Climate change severely impacting food prices – ‘The U.S. is taking a wrecking ball to the climate convention’
By Jaya Ramachandran, Arab News
16 September 2012 (SRPC) – While there are hardly any signs of substantive and forward-looking agreements being reached at the UN climate change conference from Nov. 26 to Dec. 7, in Doha, latest research cautions that impact of climate change on future food prices is being underestimated. “By the end of the most recent round of climate talks in Bangkok (Aug. 30 to Sept. 5), there was no movement from developed countries to increase the level of their ambition with regard to emissions reductions — the low pledges, subject to many conditions, made in Durban, South Africa, last December remain unchanged,” wrote Chee Yoke Ling and Hilary Chiew of the Third World Network (TWN) in an article for the South-North Development Monitor website. “Even as scientific evidence mounts on worsening climate change, developed countries are not willing to meet their legal obligations to make deep greenhouse gases cuts under the Kyoto Protocol,” they concluded. Representatives of civil society organizations reacted angrily at the end of the UN climate talks in Bangkok, and said it is apparent that the 8th annual session of the Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol to be held in Doha will not approve further action on climate change this decade. “The United States government is opposed to a top-down structure under the Kyoto Protocol’s second commitment period,” said Meena Raman, legal adviser to the TWN. “The US wants a voluntary pledging system to cut emissions that is not based on science nor based on equity.” She added: “The United States and its allies want the UN to ‘be silent’ on issues where they haven’t yet reached agreement. To be clear that means they want the UN to be silent on solving climate change. The US is taking a wrecking ball to the climate convention and any hope of stopping run away climate catastrophe.” The conference in Bangkok has been “marred by ongoing clashes between rich and poor nations, atbodyts to reopen talks on the controversial topic of measuring, reporting and verifying different countries’ emission reductions and the future of the Long-term Cooperative Action working group, which is focused on climate funding, adaptation and technology transfer mechanisms,” explained journalist Kevin Wafula in a report published by Africa Science News. “Undermining a key alleged achievement of the Durban summit last year, agreement to undertake an effective second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol was slowed as the EU refused to take on deep emission cuts and others like Australia dragged their feet on fulfilling the promises made in Durban,” he added. The meetings in Bangkok were held after the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that its Food Price Index climbed 6 percent in July, driven by heat waves and droughts in the United States and extreme weather conditions in India, Australia, Russia and other countries. The price spike wakes up the ghost of a global crisis like the one that badly hurt the poor and vulnerable groups among the world population in 2007-2008, experts warn. The same day the meetings in Thailand ended, Oxfam issued a report titled Extreme weather, extreme prices [pdf], managed by German economist Dirk Willenbockel (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK). The study forecasts that “food price spikes will get worse as extreme weather caused by climate change devastates food production.” By using a global dynamic multi-region computable general equilibrium model of the world economy, the paper goes beyond the gradual impact of climate change patterns and shows “how extreme weather events in a single year could bring about price spikes of comparable magnitude to two decades of long-run price rises,” and “signals the urgent need for a full stress-testing of the global food system in a warming world.” “The huge potential impact of extreme weather events on future food prices is missing from today’s climate change debate. The world needs to wake up to the drastic consequences facing our food system of climate inaction,” said Tim Gore, Oxfam’s Climate Change Policy Adviser. In the scenarios traced by Willenbockel, “the average price of staple foods could more than double in the next 20 years compared with 2010 trend prices — with up to half of the increase caused by climate change (changing mean body temperatures and rainfall patterns).” “Climate change is already threatening the livelihoods and food security of the poor and vulnerable. The industrial model of agricultural production threatens the viability of ecosystems and contributes massively to climate change. Nothing less than a system change is needed in the face of climate change,” the organizations warned.
