Climate Change and Crop Yields
A friend sent me an article in the journal “Agricultural Economics” that projects that food prices will be 25% higher in 2050 as a direct result of climate change on crop yields.
I respond that this is incredibly complicated and hard to predict. Of course we have extreme weather events, droughts, desertification, increased level of crop diseases, disturbances in the jet stream, and farmers displaced from their ancestral homes by sea-level rise, but we also have longer growing seasons in the extreme latitudes. I’m terrified by the prospect of runaway climate change, but I don’t put too much credence in authors who project things like this many decades hence.
Good call Craig.
If you actually think about the amount of land that will be opening up in the farther Northern latitudes for longer growing seasons (Canada and Russia), you quickly get a sense that there will be significantly more total farming area days than there is today…
Moreover, the idea that you can predict where prices will land with a change in growing patterns from a commodity like FOOD is really speculative at best. Asia will be fully modernized by 2050, so that’s a great deal more protein consumption than current, meanwhile, the Middle East will see its population double, and Africa will see huge strides towards modernization… Food demand will likely be more than double today. With the extremely low demand price elasticity of food, a small shortage could double or triple the price… or we could develop large-scale urban (vertical) farming and the price could be extremely stable regardless of weather. At this point, no-one is going to be more accurate than the gypsies with crystal balls, and anything published should be given just that much consideration.