Global warming could clobber food production: UN

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Global warming could clobber food production: UN

April 7, 2011
Courtesy of FAO
and World Science staff

Glob­al warm­ing could have a "po­ten­tially catas­troph­ic" long-term im­pact on food pro­duc­tion, with poor peo­ple most at risk, a U.N. agen­cy is warn­ing.

The ef­fects are "are ex­pected to in­creas­ingly hit the de­vel­op­ing world… ac­tion is needed now to pre­pare," the The U.N.'s Food and Ag­ri­cul­ture Or­gan­iz­a­tion warned on March 31 in a sub­mis­sion to the U.N. Frame­work Con­ven­tion on Cli­mate Change.

"Cur­rently the world is fo­cused on deal­ing with shorter-term cli­mate im­pacts caused mainly by ex­treme weath­er events," said Al­ex­an­der Müller, the FAO's assistant-director gen­er­al for nat­u­ral re­sources. "But 'slow-onset' im­pacts are ex­pected to br­ing deeper changes that chal­lenge the ec­o­sys­tem ser­vic­es needed for ag­ri­cul­ture, with po­ten­tially dis­as­trous im­pacts… from 2050 to 2100."

Courtesy FAO

"While these changes oc­cur grad­u­ally and take time… we can't simply ig­nore them," he added. "We need to move be­yond our usu­al ten­den­cy to take a short-term per­spec­tive."

Food pro­duc­tion sys­tems, and the ec­o­sys­tems they de­pend on, are highly sen­si­tive to cli­mate vari­abil­ity and cli­mate change, sci­en­tists say. Changes in tem­per­a­ture, pre­cipita­t­ion and re­lat­ed out­breaks of pest and dis­eases can re­duce pro­duc­tion. Poor peo­ple in coun­tries that de­pend on food im­ports are par­tic­u­larly vul­ner­a­ble to such ef­fects, the agen­cy warned.

The FAO out­lined pre­par­a­to­ry steps that gov­ern­ments could con­sid­er. A key one is to de­vel­op food va­ri­eties bet­ter adapted to ex­pected fu­ture cli­mat­ic con­di­tions. Plant ge­net­ic ma­te­ri­al stored in gene banks should be screened with fu­ture re­quire­ments in mind, of­fi­cials said. Ad­di­tion­al plant ge­net­ic re­sources, in­clud­ing those from wild rel­a­tives of food crops, should be col­lect­ed and stud­ied be­cause they may other­wise dis­ap­pear, they added.

Cli­mate-adapted crop­s—for ex­am­ple va­ri­eties of ma­jor ce­reals that are re­sist­ant to heat, drought, sub­mer­gence and salty wa­ter—can be bred, of­fi­cials not­ed, stress­ing that these steps should be tak­en with­out tram­pling on breed­ers' and farm­ers' rights.
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Eli Priyatna 16 Jun, 2011

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Source: http://basistik.blogspot.com/2011/06/global-warming-could-clobber-food.html
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