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Poor face future food crisis

13:42 10 July 01
Fred Pearce, Amsterdam

Forty of the world's poorest countries face losses of more
than a quarter of their food production as a result of global
warming. They include India, Brazil, Bangladesh, Ethiopia,
Sudan and other nations with a recent history of famine.

The forty nations are currently home to two billion people,
including more than half the world's undernourished people.
The prediction comes from the first global study of the
planet's future food productivity in 2080, released on
Tuesday at a conference on global climate change in
Amsterdam.

The plight of the world's poorest nations is made more stark
by the report's second conclusion - that overall food
production on the planet will rise, and will rise most among
the rich nations.

"The global impact of climate change on the growing of food
is likely to be relatively small. But the crux of the problem is
that so many poor nations face a serious negative impact,"
said Guenther Fischer of the International Institute for
Applied Systems Analysis in Lexenburg, Austria, one of the
authors of the study.

"This raises major issues of equity and fairness. Developing
countries have so far contributed relatively little to the causes
of global warming," said co-author Mahendra Sha. The
results suggest that "the number of undernourished may
drastically increase," he said.

The study predicts that other prominent losers will include
Thailand, Nigeria, South Africa and Colombia. Areas
pinpointed in the study where production of cereals without
irrigation may cease entirely include parts of northeast Brazil,
southern Africa, Spain, Turkey and southwest Australia.


Winners and losers

But other developing nations, including China, Mexico,
Kenya and Zaire could grow more food. This would result
from the higher temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns
predicted under climate change, coupled with the extra
carbon dioxide in the air, which could hasten plant growth.

Shah says that winners would only benefit if they could
intensify their agriculture, using fertiliser and irrigation water to
maximise the potential advantages.

Among rich nations, winners would include the US, Canada,
Russia and France, while losers would include Britain,
Australia and most of eastern Europe according to the
modelling study. This used the climate predictions of three
major climate models, including the Hadley Model from
Britain's Meteorological Office.

Earlier, at the conference, Robert Watson, chairman of the
UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that
"almost any change in climate will reduce agricultural
productivity in the tropics and sub-tropics. Climate change is
a development issue, not an environmental issue."