Climate change to affect global food production

Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap forsees continuing price volatility and even consumer panic in the “not so distant future” in the face of changing global food production due to climate change.

In a recent speech in Madrid, Spain before world leaders attending the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Food Security, Yap warned of a “calm before the storm.”

“Clearly, the calm is indeed before the storm,” Yap warned, citing that  in 2008, “the price volatility hiked the import bills of the world’s poorest nations by at least 40 percent and drove the malnourished from 800 million, to a billion people today.”

Yap pointed out that “despite reports of high food production levels, harvests increased only marginally, with global stocks-to-use ratios at 30-year lows.”

He stressed that “if the production of China, India, Brazil and some other countries are removed from the list of food producers, production may have actually retreated in others.”

Yap said other factors such as climatic shifts, which have altered cropping and harvesting patterns; and farmers being discouraged to plant more after using prohibitively priced fertilizers and other inputs, in turn pushing up the cost of commodities, resulted in the collapse of the commodities market last year.

As such, Yap said, “these factors, coupled with thin trading volumes, are clear recipes for price volatility, consumer panic and even sharper price spikes in the not so distant future.”

However, Yap sees a solution to such a dismal food scenario.

“The solution to this lingering woe,” Yap said, “is to instill a level of certainty and  stability in the market through the establishment of a global food reserve of stockpile.”

A global food reserve, Yap said, would ensure the stable supply and prices of food staples such as rice and other cereals in the world market in anticipation of future production shortfalls.

According to Yap, setting up a food reserve “remains an urgent concern.”

He reiterated that “while prices have retreated and food production are at their highest levels, other developments point to another possible round of consumer panic and even sharper price spikes in the not too distant future.”

The UN High-Level Meeting on Food Security For All in Madrid is a follow up to the 2008 High Level Conference on World Food Security organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome.

Yap had first broached his food reserve proposal at the Rome conference. He noted that while the FAO had included his recommendation to set up a food reserve in the Comprehensive Framework for Action (CFA) of the High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis during last year’s Rome conference,  his  proposal to date, “continues to be nothing more than just that, a proposal.”

A food reserve, Yap insists,  would benefit both food deficit and surplus countries “because a price band would be maintained and, which, at the low end, would serve to protect producers in exporting countries from falling prices. “

“The high end of the band, in turn, would serve to shield consumers of importing countries from the impact of soaring prices,” Yap explained.

When prices are too low, as it is today, Yap elaborated, the reserve should buy rice stocks from producers to prevent the rice from being dumped into the market and depressing prices further, thus protecting the welfare of farmers.