No Water for Chocolate

No Water for Chocolate

And So Much More

I’m an espresso nut (pun intended); I grind and brew my own special selection of beans, which I purchase from growers and trusted wholesalers around the world. I began to notice that over time that there were fewer and fewer farmers selling these products. Prices began to creep up, then soar, sometimes even doubling. Kona. Jamaica. Ethiopia. Colombia. It was happening everywhere. The price increases paralleled price increases in chocolate; the cocoa bean was clearly facing an equal level of contracting serviceable land. Drought was killing these crops, it seems. But, as they say, it’s just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Will these foods disappear? Became rare and pricey luxuries? What about the rest of our food chain? Is it due to climate change or is this just a cyclical pattern that the earth has witnessed before?

The current Holocene Epoch – effecting a huge measurement of time on Earth, reaches back about 11,000 years, immediately following the Pleistocene Era – began as the Ice Age ended and humanity began expanding sedentary agriculture. For most of that time, climate change did not vacillate wildly; no significant temperature changes altered that pattern… until the Industrial Revolution, and with the proliferation of motor vehicles, electrical power plants based on burning fossil fuel, increasing the use of fire to clear agricultural land and carbon-based industrial power… well… the Holocene Epoch just changed all that. Greenhouse gasses. Global warming such as the earth has never witnessed in recorded time.

Finnish researchers at Aalto University, in a peer-reviewed study entitled Climate Change Risks Pushing One-Third of Global Food Production Outside of Safe Climatic Space (in One Earth, May 14th Issue), warn that statistical analysis predicts that 30-34% of currently growing crops and raising livestock face severe climate risks within a foreseeable future. So many farms and ranches can no longer count on climatic stability for continuing their production. These are not short-term weather changes. Permanent destructive alterations in food production. Dangerous insect migration as well as diseases to plants and livestock are in this mix as well.

The authors summarize: “Food production on our planet is dominantly based on agricultural practices developed during stable Holocene climatic conditions. Although it is widely accepted that climate change perturbs these conditions, no systematic understanding exists on where and how the major risks for entering unprecedented conditions may occur. Here, we address this gap by introducing the concept of safe climatic space (SCS), which incorporates the decisive climatic factors of agricultural production: precipitation, temperature, and aridity. We show that a rapid and unhalted growth of greenhouse gas emissions (SSP5–8.5) could force 31% of the global food crop and 34% of livestock production beyond the SCS by 2081–2100. The most vulnerable areas are South and Southeast Asia and Africa's Sudano-Sahelian Zone, which have low resilience to cope with these changes. Our results underpin the importance of committing to a low-emissions scenario (SSP1–2.6), whereupon the extent of food production facing unprecedented conditions would be a fraction.”

Writing for the June 19th edition of Yahoo News, David Knowles analyzes the above report, and as the above graphic illustrates, notes that if humanity chooses to do so, the damage can still be mitigated somewhere:  “There is hope, however: If the world's nations are successful in their goal of limiting global mean temperatures to warming between 1.5° and 2°C, the impacts on food production will be lessened. 

“Numerous other studies have looked at how climate change will affect individual crops or growing areas, and some have concluded that global warming is already wreaking havoc on food production. Others make the case that dietary changes are imperative to prevent temperatures from rising even further… As certain food industries feel the impact, their products won't go away, but prices could rise and change behaviors.” 

Knowles presents observations of the expected impact of continued failure to address this climatic catastrophe: “[Wine and Beer] ‘Over the next century, the area suitable for premium wine grape production is likely to shrink and shift,’ a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded. ‘According to the higher emissions projections, premium wine grapes could only be grown in a thin strip of land along the coast of California, with premium wine-producing regions shifting northward to coastal Oregon and Washington.’… A 2018 study published in the journal Nature found that weather disruptions spurred by climate change will also affect the production of beer, thanks to the impact on barley crops… 

“[Meat] According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, meat and dairy production accounts for 14.5 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Citing deforestation that is carried out to create grazing land for livestock, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included a section in its landmark 2019 special report that declared that the prospect of eating less meat could ‘present major opportunities for adaptation and mitigation while generating significant co-benefits in terms of human health.’… Beef is, by far, one of the worst food sources in terms of its impact on climate change, in part because of the methane gas that cows produce. Beef production generates 60 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of meat, more than double that of lamb, which ranks second, Forbes reported…

“[Wheat, corn and nuts] A 2019 study published in Science Advances found that unless global mean temperatures can be kept from rising, major droughts will affect 60 percent of areas where wheat is grown. That is dramatically higher than the current 15 percent of wheat-growing areas affected by drought conditions. The backdrop to the rise in the prevalence of drought, the study noted, is that demand for wheat was projected to increase 43 percent from 2006 to 2050. 

“A similar dynamic is at play with corn, 30 percent of the world's supply of which is grown in the U.S. Weather patterns resulting in drought or widespread flooding that can overlap with the growing season for corn are projected to reduce yields by 20 to 40 percent over the decade spanning 2046-2055, a study released in April concluded…

“California, which is currently in the grip of a mega-drought, is the world's leading producer of almonds, growing roughly 80 percent of the global supply. Thanks to rising temperatures and the drought, which has depleted groundwater and deprived the state of a robust snowpack, the future of the water-intensive crop has been made more precarious. 

“Yet, as with many other crops, climate change may present the opportunity for almonds to be grown in latitudes currently too cold to support them. .. Researcher Lauren Parker of the University of California, Davis, is studying whether, as temperatures continue to rise, almond trees could thrive in states like Oregon and Washington.” 

In short, not only will climate change slam us in the wallet, well beyond the start-stop price disruption we are experiencing post-pandemic, but the actual availability of many foods we just take for granted today may well fade.

I’m Peter Dekom, and for all those remaining “it’s just a natural cycle” climate change skeptics who do not believe disrupting business with greenhouse gas restrictions, you can learn this lesson the hard way or the much, much, much harder way.