Yesterday, Pestilence; today, Famine

Yesterday I wrote about the outbreak of antibiotic resistant E. coli in Germany and Europe (and for a great take on why this is indicative of something far worse, read "The reason why this deadly E. coli makes doctors shudder" by Maryn McKenna. Excerpt: "According to Germany's Robert Koch Institute, [E. coli] O104 is resistant to more than a dozen antibiotics in eight classes: penicillins; streptomycin; tetracycline; the quinolone nalidixic acid; the sulfa drug combination trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazol; three generations of cephalosporins; and the combination drugs amoxicillin/clavulanic acid, piperacillin-sulbactam, and piperacillin-tazobactam.")

Yikes. But today our subject is another of the Four Horsemen:



















The reason I bring this up is a long and detailed NY Times article about the threat to the global food production posed by --

you guessed it --

wait for it --

CLIMATE CHANGE. Yes indeedy. Fear, fire, floods, and Famine are all connected, and the threat to food from fire (drought, if you must have it explained) and floods causes the fear that Famine is about to break the seal. We have been lucky for years, even decades, that global food production has kept up with population growth, despite the overuse of fertilizer, tremendously wasteful irrigation, and an increasing urban population increasingly dependent on stretched-to-breaking supply lines. (I could mention the carbon footprint of meat consumption and long-range imports, but I'll leave that for another posting and another time).

But now, the Earth is warming, notably, and the favorable tides of food are beginning to turn. Food prices are up -- if you are a wealthy American, have you noticed your supermarket bills lately? But that pales -- yes, it does -- compared to the threat to the staples which sustain billions, the rice, corn, wheat, and soybeans. (And we could probably also mention millet and sorghum, too.) There have been food riots in the past years, which we wealthy Americans barely notice. Part of that was blamed on conversion of corn from corn we eat to corn we make ethanol with, but I'm not sure if ethanol corn is the same as eatin' corn.

The problem is worsening, and the article notes that the vaunted CO₂ fertilizer effect has been found to be rather ineffectual, actually. So any gains provided to grains by increased CO₂ are offset by problems with actually growing them, particularly problems due to drought and heat. (Which go together a lot of times.)

Let's hear quotes from the farmers, who do not care if Senator Inhofe says it's a hoax and if Marc Morano labels good honest climate scientists as liars:

Sitting with a group of his fellow wheat farmers, Francisco Javier Ramos Bours voiced a suspicion. Water shortages had already arrived in recent years for growers in his region, the Yaqui Valley, which sits in the Sonoran Desert of northwestern Mexico. In his view, global climate change could well be responsible.

“All the world is talking about it,” Mr. Ramos said as the other farmers nodded.

Farmers everywhere face rising difficulties: water shortages as well as flash floods. Their crops are afflicted by emerging pests and diseases and by blasts of heat beyond anything they remember.

In a recent interview on the far side of the world, in northeastern India, a rice farmer named Ram Khatri Yadav offered his own complaint about the changing climate. “It will not rain in the rainy season, but it will rain in the nonrainy season,” he said. “The cold season is also shrinking.”

Yes, the farmers know, and compensate as best they can. If they can.

If they don't, Famine smiles and weighs us with his scales. Especially when he hears this music to his ears:

But the recent price spikes have helped cause the largest increases in world hunger in decades. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated the number of hungry people at 925 million last year, and the number is expected to be higher when a fresh estimate is completed this year. The World Bank says the figure could be as high as 940 million.

Dr. Borlaug’s latest successor at the corn and wheat institute, Hans-Joachim Braun, recently outlined the challenges facing the world’s farmers. On top of the weather disasters, he said, booming cities are chewing up agricultural land and competing with farmers for water. In some of the world’s breadbaskets, farmers have achieved high output only by pumping groundwater much faster than nature can replenish it.

And is the GOP going to be involved in this? You betcha:

The Obama administration has won high marks from antihunger advocates for focusing on the issue. President Obama pledged $3.5 billion at L’Aquila, more than any other country, and the United States has begun an ambitious initiative called Feed the Future to support agricultural development in 20 of the neediest countries.

So far, the administration has won $1.9 billion from Congress. Amid the budget struggles in Washington, it remains to be seen whether the United States will fully honor its pledge.

And what makes Famine joyful?

"The United Nations recently projected that global population would hit 10 billion by the end of the century, 3 billion more than today. Coupled with the demand for diets richer in protein, the projections mean that food production may need to double by later in the century.

Unlike in the past, that demand must somehow be met on a planet where little new land is available for farming, where water supplies are tightening, where the temperature is rising, where the weather has become erratic and where the food system is already showing serious signs of instability."

Gather ye corn cobs while ye may.

For Famine is ready to ride.