Were the question to be asked as to which challenges pose the greatest threat to the well-being of the international community, the likelihood that food security and climate change would be right ‘up there’ with the ‘front runners’ is particularly high.
That the two are closely connected is irrefutable. The impact that climate change continues to have on food production (and by extension, on food security) is hardly debatable. Indeed, it might even be argued that we may be witnessing one of those significant moments in recent human history when constraints imposed by conflict in one part of the world have a disastrous impact on food security in countries that are geographically distant from the hostilities.
Even as the Ukraine/Russia hostilities and the consequences thereof continue to exacerbate the food security crisis across continents, and particularly in poor countries in Africa and Asia, wealthier countries in Europe and North America, particularly, though not exclusively, battle their own demons ‘visiting’ in the form of record-breaking temperature levels that are flattening homes and forests alike and are creating levels of dislocation to which populations in contemporary developed countries are, for the most part, unaccustomed. So that while, in terms of food security, the impact has been discriminatory, the repercussions of climate change continue to be decidedly less so, as the current UN-driven efforts to have the over-bloated grain silos in the Ukraine emptied into the pockets of hunger-related crises mostly in parts of Africa and Asia.
The climate change argument is one of a somewhat different nature. At its core it posits that continually rising temperatures across the world, global warming, if you will, has been largely the result of human mistreatment (abuse may by no means be an exaggeration) of the environment an argument that lay at the core of the October/November 2021 26TH United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP 26) in Scotland.
Which constitutes the greater urgency – perhaps more pressing would be a more suitable term to employ here – is not the simplest determination to make since there is manifest evidence of a significant convergence between the two. In many ways, some of the very methods being employed ostensibly to increase food production are having deleterious environmental consequences.
The interlocking nature of the global food security and climate change challenges, however, does not gainsay the reality that there are differences in both the nature and magnitude of the two threats.
Up until now food security remains, for the most part, the plight of the poor. However threatened global food supplies become, access will always be a dependent on affordability. Nothing illustrates this point more poignantly at this time than the fact that while the ‘knots’ in the global distribution of Ukrainian grain supplies have their origins in Europe it is in Africa and Asia that the impact is most acute.
On the other hand, as the current record-breaking temperature levels and their horrific consequences, mostly in North America and Europe, demonstrate, however, wealthy countries cannot pay their way out of the environmental ‘hole’ that they, mostly, have dug for themselves and for the rest of us. What the recent rising temperatures and the destruction inflicted by ‘forest fires’ have done in Europe and North America, particularly, is to move more of the direct consequences of climate change to the doorstep of the developed world. What climate change is demonstrating to rich countries is its ability to scale barriers of wealth and power that separate rich and poor. The same, of course, does not apply in the instance of food security, where ‘immunity’ can be bought and paid for. Indeed, it is a matter of the harshest irony that the attempt at the raising of global climate change awareness through the staging of COP 26 in October/November last year was followed in short order by the recent devastating conflagrations in developed countries that have remained largely indifferent to much earlier climate change warnings.
Where food security is concerned and even as the Caribbean seeks to strike an optimistic note through its recent 25 x 2025 declaration, indications emanating from the UN itself remain gloomy in the matter of the short-term eradication of global hunger. In mid-July, an op-ed written by Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) Assistant Director General Mario Lubetkin (the FAO’s Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean) declared unambiguously that the experience of recent years points to a continuous setback in the pursuit of food security. Indeed, the FAO’s own recent Annual Report – points unerringly to the reality that the world continues to chase its proverbial tail insofar as the pursuit of global food security is concerned. The most recent State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) states that last year the number of people, globally, going hungry, reached 828 million, an increase of 46 million from 2020 and 150 million since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, statistics which provide compelling evidence that where food security is concerned we are, at this time, thrashing around in a pool of optimism that has no basis in objective reality.
Where climate change is concerned we appear to be caught between the increasingly shrill warnings of the climate change lobbyists railing against climate- unfriendly pursuits like the unchecked recovery and use of fossil fuels, on the one hand, and the powerful players in the global oil and gas industry, on the other. One might add that the lobbyists for increased global oil and gas recovery include several poor countries that appear to have ‘parked’ their climate change policies in pursuit of the opportunities that the fossil fuel industry offers.
Where global food security is concerned the unclogging of the bottlenecks that still choke off the smooth flow of grain from the Ukraine to ‘starving millions’ (a much overused and somewhat unsettling cliché) in poor countries, remains a challenge to be overcome. Leaving aside the climate-related challenges to food production already manifested in poor countries there are also challenges associated with population explosion and the sheer inability of food production (and the affordability of imports) to keep pace with ‘the numbers.”
Here in the Caribbean the nexus between climate change and food security has been made much clearer over the past decade or so by the worsening effects of climate behaviour on the region’s efforts to meet its own food needs. Whether or not the recent deliberate intra-regional focus on boosting food production (and the setting of a time frame for the reduction in extra-regional food imports) will bear meaningful fruit, given the region’s track record for unmet undertakings remains an unknown quantity.