World’s food supplies slammed by drought, loods, frost

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OHANNERSBURG - weather is slamming crops across the globe, bringing with it the threat of further food inflation at a time costs are already hovering near the highest in a decade and hunger is on the rise.

Brazil’s worst frost in two decades brought a deadly blow to young coffee trees in the world’s biggest grower. Flooding in China’s key pork region inundated farms and raised the threat of animal disease. Scorching heat and drought crushed crops on both sides of the US- Canada border. And in Europe, torrential rains sparked the risk of fungal diseases for grains and stalled tractors in soaked fields.

Coffee’s the biggest recent mover, with prices surging 17 per cent this week week and topping US$ 2 a pound for the first time since 2014. But the recent frost in Brazil is just the latest example of woes that have struck farmers there

this year. Brazil’s also experiencing a crippling drought that depleted reservoirs needed for irrigation.

The series of misfortunes underscores what scientists have been warning about for years: Climate change and its associated weather volatility will make it increasingly harder to produce enough food for the world, with the poorest nations typically feeling the hardest blow.

In some cases, social and political unrest follows.

“Things that are happening in one part of the world end up impacting all of us,” said Agnes Kalibata, a United Nations special envoy for the 2021 Food Systems Summit and Rwanda’s former agriculture minister. “We’ve underestimated as a world is just how frequently” weather would start to have serious impacts.

“Some communities are already living through the nightmares of climate change,” Kalibata said.

The Food Price Index from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization rose for 12 consecutive months through May before easing in June to 124.6 points, still up 34 per cent from a year earlier. The index measures international prices of a basket of food commodities.

No other industry is more at the mercy of sun, rain and heat than agriculture, where changes in the weather can upend a farmer’s fortunes overnight. It’s also an industry that’s become extremely globalised and concentrated, creating a precarious situation where an extreme weather event in one place is bound to have ripples everywhere.

Brazil, for example, is the world’s biggest shipper of sugar and orange juice and a key producer of corn and soybeans. It accounts for about 40 per cent of the world’s harvest for arabica coffee, the smooth variety that shows up in your Starbucks cup.