Corn plants with wilted and dying leaves stand in a dry field in Indiana during the first week of July 2012. Bloomberg News

By Alister Doyle
17 August 2012 Downpours and heat waves caused by climate change could disrupt food supplies from the fields to the supermarkets, raising the risk of more price spikes such as this year’s leap triggered by drought in the United States. Food security experts working on a chapter in a U.N. overview of global warming due in 2014 said governments should take more account of how extremes of heat, droughts or floods could affect food supplies from seeds to consumers’ plates. “It has not been properly recognized yet that we are dealing with a food system here. There is a whole chain that is also going to be affected by climate change,” Professor Dr. John Porter of the University of Copenhagen said. “It is more than just the fact that there are droughts in the United States that will reduce yields,” he said. Like the other experts, he said was giving personal opinions, not those of the U.N. panel. After harvest, floods could wash away roads or bridges, for instance, between fields and factories processing the crop. Or warehouses storing food could be damaged by more powerful storms. Such factors were likely to hit poor nations hardest. “There are reasons to expect more frequent (price) spikes, given that it will be more common to see conditions that are considered extreme,” said David Lobell, an assistant professor at Stanford University in California. Other factors could dampen rises, however, “including responses such as raising grain storage or changing trade policies”. He said Stanford was trying to produce models of the likelihood of price spikes to understand the risks. “It’s a distributional problem – there is enough food in the world. But the distribution doesn’t work,” said Bruce McCarl, a professor at Texas A&M University. Climate extremes could aggravate food price swings, he said. The worst drought in five decades in the United States has pushed up corn prices by more than 50 percent from late May to record highs above $8 a bushel. Hot, dry weather has also hit crops in southern Europe. A U.N. report on climate extremes in March said it was “virtually certain” that days with extreme heat would increase. Among other findings, it said it was likely that downpours would increase as a percentage of total rainfall. […]

Climate Change Poses Risks to Food Supplies Beyond U.S. Drought