains in the next week, although there is a 50 percent chance for showers and thunderstorms Friday and Saturday.
Speich said the lack of moisture has shut down the field corn’s pollination process in the critical 10 days after it tassels. “If it doesn’t pollinate, there’s no ear,” Speich added. “That’s the reason it can become a total loss. You’ve got that 10-day window and that’s it.” Farmers without crop insurance are learning they have little chance of receiving any financial help because federal provisions for drought relief expired last year.
Like the suffering corn fields, livestock pastures are bone-dry and may force local livestock farmers to think about selling off their herds, as Bill Novak reported yesterday for The Capital Times. For more on the impact in southern Wisconsin, check out Karen Kerzog’s recent piece for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Also, see the longer-term outlook posted today by Alex Sosnowski at AccuWeather, suggesting that the little bit of rain we just had may not be enough to make a big difference.
What’s the source of this drought? Kolbert’s article pins the blame on global climate change, something she’s been writing about for quite some time. Her 2006 book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, is available in paperback or e-book. (Check out this review at Grist.) For a more recent and shorter piece, take a look at her list of the Top Ten Signs We Are Living in a Warming World: 2011 Edition.
Climate change and political upheaval
Image by NDSU Ag Comm via Flickr
Several months ago, The Nation ran this piece by Christian Parenti entitled “Soaring Food Prices, Wild Weather and a Planetful of Trouble.” He examines the confluence of weather and climate challenges to agriculture, corporate control of commodities, rising food prices, and political unrest, focusing in particular on rising wheat prices and the Arab Spring.
In the article, he describes how “in the summer of 2010 … extreme weather triggered fires that burnt down vast swathes of Russian forests, bleached farmlands, and damaged the country’s breadbasket wheat crop so badly that its leaders (urged on by Western grain speculators) imposed a year-long ban on wheat exports. As Russia is among the top four wheat exporters in any year, this caused prices to surge upward. At the same time, massive flooding occurred in Australia, another significant wheat exporter, while excessive rains in the American Midwest and Canada damaged corn production. Freakishly massive flooding in Pakistan, which put some 20 percent of that country under water, also spooked markets and spurred on the speculators. And that’s when those climate-driven prices began to soar in Egypt. The ensuing crisis, triggered in part by that rise in the price of our loaf of bread, led to upheaval and finally the fall of the country’s reigning autocrat Hosni Mubarak.”
Parenti’s article is an extension of his 2011 book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. In it, he considers recent global history to argue that “climate change arrives in a world primed for crisis. The current and impending dislocations of climate change instersect with the already-existing crises of poverty and violence. I call this collision of political, economic, and environmental disasters the catastrophic convergence.” You can hear him discuss the book here in an informative interview on TomDispatch.com.
The Conscientious Omnivore 