Crops under stress as
temperatures fall
Our politicians haven't noticed that the
problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling.
By Christopher
Booker
Published: 6:04PM BST 13 Jun 2009
Waterworld: Floodwater surrounding a farm near Fargo, North Dakota, in March 2009 Photo: Reuters
For the second
time in little over a year, it looks as though the world may be heading for a
serious food crisis, thanks to our old friend "climate change". In
many parts of the world recently the weather has not been too brilliant for
farmers. After a fearsomely cold winter, June brought heavy snowfall across
large parts of western Canada and the northern states of the American Midwest.
In Manitoba last week, it was -4ēC. North Dakota had its first June snow for 60
years.
There was
midsummer snow not just in Norway and the Cairngorms, but even in Saudi Arabia.
At least in the southern hemisphere it is winter, but snowfalls in New Zealand
and Australia have been abnormal. There have been frosts in Brazil, elsewhere
in South America they have had prolonged droughts, while in China they have had
to cope with abnormal rain and freak hailstorms, which in one province killed
20 people.
None of this
has given much cheer to farmers. In Canada and northern America summer planting
of corn and soybeans has been way behind schedule, with the prospect of reduced
yields and lower quality. Grain stocks are predicted to be down 15 per cent
next year. US reserves of soya used in animal feed and in many processed
foods are expected to fall to a 32-year low.
In China, the
world's largest wheat grower, they have been battling against the atrocious
weather to bring in the harvest. (In one province they even fired chemical
shells into the clouds to turn freezing hailstones into rain.) In north-west
China drought has devastated crops with a plague of pests and blight. In
countries such as Argentina and Brazil droughts have caused such havoc that a
veteran US grain expert said last week: "In 43 years I've never seen
anything like the decline we're looking at in South America."
In Europe, the
weather has been a factor in well-below average predicted crop yields in
eastern Europe and Ukraine. In Britain this year's oilseed rape crop is likely
to be 30 per cent below its 2008 level. And although it may be too early to
predict a repeat of last year's food shortage, which provoked riots from west
Africa to Egypt and Yemen, it seems possible that world food stocks may next
year again be under severe strain, threatening to repeat the steep rises which,
in 2008, saw prices double what they had been two years before.
There are
obviously various reasons for this concern as to whether the world can continue
to feed itself, but one of them is undoubtedly the downturn in world
temperatures, which has brought more cold and snow since 2007 than we have
known for decades.
Three factors are vital to crops: the light and warmth of
the sun, adequate rainfall and the carbon dioxide they need for photosynthesis. As we are
constantly reminded, we still have plenty of that nasty, polluting CO2, which
the politicians are so keen to get rid of. But there is not much they can do
about the sunshine or the rainfall.
It is now more
than 200 years since the great astronomer William Herschel observed a
correlation between wheat prices and sunspots. When the latter were few in
number, he noted, the climate turned colder and drier, crop yields fell and
wheat prices rose. In the past two years, sunspot activity has dropped to its
lowest point for a century. One of our biggest worries is that our politicians
are so fixated on the idea that CO2 is causing global warming that most of them
haven't noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but
cooling, with all the implications that has for whether we get enough
to eat.
It is
appropriate that another contributory factor to the world's food shortage
should be the millions of acres of farmland now being switched from food crops
to biofuels, to stop the world warming, Last year even the experts of the
European Commission admitted that, to meet the EU's biofuel targets, we will
eventually need almost all the food-growing land in Europe. But that didn't
persuade them to change their policy. They would rather we starved than did
that. And the EU, we must always remember, is now our government the one most
of us didn't vote for last week.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5525933/Crops-under-stress-as-temperatures-fall.html