EINNEWS, December 3—The U.S. corn belt will be faced with a ‘significant reduction in productivity potential’ and major food disruptions are ahead for agriculture in much of the world due to climate change, according to a new report released Thursday in conjunction with the Cancun conference on global warming.
The report came from the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Center as delegates from around the world gathered at the Mexican resort city in an attempt to develop a common strategy to combat warming trends.
IFPRI researchers said they fed 15 scenarios of population and income growth into supercomputer models of climate and found that “climate change worsens future human well-being, especially among the world’s poorest people.”
“Unlike the 20th century, when real agricultural prices declined, the first half of the 21st century is likely to see increases in real agricultural prices,” the IFPRI report said.
Even with “perfect mitigation,” the implausible complete elimination immediately of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, it said real prices for grain would rise because of growing demand and other factors — by 18 percent for rice by 2050 under the most optimistic scenario, to up to 34 percent for corn in the most pessimistic, a scenario envisioning high population growth.
The study said prices will be driven up by a combination of factors: a slowdown in productivity in some places caused by warming and shifting rain patterns, and an increase in demand because of population and income growth.
Development of higher-yielding varieties of essential crops could mitigate some of these effects, the study said.
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