We live in a highly food insecure world. Although global food supplies are more than adequate, the latest United Nations ‘Report on theWorld Nutrition Situation’ estimates that 798 million people were “undernourished” in 1999–2001, up from 780 million in 1995–97 (UN-SCN 2004: 9).
In the 46 poorest countries, per capita food production has fallen by 10 per cent in the past 20 years (Fischer et al. 2002: 4). Parts of Africa, especially the Horn, have historically been acutely famine-prone – and remain so. HIV/AIDS, civil war and insecurity, and inadequate government and donor support to agriculture are all undermining progress towards the first Millennium Development Goal, of halving extreme poverty and hunger by 2015. The questions that climate change add to this challenging context are: how will climate change impact on global food supplies, and how will its impacts be distributed? Specifically, will climate change increase or reduce the food security risks facing countries and people in different parts of the world?
During the 1990s, a number of projections of world food demand and supplies into the twenty first century were made, including studies by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (Alexandratos 1995), the International Food Policy Research Institute (Pinstrup-Andersen et al. 1999), and independent academics (Dyson 1996). The bottom-line conclusion from these models is that global food supplies will match or exceed global food demand for at least the next two to three decades; but three important caveats should be noted. First, following rapid yield increases since the 1950s, production growth is slowing down as the limits of agricultural intensification appear to be approaching – though biotechnology might push back the frontiers. Second, a positive global “storyline” conceals regional disparities that are deeply worrying for already food insecure regions: specifically, food gaps in sub-Saharan Africa are projected to widen as population growth continues to exceed production growth, increasing the need for food imports from surplus producing countries (Maxwell 2001). Third, these models pay little or no attention to climate change.
Environmental determinism has always been an influential strand of the food security discourse. In the 1970s, desertification was invoked as a major threat to livelihoods in Africa. Apocalyptic predictions were made – the Sahara was allegedly advancing by 6 km every year, destroying farmland and pastures – that, with hindsight, have proved unfounded (Nicholson 2001). Also in the 1970s, geographers identified two weather-related “famine belts”, one located in the cold northern latitudes from Europe toChina, the other girdling the tropics, from the West African Sahel to India (Cox 1981). Cold spells in the former, and droughts in the latter, triggered most famines until relatively recently. Famines have now disappeared from the “cold belt” – though a series of harsh winters brought Mongolia to the brink in 2002 (Siurua and Swift 2002) – but extreme weather events still trigger many humanitarian emergencies in the “hot belt”. Nonetheless, the causes of contemporary food crises are recognised as far more complex: if climate, environment and demography received most analytical attention in the past, nowadays failures of national policies and global politics dominate thinking on famine and food insecurity (IDS 2002).
The excessive alarmism of environmental determinists in the past provides no basis for dismissing current concerns about climate change in the future. For one thing, climate modelling is becoming more sophisticated, and the projections for food security in regions that are already vulnerable to hunger and famine are deeply worrying. Achieving food security for all is challenging enough even in the absence of climate change. On the other hand, not all climate change is bad change – or more accurately, climate change is not necessarily bad for all people. This article will argue that the food security implications of climate change need to be carefully disaggregated, and that effective mitigation and adaptation depend as much on political responses as on agricultural consequences.
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This article comes from the IDS Bulletin 35.3 (2004) Climate Change and Food Security
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