More food insecurity news - paging Nostradamus
The following is excerpted from Dr. Jeff Master's UnderBlog on Weather Underground (http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html). This amplifies warnings reflected in previous posts about environmental refugees, food bubbles, and climate impacts on food production. Good grief - was this in Nostramdamus? Emphasis below is my own.
"The soil lies cracked and broken in China's Shangdong Province, thirsting for rains that will not come. China's key wheat producing region, lying just south of Beijing, has received just 12 millimeters (1/2 inch) of rain since September, according to the Chinese news service Xinhua. If no rains come during the remainder of February, it could become the worst drought in 200 years .... China's ability to feed itself may be greatly challenged this year.
"According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the drought in north China seems to be putting pressure on wheat prices, which have been rising rapidly in the past few months. This has helped push global food prices to their highest levels since the FAO Food Price Index was created in 1990 .... China is the world's largest producer of wheat, and if they are forced to import large amounts of food due to continued drought, it could severely impact world food prices....
"The record food global food prices have been partially driven by two other huge weather disasters, the Russian summer heat wave and drought of 2010, and the Australian floods of December - January 2011. Both Russia and Australia are major exporters of grain....
The recent unrest in the Middle East, which has been attributed, in part, to high food prices, gives us a warning of the type of global unrest that might result in future years if the climate continues to warm as expected. A hotter climate means more severe droughts will occur. We can expect an increasing number of unprecedented heat waves and droughts like the 2010 Russian drought in coming decades. This will significantly increase the odds of a world food emergency far worse than the 2007 - 2008 global food crisis. When we also consider the world's expanding population and the possibility that peak oil will make fertilizers and agriculture much more expensive, we have the potential for a perfect storm of events aligning in the near future, with droughts made significantly worse by climate change contributing to events that will cause disruption of the global economy, intense political turmoil, and war."
The word for today is "environmental refugee"
There's been a spate of coverage from the AAAS conference on the subject of environmental refugees, stemming from a figure given of 50 million by 2020. An expression made popular by Lester Brown, it refers to people to migrate due to deteriorating environmental conditions.
There's been some push-back from the chattering classes about that figure - some think that there are already that many, some very cynical about any news of hardship coming out of Africa in particular. We may have ourselves to thank for this - there's no doubt in my mind but that there is a scale of tragedy such that the farther away an event is, the greater the body count before it is newsworthy. (By that measure Australia should by rights need to be struck by a meteor before being mentioned in the US press - but hey, we speak distantly related languages and somewhat similar histories etc - yeah, you know what I'm talking about). Back on point - I don't know the basis for the figure nor if it is credible. But common sense suggests that declining productivity and burgeoning demand translate into want, and there are consequences to this want. Drought-stricken populations on the move provides a great subject for a dystopian novel, but it makes for lousy reading in your morning paper. The race is on - can we put the chattering classes to work applying the vaunted human ingenuity to these problems before it is too late? Yeah, we've got a checklist for that - lessee, cut the Agricultural Research Service, check
wipe out foreign aid. Oh yeah
halt climate change research. No brainer
eliminate job-throttling programs that cut back CO2 emissions? Now you're talking! I've got it - let's give all those poor people Facebook and Twitter accounts. They can use them to find jobs ... when they migrate. Maybe a better idea - let's just change places!Amplify’d from www.physorg.com
"In 2020, the UN has projected that we will have 50 million environmental refugees," University of California, Los Angeles professor Cristina Tirado said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
"When people are not living in sustainable conditions, they migrate," she continued, outlining with the other speakers how climate change is impacting both food security and food safety, or the amount of food available and the healthfulness of that food.
Southern Europe is already seeing a sharp increase in what has long been a slow but steady flow of migrants from Africa, many of whom risk their lives to cross the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain from Morocco or sail in makeshift vessels to Italy from Libya and Tunisia.
The flow recently grew to a flood after a month of protests in Tunisia, set off by food shortages and widespread unemployment and poverty, brought down the government of longtime ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, said Michigan State University professor Ewen Todd, who predicted there will be more of the same.
"What we saw in Tunisia -- a change in government and suddenly there are a whole lot of people going to Italy -- this is going to be the pattern," Todd told AFP.
"Already, Africans are going in small droves up to Spain, Germany and wherever from different countries in the Mediterranean region, but we're going to see many, many more trying to go north when food stress comes in. And it was food shortages that put the people of Tunisia and Egypt over the top.
"In many Middle Eastern and North African countries," he continued, "you have a cocktail of politics, religion and other things, but often it's just poor people saying 'I've got to survive, I've got to eat, I've got to feed my family' that ignites things."
