The World Is Producing More Food than Ever—but Not for Long

This story originally appeared on Vox and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Globally, humanity produces more food than ever, but this harvest is concentrated in just a handful of berries.

More than a third of global wheat and barley exports come from Ukraine and Russia, for example. Some of these highly productive agricultural lands, including major culture culture regions in the United States, are on the right track to see the most sharp harvests due to climate change.

This is bad news not only for farmers, but also for all those who eat, especially because it becomes more difficult and more expensive to feed a more congested and more confronted world, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.

In a scenario of moderate greenhouse gas emissions, six key basic crops will see a drop of 11.2% by the end of the century compared to a world without warming, even if farmers are trying to adapt. And the largest drops do not occur in poorer and more marginal agricultural land, but in places that are already large food producers. These are regions like the American Midwest that have been blessed with good soil and an ideal time to raise staples such as corn and soy.

But when this time is far from ideal, it can considerably reduce agricultural productivity. Extreme time has already started to eat in harvests this year: floods have destroyed rice in Tajikistan, cucumbers in Spain and bananas in Australia. In the United States, serious storms have caused millions of dollars in damages. In recent years, severe heat has resulted in a sharp drop in blueberries, olives and grapes. And as the climate changes, the increase in average temperatures and the evolution of precipitation models are ready to reduce yields, while weather events such as droughts and floods reaching larger extremes could destroy harvests more often.

“It is not a mystery that climate change will affect our food production,” said Andrew Hultgren, a researcher in agriculture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “It is the sector most exposed to the economy.”

Farmers do what they can – by testing different varieties of crops that can better resist changes in the climate, by changing the moment when they are segment, has refined their use of fertilizers and water and to invest in infrastructure such as water tanks.

The question is whether these adaptations can continue to keep the pace of warming. To understand this, Hultgren and his team examined the data of cultures and meteorologicals of 54 countries around the world dating from the 1940s. They specifically examined how farmers have adapted to the changes in the climate that have already occurred, focusing on corn, wheat, rice, cassava, sorghum and soy. Combined, these cultures provide two thirds of the calories of humanity.

In the Journal de la Nature, Hultgren and his team reported that in general, adaptation can slow down certain harvest losses due to climate change, but not all.

And the decrease in our food production could be devastating: each degree Celsius of warming, global food production should decrease by 120 calories per person per day. This even takes into account the way in which climate change can make seasonal growth and how the most carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can encourage plant growth. In the scenario of moderate greenhouse gas emissions – passing between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius from warming by 2100 – income and adaptations of adaptation would compensate only third party of harvest losses in the world.