The problems are already evident in many countries, particularly in Africa
CANCUN, Mexico (AlertNet) – Farmers will struggle to feed a world population predicted to grow by half – to 9 billion people – by 2050, even without the effects of climate change. But climate shifts will make the task hugely more difficult and complex, agricultural experts warned at this week’s UN climate negotiations in Mexico.
By 2050, maize prices worldwide are expected to rise by 50 percent before climate change effects are taken into account. Add those effects in and, depending on the model, maize prices rise by 88 to 133 percent, said Gerald Nelson, an agricultural economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and lead author of a new study on food security, farming and climate change.
Worse, by 2080, irrigated wheat production worldwide is predicted to fall by 29 percent, threatening huge increases in malnutrition.
After 2050, “the challenges grow increasingly insurmountable,” warned Lloyd Le Page, head of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
The problems are already evident in many countries, particularly in Africa.
In Uganda, which has one of the fastest rates of population growth in the world, farmers are already struggling to produce enough food on ever-smaller plots of land that, when passed on to the next generation, are divided among a large number of children, said David Obong, a climate change and agriculture expert in Uganda’s Ministry of Water and Environment.
Now, however, as a result of climate change, the country is facing a host of new problems. Heavier rains and more frequent, extended droughts are worsening soil erosion and landslides. Crop failures are “very common these days,” he said, and farmers find their fields attacked by a host of new or more virulent pests, from army worm to cassava mosaic. Rivers that once ran all year are now reduced to a trickle in some seasons.
“Water is becoming a rare commodity, unpredictable,” Obong said. Most of the country’s water – from rivers like the Nile – is shared with neighbouring states, raising concerns about growing cross border conflict.
USING INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
Uganda is doing what is can to fight back. Automated weather stations are being set up in worst-affected northern and eastern Uganda to help give farmers accurate weather information, Obong said. Planting seasons are being shifted and land use policies are being revised to ensure land suitable for agriculture is protected for that purpose, as much as possible.
Researchers are also trying to tap into indigenous knowledge for guidance as to how farmers have coped with hard times in the past.
“Farmers have the best bank of information, stored over generations,” Obong said. One key to making agricultural adaptation to climate change work, he said, may be combining that knowledge with modern tools such as improved seeds and better weather prediction.
But challenges remain, including attitudes toward the emerging problems.
“There is not enough appreciation of the need for change from business as usual,” Obong said.
Easing pressures on countries like Uganda and boosting agricultural production in the face of climate change will require a range of new agricultural adaptations on the scale of the Green Revolution that used new seed varieties and improved irrigation to send crop yields surging in Asia and parts of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, said Le Page of CGIAR.
The problem, he said, is that this time around, faced with swift-moving climate pressures, “we must try to do it better and do it quicker.”
If such efforts are not successful, the number of hungry people worldwide – now just short of 1 billion – could surge by 10 to 20 percent by 2050, said Richard Choularton, an expert on climate change and disaster risk reduction with the World Food Programme.
Under most climate scenarios, some parts of the world – particularly in northern regions of the world – are expected to see boosts in agricultural production in coming decades as a result of warming growing seasons.
But moving food from parts of the world with an abundance to those in need also is likely to get more complicated as taxes on the production of carbon emissions – including in transport - are eventually put into place and as periodic food shortages tempt producer countries to close off exports. That was the view of Sam Bickersteth, a climate change and agriculture adviser to the UK Department for International Development (DFID).
He pointed to Russia’s decision this year to temporarily curb wheat exports after suffering severe drought and wildfires that cut production.
In coming years, balancing growing demand for food with the need to protect natural resources will be a huge challenge, he said, as will finding ways to deal with growing food price volatility and price increases which “will have a huge impact on hunger, especially for poor people.”
One key to helping people cope with coming climate pressures, Nelson said, will be doing as much as possible now to improve their economic position and potential resilience, through things like diversifying crops or lining up alternative jobs.
“Many reports suggest that to deal with poverty you need to do climate change adaptation. We turn that around,” he said. “To deal with climate change adaptation you need broad-based sustainable economic growth. That’s the best way. More income for farmers and poor people means they’re better able to adapt to the challenges they face.”
BLEAK FUTURE
The potential price of failing to prepare is becoming evident in places like Swaziland, a tiny nation of just over a million people set between South Africa and Mozambique.
The country, poorly governed and beset by one of the world’s worst HIV/AIDS epidemics, has a 40 percent unemployment rate, 69 percent of its people living in poverty and a high rate of child malnutrition. For the past decade it has needed to import as much as half of the staple maize it needs to feed its people, said Absalom Manyatsi, an agricultural land and water specialist at the University of Swaziland.
For a country already struggling agriculturally, predictions that climate change could bring worsening extended droughts are a disaster, Manyatsi said.
“If you look at the effect of climate change on agriculture, it’s really going to be very severe,” he said.
But Swaziland’s government has done little to prepare its people for the coming changes, only recently putting in place a first policy and program on climate adaptation, Manyatsi said. Even that is now threatened by expected government budget cuts in the face of a looming budget deficit.
For Swaziland, “there is a bleak future,” he admitted. “We will have more and more problems in the country.”
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