Below is an excerpt from our book,”Famine in the West”. Though it was only written a few months ago, events have allready slightly overtaken it.
“In January 2007 the IPCC issued a report which was the culmination of six years of research by 2500 scientists from more than 130 countries. This highly regarded study predicts catastrophic rises in sea levels, frequent droughts, tropical storms, flooding, heatwaves and the disappearance of Arctic ice in the sea in the second half of this century.
“It forecasts a 3ºc rise in average temperature by the end of the century but a 6.4ºc rise is possible. So, without very quick action, runaway change looks certain.
“Some commentators have said that climate change will merely mean a geographic relocation of the areas suitable for agriculture, that as large areas like Africa, Southern Europe and the U.S. corn belt become too dry, other parts of the world such as Upper Canada and Northern Russia would become more viable for farming. This argument might make sense if the change were taking place over many hundreds of years but as we lose production from the South we cannot easily move farming to the more northern areas. It would take years to clear the land and build an infrastructure and even then would only be marginally suitable. Certainly there would be no chance of replacing production lost elsewhere. The best we could hope for would be a slow movement northwards of the boundaries of productive land.
“As far as other productive farming areas are concerned, scientists predict major losses in agricultural productivity if global surface temperatures rise by more than 2ºC. However, non-farmers do not always realise how dependent farmers are on a regular weather pattern for the type of farming they do and how relatively small changes can cause big losses. In fact, in the last few years I am sure that every farmer has seen extremes of weather, way outside of the normal fluctuations, that have at times lowered crop yield. So far though, consumers have been lucky in that poor yields in one area have been balanced by good yields in others and there have been carry-over stocks available from previous harvests…”
Since that was written, the 2007 harvest has been poor in several parts of the world causing grain prices to shoot up to record levels. By next harvest, stocks will be at dangerous levels and we are now extremely vulnerable should that harvest also be poor.