Across eastern and southern Africa, where harvest season has just begun, the Pacific current is having devastating effects. An extraordinary drought in South Africa has all but wiped out the country’s corn crop. Ethiopia’s grain production has fallen by 75 per cent, leading the Agency for International Development to warn that 10 million people there “may be in food crisis” later this year; Malawi has already declared a food emergency; Zimbabwe will be spending $200-million on grain imports to cover lost harvests. In many of these countries, grain prices have more than doubled.
In India, where several states are hit with drought, the government has implemented emergency measures to sustain food supplies.
Thailand, Vietnam and India, together responsible for 60 per cent of the world’s rice supply, expect to see their inventories fall by a third – the biggest drop since 2003.
China has just announced a 9.9 million tonne gap between the grain it produces and consumes. Indonesia is struggling to recover from simultaneous droughts and wildfires, both symptoms of El Nino. And North Koreans have now been warned by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization that their already-low rice yields have fallen by 26 per cent.
An El Nino drought is not itself climate change (though this one is occurring in the midst of the warmest decade in recorded history). But it shows us what a warming climate will do to our livelihoods and economies, and where the most vulnerable people will be.
The most recent time this happened, in 2008, the result was food riots and starvation crises that fed political instability across the developing world. The sudden sharp rise in grain prices (after food prices had plummeted for decades) had one benefit: It caused billions to be invested in suddenly profitable agriculture, and millions of hectares of land to be made productive, thus ending the crisis.
But it’s all too apparent this year that it was not enough. And what the year-long drought is showing us is that global warming is a predominantly rural crisis, and that the hardest-hit areas are those where rural life is poor, under-invested, non-commercial and lacking connections to the wider economy.
