How Climate Change Will Hurt Crops and Endanger Our Food Security

It is estimated that a 2-3 degree rise in temperature may lead to a decrease in wheat production in north India.

The global climate system is a complex, multifaceted system. It’s hard to infer the effects of climate change plainly on the basis of an isolated instance of unseasonal rain or temperature spikes in a particular place.

Nonetheless, when we look at the larger picture, certain trends become clear.

What are These Trends?

Well, the trends point towards untimely rain, droughts, hotter average temperatures and increased extreme weather events like heat waves, floods and cyclones.

If you think that sounds familiar to what’s been happening over the last few years in India, you wouldn’t be wrong.

While climate change is likely to affect food security is several ways, two of the most important are:
• Reduction in food availability
• Changes in cropping patterns

Impact on Food Productivity

With over fifty percent of India’s population dependent on agriculture, timely rains and expected weather indeed become critical for survival.

So, while rain at the right time can ensure a bumper harvest, rain at the wrong time, as happened in India in 2015, could mean that a year’s mango or wheat crop is destroyed.

Two drought years in 2014 and 2015 have had severe impact on our crop yields.

A recent report noted that India was importing corn, sugar and pulses on a large scale. For example, India exported corn in the previous fiscal and this is the first time in 16 years that corn has been imported.

A rise in domestic prices of corn also increased the costs of raising poultry by over 40 percent.

And worse is still likely to happen.

It is estimated that a 2-3 degree rise in temperature (which is quite possible unless the world drastically changes its current path) could lead to a decrease in wheat production to the tune of 6 to 7 million tonnes every year in north India.

Also, a decrease in food supply could cause food inflation leading to an increase in food prices. And given the state of our agriculture markets, windfall gains will be mopped up by the middleman and farmer incomes would be hit due to reduced supply.

In the case of cash crops which are notoriously climate sensitive, decreased production will affect millions and also affect our foreign exchange earnings.

Take the case of tea, for example. Scientists estimate that temperatures have increased by 1.3 degrees and rainfall has reduced by 20cm a year apart from being erratic. The changed climate is being held responsible for the higher incidence of pest infestations, increasing the use of pesticides.

The tea industry worry that all these factors will lower both the quality and quantity of the tea yield at a time when the Indian tea industry is competing with Sri Lanka and Kenya in the global tea market—in 2014, tea exports decreased by 8 percent.

Impact on Cropping Patterns

Experts have also pointed out that a change in climate will lead to changes in crop boundaries—that is, areas where crops can be grown. This has already been happening—apple growing in the Himachal Pradesh has been moving higher and higher in order to cope with a warming climate.

Also, erratic rainfall patterns might call for increased irrigation—no mean task in a country where two-thirds of the agriculture is rain-fed and where experts predict water stress in a few years from now.

Pulses are a good example of these problems—they are critical for Indian food security but less than a fifth of the area under pulse production is irrigated leaving them entirely at the mercy of rains.

Conclusion

There’s little doubt that far from being an abstract phenomenon, climate change is likely to have a huge impact on our daily lives.

Food prices are likely to rise, as is food scarcity and certain types of climate sensitive local varieties of food might altogether disappear.

Growing climate resilient crops and improving our research on hardy local varieties of common food grains and horticultural crops is possibly the only way to “climate-proof” our future.

(Shalini Iyengar is a lawyer and a Research Associate at the International College of Turin)