Climate disasters colliding with Ukraine war to deepen hunger crisis
With temperatures spiking to 110 degrees once more, Jeetram Yadav sat in the shade on his farm outside New Delhi and cupped a handful of this season’s disappointing wheat between his calloused palms. The grains were brown and the size of cumin seeds, shriveled by heat. “I can speak for my village: Everybody has had the same fate,” said Yadav, a 70-year-old who grows wheat and rice on his 2.6-acre plot.
Yadav’s shriveled grains are a small part of the dangerous feedback loop between climate-linked weather disasters and the war in Ukraine that have sent food prices soaring around the world and raising the risk of an epidemic of starvation.
When Russia invaded earlier this year, threatening Ukraine’s exports of grains, crop-rich India was seen as a global buffer, making up for the shortfall. But this spring’s erratic rains and scorching heat killed crops and made it dangerous for farmworkers to harvest, devastating India’s production. In response, India announced in May they would shut down all grain exports, staving off famine in their own country but threatening starvation abroad.
It was yet another climate-driven shock to a global food system already in upheaval, and a sign of the hunger crisis that looms as the planet warms.
As of last week, about 750,000 people around the world were facing a food security “catastrophe” - at which “starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident” - according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the U.N. agency tasked with fighting global hunger. About 49 million are at risk of falling into famine conditions in the months ahead, according to a Hunger Hotspots report published last week by the FAO and the World Food Program, the United Nations’ food assistance branch. “These are millions of people who literally don’t know where their next meal is coming from,” said Brian Lander, deputy director of WFP’s emergencies division. Climate change is not the only contributing factor, he noted. Supply chain issues and economic instability linked to the coronavirus pandemic have raised costs for fuel, fertilizer, shipping and other agricultural inputs.
The war between Russia and Ukraine has also disrupted exports from two of the world’s biggest wheat producers, increasing the price of the grain that supplies one-fifth of all calories consumed by humans. With Black Sea shipping blocked and Ukrainian ports heavily mined, millions of tons of grains are trapped in the region. Russia has also seized wheat, bombed silos and blocked many railways, leading U.S. and European officials to accuse Moscow of “weaponizing” the world’s food supply to gain an upper hand in the war.
At talks in Turkey last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov indicated support for a U.N. proposal that would create shipping corridors to ease the ports blockade and allow Russia to export grain and fertilizer. Ukrainian officials expressed skepticism that Russia would not exploit the corridors for an amphibious attack, and the prospect of a deal remains elusive. But while the Ukraine war and the pandemic might fade with time, experts say, climate change has become a persistent threat to food security, making it more difficult to respond to unforeseen shocks. Human greenhouse gas emissions have fueled increasingly unpredictable weather events that can wipe out harvests for an entire region, studies show. Waves of punishing heat can kill livestock and make it unsafe for farmworkers to do their jobs. Floods and other natural disasters can devastate the infrastructure needed to transport food to hungry communities.
A February report on climate impacts and adaptation from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that current warming levels of about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) have already cut into yields of staples like wheat, sorghum and rice. If global temperatures rise an additional degree, the chance of simultaneous crop failures in different parts of the world rises to almost 1 in 10 for a given year. By the end of the century, the report projects, as much as 30% of current agricultural land could become unsuitable for farming. “It does feel as though what we had in the report is just playing out in live stream when I read the news,” said Rachel Bezner Kerr, a professor of global development at Cornell University and coordinating lead author for the IPCC. “We have consistent robust evidence of increased extreme events from climate change, which exacerbate some of these other non-climatic factors and can lead to real spikes,” she added.
Climate change impacts on food production are most felt in low-income countries that rely on a tenuous mix of locally grown and imported food, Kerr said. These communities are increasingly struggling to ensure their own harvests but cannot afford to pay ever higher prices on the global market. In few places is the situation more dire than in the Horn of Africa, where recent rainfall has been just half of average and a historic drought is stretching into its fourth consecutive season. Hunger mortality rates for the region have been ticking upward, and as much as 29% of Somali children younger than 5 are experiencing acute malnutrition.