Climate change, a result of human-induced activities like burning flammable minerals and cutting logs, is causing a rise in temperature, precipitation, and weather patterns. This has led to food security issues, affecting farmers’ ability to obtain safe, nutritious food for health.
Farmers face challenges such as altered precipitation, increased temperature, and water scarcity, which affect irrigation and soil fertility. Warmer climates also increase pests and diseases in plants and livestock, leading to declining profits in farms and cattle. Fisheries also face negative effects, as rising oceanic temperatures and acidification destroy marine ecosystems, reducing fish stocks and availability. These factors negatively affect weaker sectors of the population, particularly in developing countries that heavily rely on agriculture, leading to higher food prices, hunger, and malnutrition.
Climate events and extreme climatic events drove almost 57 million people into a food crisis last year. Climate change affects food insecurity and agriculture in two ways. Climate shocks and extreme events, whether those are cyclones, droughts, earthquakes and so on, cause widespread damage losses and damages and that affects the most vulnerable people directly. The second pathway is much more gradual. It’s the slow onset, it’s the creeping effect that climate change has on agriculture and food systems.
That’s where you see the degradation of land, salinity entering into the soil, into the groundwater and that has a very long-term damaging effect on food production. That doesn’t make the headlines; by the way, up to 40 percent of the planet’s total land area is currently degraded. That’s massive, and that forces farmers all across the world to find alternative solutions, and that affects the food security of the entire planet.
A lot of people in the developing world don’t have access to clean water, so that has a direct impact on malnutrition because one of the underlying causes of malnutrition is poor drinking water, which causes disease. Coupled with poor sanitation, that makes people sick, and they cannot absorb their food, and that creates malnutrition.
There’s also another aspect here which is the burden of collecting water across the developing world. The burden of collecting water falls on women and girls, and that means that those women are spending huge amounts of their time collecting water. Girls aren’t attending school because of third, and there are security concerns for women, traversing land to be able to collect water.
India is very much leading the way, to be honest, on this because of the National Food Security Act, which India has with the Big Four food-based safety nets covering more than a billion people here in this country. We all have a lot to learn from these systems, and all social protection systems of this kind, whether it’s midday meals or it’s a public distribution system, can always be strengthened and improved.
Sudan is yet another country where change in climate, conflict, and food insecurity are associated. Long droughts and desertification in Sudan have reduced the productivity of farmlands. In Darfur and other areas, farmers are not returning to their lands because of the conflict and the advance of the desert. Millions continue to suffer from food insecurity. Nearly 20 million people in Sudan are under severe deficiencies in the food supply, which has been attributed to scarce water and the unavailability of clean drinking water. In many other developing regions, women and girls spend hours collecting water, thus increasing their vulnerability and preventing girls from attending school.
There’s the impact of insufficient water on crops and food production. You need a lot of water to produce food, so as we’re seeing increasing droughts increasing stresses when it comes to water resources, well that also impacts the production of food, which is going down. Two billion people worldwide live on land that is vulnerable to desertification and that means also that there’s a displacement of people because they can’t grow food where they typically live and they have to move.
Concerning India, 60 percent of agriculture depends on rainfall, and there have been big shifts in the monsoons. The monsoons are making the drought areas of the country, the already dry areas of the country, worse because they are shifting away from those areas. So, there is particular concern about certain states, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu, where there are particularly vulnerable tribal groups, for instance, that depend on natural resources. Those communities are being directly affected. They are facing reduced yields and less food production. What we know is that climate change is projected to reduce wheat yields, for example, by 19 percent by 2050, and the Kharif maize yields will be reduced by 18 percent by 2050.
So those are very concrete projections, and 80 percent of farmers in India are smallholders, and they need a lot of support in adapting and dealing with climate change. One is that we need a stronger relief system. It is clear the current relief system needs reforming, with more anticipatory action, not just responding once an emergency hits. That means that there are plenty of tools for climate risk insurance. More funds are needed, as are better safety net programmes.
India is very much leading the way, to be honest, on this because of the National Food Security Act, which India has with the Big Four food-based safety nets covering more than a billion people here in this country. We all have a lot to learn from these systems, and all social protection systems of this kind, whether it’s midday meals or it’s a public distribution system, can always be strengthened and improved.
