Op-Ed
Columnist
Droughts, Floods and Food
By
PAUL KRUGMAN
Published:
February 6, 2011
We’re in the midst of a global food
crisis — the second in three years. World food prices hit a record in January,
driven by huge increases in the prices of wheat, corn, sugar and oils. These
soaring prices have had only a modest effect on U.S. inflation, which is still
low by historical standards, but they’re having a brutal impact on the world’s
poor, who spend much if not most of their income on basic foodstuffs.
Fred
R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
The consequences of this food crisis
go far beyond economics. After all, the big question about uprisings against
corrupt and oppressive regimes in the Middle East isn’t so much why they’re
happening as why they’re happening now. And there’s little question that
sky-high food prices have been an important trigger for
popular rage.
So what’s behind the price spike?
American right-wingers (and the Chinese) blame easy-money policies at the
Federal Reserve, with at least one commentator
declaring that there is “blood on Bernanke’s hands.” Meanwhile, President
Nicolas Sarkozy of France blames speculators, accusing them of “extortion and
pillaging.”
But the evidence tells a different,
much more ominous story. While several factors have contributed to soaring food
prices, what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events
have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are
exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of
greenhouse gases change our climate — which means that the current food price
surge may be just the beginning.
Now, to some extent soaring food
prices are part of a general commodity boom: the prices of many raw materials,
running the gamut from aluminum to zinc, have been rising rapidly since early
2009, mainly thanks to rapid industrial growth in emerging markets.
But the link between industrial
growth and demand is a lot clearer for, say, copper than it is for food. Except
in very poor countries, rising incomes don’t have much effect on how much
people eat.
It’s true that growth in emerging
nations like China leads to rising meat consumption, and hence rising demand
for animal feed. It’s also true that agricultural raw materials, especially
cotton, compete for land and other resources with food crops — as does the
subsidized production of ethanol, which consumes a lot of corn. So both
economic growth and bad energy policy have played some role in the food price
surge.
Still, food prices lagged behind the
prices of other commodities until last summer. Then the weather struck.
Consider the case of wheat, whose
price has almost doubled since the summer. The immediate cause of the wheat
price spike is obvious: world production is down sharply. The bulk of that
production decline, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, reflects
a sharp plunge in the former Soviet Union. And we know what that’s about: a
record heat wave and drought, which pushed Moscow temperatures above 100 degrees
for the first time ever.
The Russian heat wave was only one
of many recent extreme weather events, from dry weather in Brazil to
biblical-proportion flooding in Australia, that have damaged world food
production.
The question then becomes, what’s
behind all this extreme weather?
To some extent we’re seeing the
results of a natural phenomenon, La Niña — a periodic event in which water in
the equatorial Pacific becomes cooler than normal. And La Niña events have
historically been associated with global food crises, including the crisis of
2007-8.
But that’s not the whole story.
Don’t let the snow fool you: globally, 2010 was tied with 2005 for warmest year
on record, even though we were at a solar minimum and La Niña was a cooling
factor in the second half of the year. Temperature records were set not just in
Russia but in no fewer than 19 countries, covering a fifth of the world’s land
area. And both droughts and floods are natural consequences of a warming world:
droughts because it’s hotter, floods because warm oceans release more water
vapor.
As always, you can’t attribute any
one weather event to greenhouse gases. But the pattern we’re seeing, with
extreme highs and extreme weather in general becoming much more common, is just
what you’d expect from climate change.
The usual suspects will, of course,
go wild over suggestions that global warming has something to do with the food
crisis; those who insist that Ben Bernanke has blood on his hands tend to be
more or less the same people who insist that the scientific consensus on
climate reflects a vast leftist conspiracy.
But the evidence does, in fact,
suggest that what we’re getting now is a first taste of the disruption,
economic and political, that we’ll face in a warming world. And given our
failure to act on greenhouse gases, there will be much more, and much worse, to
come
A
version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 7, 2011, on page A23 of the
New York edition
هل ستنجح حكومة هشام قنديل في امتصاص غضب الشعب من تردي ظروف الحياة؟