The Financial Times reports:
Climate change has become one of the leading risks to food security, with droughts, floods and hurricanes expected to result in production and price volatility, a report from the UN’s agriculture agencies has warned.
The 2007-08 food crisis, when the surge in food costs sparked riots across developing countries, had its roots in a series of droughts around the world, including Argentina and Vietnam.
The Russian wheat export ban in 2010-11, caused by a severe drought, also led to instability in African states amid a surge in bread prices.
Unpredictable weather patterns, which have led to losses in harvests in crops such as wheat, rice and corn, have continued to keep governments on high alert. Last year, the US was hit by the worst drought in half a century, while the Black Sea region of Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine also suffered from lack of precipitation.
“Climate will play an even more prominent role in food security,” said Josef Schmidhuber at the Food and Agriculture Organization, one of the three agencies behind the annual agricultural report.
But here’s what the IPCC says about global warming and drought:
The biofuel mandates had nothing to do with this, of course.