One of the biggest problems of the century: are we prepared for a food crisis?

As climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather disasters across the globe, Bronte Gossling investigates how agricultural yield suffers the consequences.

When Australia’s drought was declared in 2000, Emma McCrabb was four years old. For the next ten years, she would grow up during Australia’s worst drought on record since European settlement, which plagued most of the southern region – including the sunburnt country’s largest agricultural area, the Murray-Darling Basin.

The parched, heat-stricken and browned countryside characterised McCrabb’s childhood in Hay, a small town located in southwestern New South Wales, as she helped out on her family’s farm, which was struggling through one of the most catastrophic periods of Australian agriculture.

“During [the drought], we nearly completely destocked our home property, putting the few breeding stock we had left onto agistment properties in areas with more feed, which ended up spanning along the east coast. The whole process was extremely expensive and hard on everyone involved”, the now 21-year-old describes.

In addition to the dramatic decline in yield, long-term negative impacts of the now-broken drought ranged from difficulties in land management and crop growth due to land degradation, to larger economic and social issues.

“Droughts have hugely impacted rural community’s mental health. This can partly be attributed I think to the tight financial situation. In addition to a loss in stock profit, farmers were also struggling to get by in the extremely dry living conditions with the heightened cost of water”, McCrabb adds.

The Bureau of Meteorology concluded that climate change had exacerbated the severity of the drought, which considering the recent increase of “once in a lifetime” natural disasters in the Americas, is easy to infer from hindsight.

“Make no mistake … this is one of the biggest problems facing the century.” – Evan Fraser

The impact of climate change on food security is becoming more discernible as world hunger grows. In 2017, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations estimated that the number of undernourished people risen to 815 million in 2016, with the most visible areas affected being sub-Saharan Africa, South Eastern and Western Asia. This comes as no surprise to Evan Fraser, Director of the Arrell Food Institute at Canada’s University of Guelph, who believes that the mid-latitudes are the most vulnerable to extreme changes of climate.

Measuring the effect of climate change by Food Production Index

Using the number of extreme weather events and global food production index data, the below visualisation maps out the hotspots of potential food insecurity.

When a natural disaster occurs, the food production index of that region decreases – an obvious inference. What is also becoming increasingly obvious is the unfortunate fact that the regions which produce most of the world’s food are more prone to natural disasters; their vicinity to the equator, while allowing for optimal conditions to grow crops, also guarantees extreme weather and by extension, food insecurity.

Fraser acknowledges that climate change influencing food insecurity is location-dependent. “It entirely depends on where you are. In Canada, there’s problems of food insecurity that have absolutely nothing to do with agriculture or climate change, but rather, economic marginalisation and social policies. Whereas in Africa, which is in the mid-latitudes, the situation is different.”

Canada produces 1.5% of food in the world, while weather-affected regions such as China produce food for 20% of the world’s population, in addition to their local reliance on agriculture.

At a glance: food production around the world

With China, Russia and the USA being the top three producers of the top ten cereals, the below visualisation tracks their production in association with extreme weather events from 2004 - 2014.

With three out of the top ten most valuable food products being cereals, and two of those being mainly produced by China, it’s not hard to grasp the fact that unless crop production is geographically scattered, a climate change-enhanced natural disaster in crop-heavy areas would be cataclysmic.

To imagine the future, one can look into the past. With China’s classification as the top global producer for rice (paddy), wheat, and a majority of vegetable and meat production, the consequences of their extreme weather period of 2006 – 2007 are only a fraction of what could happen to other regions, thanks to their stock located around the country.

In 2006, southwest China was struck by the worst drought in a century, and heatwaves of more than 45 degrees Celsius. The drought cost more than US$1.1 billion in crop damage alone, and resulted in the loss of over five million tonnes of sweet potatoes and beans, and the destruction of 11 million hectares of rice, corn and tobacco.

Russia, on the other hand, is the top producer of barley, buckwheat and oats. 2010, which was deemed one of the costliest years of natural disasters, brought an unprecedented heatwave to the capital of the ushanka; the heatwave and associated wildfires killed 56,000 people, and reduced crop production by roughly 70%.

As for the United States, it is the top producer of cow’s milk, cattle meat, chicken meat, maize, corn and soybeans. While the exact damage of Hurricane Harvey and the Sonoma Wildfires is yet to be determined, Hurricane Sandy, severe heatwaves, droughts and wildfires on the Midwest in 2012 cost US$110 billion in total damages, with 3,723,108 hectares of land burned.

Where do we go from here?

Australians have already seen the dramatic effects of diminished food production in 2006, at the height of the drought. The Australian Department of Agriculture and Water Resources’ white paper, pledges AU$250 to Drought Concessional Loans and AU$700 million to the Green Army for training in conservation management.

Aled Jones, Director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Cambridge’s Angila Ruskin University, believes that government action needs to focus on research. “It is vital to understand the risks to conquer them. This is an urgent issue which needs action now to create the systems and processes that we will need when further extreme weather impacts our global food systems”, he states.

Although they are located on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Fraser and Jones’ strategies to manage food insecurity in conjunction with climate change overlap immensely.

“This is our big thorny issue, make no mistake, so there are no easy solutions here”, Fraser says.

Both Jones and Fraser propose a multi-portfolio solution, which starts with technology and information transparency between governments. Fraser proposes that scientists and governments would, “have to work in partnership with local farmers to find local solutions to local problems.” A “wonder-seed” developed in Canada would not necessarily work in the Sahara.

Additionally, a strong environmental policy, such as a carbon tax, is vital to raising environmental consciousness and the money needed to fund the research. Simultaneously, strategically developing grain reserves as a buffer against shortfalls in poor areas with volatile weather is essential.

“It helps people in times of need stay on their farms, for example, if a small-scale farmer experiences a crop shortfall, the first thing they’ll do is sell their next-year’s seed, then they’ll sell their plows, then they’ll abandon their farms. When those distress strategies kick in, it’s really hard for the system to recover. So we need the food stores to prevent that problem”, Fraser continues.

A representative from the Australian Department of Agriculture and Water Resources was contacted for a comment.