Sustainable development blog : ecology and humanitarian aid

Climate change could have terrible side effects... and leave another 25 million children malnourished by 2050, unless heafty investments in adaptive measures are made, says a major new report.

Three-year-old Antonio, who has the weight of a 6-month-old baby, is being attended at a health center for malnourished children (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)

An annual US$7 billion investment in agricultural productivity will be necessary to help farmers adapt and reducethe number of undernourished children to 'no climate change' levels, claims an International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) report. Combining crop models and climate change with IFPRI's economic model of world agriculture, it forecasts that calorie availability in 2050 will decrease relative to 2000 levels throughout the developing world. To Gerald Nelson, a senior research member at IFPRI, climate change will definitely dismiss improvement in child nourishment levels. The report adds that rice and wheat harvests will drop by 15 and 30 per cent respectively, from now to 2050. Moreover, prices are liable to boom, getting up to 121 per cent for rice, 194 per cent for wheat and 153 per cent for maize. Developing countries, especially those in South Asia and Africa, are supposed to experience the toughest times.

"Climate change places new and more challenging demands on agricultural productivity," claims the report. Hence developing new ways out of the crisis : "crop and livestock productivity-enhancing research including biotechnology will be essential to help overcome stresses due to climate change." Actually, both new and pre-existing technologies must be put into effect to offset the effects of climate change.

The report advises farmers to focus on crops and livestock that do "reasonably well" in a set of environments rather than those that thrive extremely well with more drastic climatic conditions. It also highlights that investment should both further irrigation infrastructure and rural infrastructure — for instance, by creating better road networks to ease access to markets. "Our results are that about 40 per cent of the total [investment] should be in Sub-Saharan Africa and much of that on rural roads," said Gerald Nelson.

"Climate change makes the challenge [of meeting food demands] much harder. The good news is that policymakers around the world are now paying much more attention. But it is not only about financial resources. Policymakers everywhere need to work to provide farmers with a favourable environment, providing public goods like good road systems, better technologies and more transparent taxing and spending programmes."

And we shall never forget how much humanitarian aid is important.