GLOBALISATION OF the world economy enormously magnifies the effects of extreme weather events in particular places and regions. This simple truth about contemporary interdependence has been vividly illustrated by the severe drought affecting the United States’s corn belt over the last two months, the worst since the 1930s.
It has devastated the crop. Slashed output figures and soaring prices for corn or maize and soya bean have an immediate effect, given that last year US farmers grew 35 per cent of all these commodities and were responsible for 40 per cent of those traded on the world market. They form part of feedstuffs all over the world.
The Group of 20 is considering calling an urgent meeting to discuss the implications for world food supplies amid concerns about acute hardship for the poorest and social conflict in affected regions. This is an interesting initiative; a mandate for emergency action confers legitimacy even if the G20 is ill-equipped to service it. But the G20 works with United Nations agencies and can point the way for necessary action. During the last such crisis in 2007-8 many of the world’s poorest people were pitched into hunger as increased food prices contributed directly to violent protests in Bangladesh, Haiti and Egypt, setting the scene for the development of the Arab uprisings last year.
Debates on growing such crops for food or fuel, and on climate change, have been intensified. Some 40 per cent of US corn output is targeted for biofuel. It is a growing trend which helps moderate the country’s reliance on imported oil and forms part of the production chain for refined products. Similar policies are followed in the EU. These biofuel targets are rightly criticised for hindering food supplies in times like these. The market is so finely balanced that it is easily disrupted by such an extreme weather event. It took US forecasters and industry analysts entirely by surprise. In mid-June they firmly expected record US corn output this year. Since then the sudden development of the drought has thrown these estimates awry, as the Obama administration declares more than 1,200 farm counties disaster areas and farmers survey ruined fields and crops.
US farmers’ leaders concentrate much more on government regulation and subsidies than on climate change in their response to the crisis. They expect crop insurance programmes to protect their incomes irrespective of changing weather patterns. Surveys show farmers remain predominantly sceptical of human-induced climate change, despite accumulating evidence that rainfall patterns are shifting because higher temperatures enable skies to hold more water, delivering it in violent storms rather than steady showers. It is indeed difficult to distinguish properly between fleeting or extreme weather events and longer term climate trends, as responsible scientists recognise. But it is equally obtuse to deny that the two are related. Tipping points definitely occur and the latest research indicates that humanity is perilously close to several such critical shifts in a warming climate.