THE VINE APRIL 17, 2008
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The primary culprits for the much-discussed spike in global food prices are increased demand, the cost of oil, and biofuels subsidies. But, as Keith Bradsher highlights in an excellent piece in today's New York Times, climate change is starting to play a role, too:
Drought has already spurred significant changes in
Australia’s agricultural heartland. Some farmers are abandoning rice,
which requires large amounts of water, to plant less water-intensive
crops like wheat or, especially here in southeastern Australia, wine
grapes. Other rice farmers have sold fields or water rights, usually to
grape growers.Scientists and economists worry that the
reallocation of scarce water resources--away from rice and other
grains and toward more lucrative crops and livestock--threatens poor
countries that import rice as a dietary staple.
On the plus side, at least Australia—unlike, say, the United States—has a market for water rights, so that increasingly scarce resources can be employed for the most productive purposes. But that means, of course, that the price of staple foods for people in the developing world will rise even faster, especially since agriculture in the tropics will likely take a big hit as global temperatures increase, while farms further from the equator might actually benefit slightly (at least at first). Even if new foodstuffs from Canada and Russia replace the lost output in the tropics, the distributional consequences of this shift aren't going away anytime soon.
--Josh Patashnik
4 comments
That would make sense if temperatures were increasing globally in the last few years and causing new effects. Problem is they have been falling for a few years, and in Antarctica, they have been falling for about 30 years...
- cthulhu2008
April 17, 2008 at 9:14pm
Do Australia's drought conditions stem primarily from global warming, or does global warming merely exacerbate drought conditions caused primarily from years of poor land management?
- jeidel1906
April 18, 2008 at 11:00am
Australia is a poor example to use for water issues not because they don't have them. They do. But Australia is the most arid continent in the world and has some of the poorest soil mediums for agriculture. Be that as it may, moving from water intensive crops like rice to other grains and cereals that can thrive in dry-land farming conditions is probably a good thing because it reduces depletion of top soil nutrients via runoff, flood irrigation in arid areas loses acre-feet of water to evaporation and increases salinity in the soil itself as well as the run-off.
Australia has done a good job of education amongst urban populations to use water sparingly, duel-flush toilets abound and urban irrigation is reasonable. Australia is also going throw litigation woes with the Yarra river and how best to get water to urban cities and also have historical water rights for ranching and irrigation remain intact.
I think what we are going to start seeing is a contraction of global markets for specific foods both because local conditions will start prohibiting large-scale overproduction for export and food stuffs will stay more national. Rice, sorghum, wheat, soy, corn and sugar cane will remain global commodities but fruits and vegetables will start contracting because of pressures of fuel prices, drought, growing conditions and crops changing zones due to global warming, etc.
But again, there are certain crops that shouldn't be grown in arid or desert areas because of the high irrigation requirements. Growing rice and cotton in Arizona is insane yet it happens. I think these issues will start making more people notice how all the dots of the world ecosystem are starting to connect and we realize that alot of climate issues and effects are exacerbated by human impacts.
It's going to be an interesting decade I think.
- singlespeed
April 18, 2008 at 12:07pm
You may have already read about the contribution of drought in Australia to the global food crunch, but
- Anonymous
April 30, 2008 at 11:31am