The UK’s National Drought Group estimates that the yields of some vegetable crops, including potatoes, carrots, and onions, may be reduced by half. The majority of the continent is drier than it has been since the Renaissance, according to the European Droughts Observatory. Following an unprecedented heatwave, China’s agricultural ministry urged farmers to make emergency crop changes.
It is only natural to be concerned about the world’s food supplies as the fall harvests approach. However, experts who monitor the production and trade of important crops claim that there is currently no emergency. Anywhere you look, you might see indications of stress. However, the system as a whole continues to be resilient. According to Scott Irwin, a well-known economist and professor of agricultural marketing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “It’s easy to lose track of the scale of global agriculture.” “It’s just enormous, and it’s geographically very dispersed. At least historically, if you have a problem in one place, it usually gets balanced out by better-than-average growing conditions somewhere else.”
The world currently has adequate supplies of grain, he continues.
Given the skyrocketing food prices and the ongoing disruption caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where cargo ships that have been trapped since February have finally been allowed to leave, that may seem counterintuitive. But it shows how different economists and local people see the health of a food system based on wheat, corn, and soybeans, which are easy to move and store.
The US Department of Agriculture’s most recent monthly assessment, released in mid-August, forecasts higher US and global production for wheat and soybeans and mixed results for corn and rice. Because these forecasts are an average, they don’t take into account things like better weather in some areas and lower yields in others, or the fact that different commodity crops are planted and harvested at different times of the year.By the time the summer heat waves hit, the winter wheat, which is harvested in May or June, had already been cut. However, the hot, dry weather may have hampered corn pollination because corn is planted in the spring.
“A couple of days ago, there were headlines stating that Nebraska was a little below normal and that South Dakota’s corn crop was unusually low this year—and they have a terrible drought,” says Daniel Sumner, an economist and the director of the Agricultural Issues Center at the University of California, Davis. However, the USDA was still predicting a typical national corn and soybean crop in the United States as of the middle of August. And the reason for that is that Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa have relatively good crops and play a much larger role in the overall national economy than Nebraska or South Dakota do.
Even if those differences average out on a national level—possibly even on a global level, when you balance production in the Southern Hemisphere against that of the US and Western Europe, or the Americas against that of Central Europe and Asia—there is a persistent sense that things are, well, wiggly.Farmers’ choices, such as whether to plant more to make up for a dry year or less to reduce the increases in fertilizer prices brought on by Russia’s export ban, account for some of the changes in productivity. But some are definitely caused by climate change, which is causing the weather to be more unpredictable. This is making it hard for farmers to do their jobs and putting crops that are already growing in the fields at risk.
According to Beth Hall, director of the Indiana State Climate Office at Purdue University, “we’re seeing longer periods of dryness before the next rain event occurs, and that next rain event is more likely to be in the form of heavy rainfall that will end up running off.” “When farmers were able to plant their fields, it made all the difference in this year’s success of crops in the US,” particularly in the larger Midwest region. She continues, “But if fields were muddy from rain and farmers couldn’t get into them, they planted later—and root systems were shorter and unable to keep new plants healthy before the next downpour came around. Those that were planted earlier had roots deep enough that when it was dry, they could tap into some low moisture.
Of course, weather concerns have always plagued farmers. It is currently a challenge for crop experts to determine whether droughts and other disturbances—and the potential crop shortfalls they may cause—additionally add up to a predictable trend. This is crucial because, despite overall good productivity, there isn’t much grain stockpile left over after last year’s scattered droughts and the supply shock of Ukraine’s breadbasket being temporarily cut off from the world food system.
According to Joseph Glauber, a senior research fellow at the nonprofit International Food Policy Research Institute and a former chief economist at the USDA, “the key thing about stocks is that, if you have a drought, you can use them to keep prices reasonable—because when they get very low, prices get volatile.” “I believe that people anticipated that stock levels would increase, and that this year’s crops would be particularly abundant. Even though all the shoes haven’t yet fallen, there are these droughts and weather changes happening all over the world.
No one involved in crop economics has forgotten that riots in Haiti, South America, and South Asia in 2008 and 2009, as well as the Arab Spring in 2010, were all caused by high grain prices more than ten years ago. And nobody currently believes that things are that bad. It’s simple to undervalue how adaptable production can be, according to Sumner. “We’ve seen droughts at least half a dozen times in my career, but the current ones don’t yet appear to be nearly as severe.”
Additionally, future shortages will probably be distributed unevenly. Droughts have already lasted long enough in some regions of the world to seriously disrupt food production. The majority of those affected by the disruption do not have the resources or influence to lessen their suffering. The Horn of Africa, which includes Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya, has historically had two rainy seasons per year, one lasting from October to December and the other from March to May. Precipitation is essential for feeding both people and livestock. The last four wet seasons have all been failures. The most recent one, which ought to have ended in May of last year, was the driest ever. A third of the livestock in the area have perished. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a project of the US Agency for International Development and international nonprofits, says that up to 20 million people need food.
Governments from other countries have previously sent food aid. Due to droughts and supply shocks this year, that response isn’t occurring with the usual frequency or speed. For example, wheat from Ukraine would have been a staple of aid, but the first shipment from there didn’t arrive until August 30. The UN World Food Programme is able to move food into crisis situations, according to Christine Stewart, director of the Institute for Global Nutrition at the University of California, Davis. “In normal cases, we can move food from one region to another to make up for losses,” she says. The problem is that there are so many crises going on at the same time that the backup system is overworked.
Although the Horn of Africa is an extreme example, it could also be a sign of things to come. The purpose of the global food system is to facilitate the exchange of surpluses for crops in areas that lack them. For now, it functions. However, as climate change and droughts become more frequent, production may become unreliable—and the distribution of food to those in need may stall.
