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."
Is there a food bubble?
reposting from my old blog, www.green-hand.net, which I'm phasing out.
Lester Brown thinks so. And will it burst? Interviewed in New Scientist on February 10 he describes a food bubble as inflated food production through unsustainable uses of water and land. Let’s set aside unsustainable uses of water and land for a moment. In my February 15 post on The Resilient World I discussed how invasive species, including noxious weeds, could thrive in an atmosphere with elevated CO2 levels, substantially reducing agricultural productivity. This is on top of the probability of stresses to crops from higher temperatures and changing weather patterns. Throw in growing demand through a growing population and competing uses for land and water, and well, let’s just say that we have some work to do.
Zeroing in on unsustainable water use, Brown calls our attention to the fact that 130 million people in China and 175 million people in India depend upon fossil water, from aquifers that will not be replenished, to grow the grain they eat. Some call the phenomenon “peak water.” (We can add this to the list of things to keep us up at night along with peak oil and peak phosphorus).
Is Brown a prophet of doom and gloom? Well, he certainly does pull back the curtain and what he shows isn’t pretty. But like the ghost of Christmas pass, his message is one of choices, some of which lead to redemption. Our job must be to build resilience into our systems. “Civilisation as we know it”, Brown cautions “can't withstand the stresses of continuing with business as usual.”
Brown stays on point: We've got to move, almost on a war footing, to cut carbon emissions, eradicate poverty, stabilise population. We must also restore the economy's natural support systems: forests and aquifers and soils. No civilisation ever survived that kind of destruction; nor will ours. We haven't gone over the edge, but we're much closer than most people think. If the heatwave that hit Moscow in 2010 had been centred on Chicago instead, we would be in deep trouble. The Russians lost 40 per cent of their 100-million-tonne grain crop, but we would have lost 40 per cent of our 400-million-tonne crop - a massive global setback.” (New Scientist Feb 10 2011).
So how do we build resilience? That’s the harder question. A smaller footprint. Maintaining fallback options when systems fail. Removal of perverse incentives. Better and more informed choices. One strategy involves harnessing the marketplace through product labeling. Most of us have seen plenty of product labels. Underwriter Laboratories (in the USA). Organic and Fair Trade certifications. Forest Stewardship Council wood products and Marine Stewardship fish products. The Alliance for Water Stewardship is creating a labeling scheme for sustainable water management. I don’t want to claim that certifying water supplies is actually going to solve the peak water challenge worldwide. What it can do, and should do, is provide the nucleus for resilient communities and regions using the principle of sustainable water management as an organizing theme. This is how you build the future - a brick at a time, at least until episodes of rapid change occur.
Peak phosphorus is around the corner
Ah, another doom and gloom screed. Not quite - well yes, but only if the warnings are ignored, which they tend to be until the markets respond, by which time food prices are driven to unsustainable levels, you get riots in the Middle East etc etc.
The resilient world take-home message is that sustainable agricultural practices can recycle nutrients like phosphorus. Rising phosphorus costs may make such farming practices more economical, and negate the economic incentives to pollute rivers and coasts. A big question is; will the lag time before markets respond mean that the transition is too little, too late? TBD. With the right policies and institutions in place, this is a great opportunity to advance resilient communities. With the wrong ones, well, that food that is going to get more expensive due to climate change might get even more expensive. Expensive enough to pose a security risk. Oh, and BTW, it is spelled p-h-o-s-p-h-o-r-u-s.Amplify’d from www.physorg.com
Phosphorous is an essential element for life. Living organisms, including humans, have small amounts and the element is crucial for driving the energetic processes of cells. In agriculture, phosphorous mined from ancient marine deposits is widely used to boost crop yields. The element also has other industrial uses.
But excess phosphorous from fertilizer that washes from farm fields and suburban lawns into lakes and streams is the primary cause of the algae blooms that throw freshwater ecosystems out of kilter and degrade water quality. Phosphorous pollution poses a risk to fish and other aquatic life as well as to the animals and humans who depend on clean fresh water. In some instances, excess phosphorous sparks blooms of toxic algae, which pose a direct threat to human and animal life.
Bennett and Carpenter argue that agricultural practices to better conserve phosphate within agricultural ecosystems are necessary to avert the widespread pollution of surface waters. Phosphorous from parts of the world where the element is abundant, they say, can be moved to phosphorous deficient regions of the world by extracting phosphorous from manure, for example, using manure digesters.
