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“The end of the world as we know it” is how Michael T. Klare, an American professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, Massachusetts, describes our crisis-hobbled home planet. His book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, is disturbing but highly recommended reading for realists.
At this point of world history, when more people have learned to want it all, putting on farmers’ eyes would help everyone think over a second hard fact: the close interconnection between producing our suddenly shockingly expensive food and the now severely threatened conditions for producing and bringing it to our dining tables. And nowhere is the impact of climate change on agriculture more dramatically illustrated than in the recent closing of what was once the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere.
That mill in Deniliquin, New South Wales, Australia, was processing enough rice for 20 million people worldwide, reports the New York Times, until the last six years of drought reduced Australia’s rice crop by a staggering 98 percent. That was one of the major factors in the doubling of world rice prices over the past three months, it turns out.
This event also counts “among the earliest signs that a warming planet is starting to affect food production,” just as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in its climate change report last July. It would take science another 15 to 20 years of study and experimentation to link short-term weather changes to long-term climate change beyond doubt, the Times reports. But Australia’s “unusually severe drought is consistent with what climatologists predict will be a problem of increasing frequency.”
The IPCC scientists in fact “predicted that even slight warming would lower agricultural output in the tropics and subtropics.” That’s not even taking into account “newer findings that global warming could reduce rainfall and make it more variable.” The prospects could be worse, in other words, given the increasing incidence of freak weather worldwide. That this could hurt agriculture to the point of crippling goes without saying. The present food crisis is a foretaste, but this is apparently only the beginning.
Everyone’s little bit would help alleviate the crisis – if not by starting to raise what food one can in one’s own backyard, then by finally making lifestyle decisions to become part of the solution, starting with drastically cutting down on energy use. It has taken 30 years for everyone to feel the urgency of the ecologists’ motto – “live lightly on the earth” – but now we find ourselves standing together under a merciless sun beating down at high noon.
The ignorance, greed and heedlessness that brought us to this point are part of human nature, but so is the creativity in coming up with solutions to ease a path of radical change from which there’s no turning back. May they catch up with the speed of crisis. – Sylvia L. Mayuga, Inquirer.net
