In a press conference on Thursday, Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, shared his concern that greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere will lead to grain and water shortages in India and China as well as rising grain prices in the United States.
“The world has never faced such a massively predictable potential reduction in grain harvest as we are now looking at with the melting of the glaciers in the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau,” said Mr. Brown. “Keep in mind, this is not based off of a climate model with somewhat theoretical projections. This analysis is based on what is already happening–on a trend that’s very well established in both India and in China.”
China and India are by far the world’s leading growers of wheat and rice, the most abundant food staples. Crop shortages in these countries would therefore have important effects on food around the world. What could cause these crop shortages?
In the business as usual scenario, where industries and individuals do not reduce CO2 and methane emissions, many of the Himalayan glaciers will melt in less than thirty years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Without ice melt from these glaciers, the Ganges river in India and the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in China would become seasonally dry. Crops of wheat and rice that are grown along these rivers would suffer major declines. Already, water strains from urbanization and other factors have led to noticeable hardships for grain farmers.
According to Mr. Brown, the effects of major declines in these key grains might include hunger in India, political unrest in China, and Chinese competition with Americans over US-grown grains.
In India, 407 million people live along the Ganges River. That’s a third again the entire population of the United States. India’s “Green Revolution,” a period when the country was producing enough food to support its population, is already coming apart due to a drop in water tables and a rapidly soaring population.
“The water level has gone down–we don’t get enough water to irrigate the fields,” Tejpal Chohan, an Indian rice farmer, told the BBC two years ago.
In China, 127 million live along the Yellow River and 68 million along the Yangtze River. Unlike in India, China’s booming economy will insulate much of its population from starvation as grain yields fall. However, the same economic clout that could allow China to wrestle a greater share of grain from the world’s markets will also create stiff competition for grains around the world, even in the United States.
“It’ll probably be easier for China to import grain than for India, certainly because of China’s vast dollar holdings and it has a huge trade surplus with the United States, which would be the likely source of much of the grain that it would need to import,” said Mr. Brown at the conference. “Today, China has so much leverage over the US with its huge dollar holdings that, like it or not, US consumers would find themselves sharing changes in China with Chinese consumers.”
To complicate matters, young people in Asia are leaving their family’s rural farms en mass and moving to cities. This exodus from the farming profession has strained farms and families. Compounding the shortage of farmers is the additional strain that urban areas place on water sources.
Here in South Korea, for example, where few young people remain to farm, a great deal of food must be imported.
If China and India lose their water supply, where will the world turn for rice and wheat, our two most important food staples? A more productive question is how can we make political, business, and personal commitments to reducing CO2 and methane levels in order to protect grain and water supplies?
Photo: Wikimedia
