Climate Change casts shadow over agriculture
Pastor Dale Morgan
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Climate Change casts shadow over agriculture*
From correspondents in St Louis
May 11, 2007 04:54am
Article from: Reuters
GLOBAL climate change will drastically reshape grain, oilseed and other
crop production, but exactly how that will happen remains unclear.
"Climate change has forced us to rethink so much of what we do on so
many fronts, just as the Internet has done in terms of our daily lives,"
James Spellman, consultant with the United Nations Foundation, said on
the sidelines of the annual World Agricultural Forum that ends today.
"Climate change has an impact on prosperity. If climate change is not
mitigated or understood early enough, the ability of a country to
generate a livelihood may be impacted by increased disease, new pest
patterns, diseases that plants weren't accustomed to in northern
regions," Mr Spellman said.
"It's a profound re-engineering of the entire agricultural system," he said.
Most scientists have linked the buildup of greenhouse gases like carbon
dioxide to global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), a UN body, said last month that rising world temperatures were
already affecting plants and animals, water supplies, growing seasons,
and fisheries.
Use of soils, forests and the ocean are key to climate change since they
act to break down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Industrial
agriculture also puts large amounts of greenhouse gases like methane
into the atmosphere.
Experts noted myriad efforts now going on in agriculture to adapt to and
mitigate climate change from waste use and tillage to biofuels, carbon
markets and drought-resistant crops.
"Farm practices like no-till capture CO2. Livestock producers are
converting animal waste to fuel. Carbon exchanges like the Chicago
Climate Exchange are paying producers for agricultural offsets," said
Carole Brookins, managing partner of Public Capital Advisers and a
former World Bank official.
But as the IPCC report said: "There is no universally applicable list of
mitigation practices; practices need to be evaluated for individual
agriculture systems and settings."
One theme at this week's agriculture leaders' conference was a need for
more coordination and analysis of the effects on agriculture and food
production from the world's scramble to cut fossil-fuel use, the major
source of CO2 and of other greenhouse gases.
The European Union wants to derive 20 per cent of its energy from
renewable sources by 2020. Green fuels are part of the mix but energy
would also come from other renewable sources such as solar, wind,
hydropower and conservation technology.
"Energy and climate change are linked together and therefore it has been
very high on the agenda of the European Commission since last year,"
said Mariann Fischer Boel, EU commissioner for agricultural and rural
development.
Europe's goal is to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020
compared with 1990, she said.
"If we can be joined by other big players like the United States, then
we would go up to a 30 per cent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions,"
Ms Fischer Boel said.
The current massive push toward biofuels made from corn, soybeans, sugar
and other crops also raised a red flag to some who said food supplies
and prices for both rich and poor could be affected as energy demand
seized agriculture.
"We can't allow this to be thought of strictly as an economic or
technological problem. We really have to think hard ... of what kind of
role we want our agriculture to play in the future," said Paul Thompson,
WK Kellogg chair in agriculture, food and community ethics at Michigan
State University.
Regional climate change effects on land and water also mean conflicts
will be complex and have to be negotiated, resolved and debated within a
regional and global context.
"It's really rethinking what land is beyond simply a productive factor
in producing crops. Land has become a much more precious commodity - so
the question is, how do you maximise the use of the land?" Mr Spellman
said.