aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Global Warming Threat to Farming and Food Supply

I fear this will be read as a permission slip for Right leaning American global warming skeptics to keep their head in the sand for a good while longer:

Several recent analyses have concluded that the higher temperatures expected in coming years—along with salt seepage into groundwater as sea levels rise and anticipated increases in flooding and droughts—will disproportionately affect agriculture in the planet’s lower latitudes, where most of the world’s poor live.

India, on track to be the world’s most populous country, could see a 40 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the 2080s as record heat waves bake its wheat-growing region, placing hundreds of millions of people at the brink of chronic hunger.

Africa—where four out of five people make their living directly from the land—could see agricultural downturns of 30 percent, forcing farmers to abandon traditional crops in favor of more heat-resistant and flood-tolerant ones such as rice. Worse, some African countries, including Senegal and war-torn Sudan, are on track to suffer what amounts to complete agricultural collapse, with productivity declines of more than 50 percent.

Even the emerging agricultural powerhouse of Latin America is poised to suffer reductions of 20 percent or more, which could return thriving exporters such as Brazil to the subsistence-oriented nations they were a few decades ago.