A prediction whose time has come
Frank Press took the last seat in the classroom, thanks to an unsaid rule in the New York City school system where the brightest kid got the first seat and the dumbest kid the last. Then one fine morning, in the sixth grade, Frank suddenly turned bright as his teacher noticed that he suffered from short-sightedness and thus was unable to read the blackboard. This incident occurred in mid-1930, and things drastically changed thereafter for Frank as he immediately leapfrogged to top the class, and continued this trend throughout his career: earning PhD in Columbia to becoming Head of department at MIT to becoming Science Advisor to President Jimmy Carter and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1976.
During his tenure as Advisor, he wrote a memo (in 1977), when the world was witnessing and harvesting the fruits of the green revolution, and he warned, “The potential effect on the environment of a climatic fluctuation of such rapidity could be catastrophic and … A rapid climatic change may result in large scale crop failures at a time when an increased world population taxes agriculture to the limits of productivity.”
His foresightedness contradicted the trend that continued to show a linear increase in world cereal production for the next several decades, until humanity stepped into the present decade. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war, once in a generation events, created blips in the global production but in a sense have occluded the growing omnipresent and omnipotent threat of climate change on food production.
The consistent massive gains in global cereal production for many decades have started to flatten. The global cereal production increased from 2.56 to 2.97 billion metric tons during 2012–17, but after following a zig-zag path only reached 2.77 billion metric tons in 2022. Droughts, floods, heatwaves, pests attacks and other climate driven factors year-on-year are now causing substantial variations in yields and quality. Europe has been getting hotter and drier for the last several years now, severely affecting farmers’ capacity to grow and sustain variety of crops. Situation in East Africa is going from bad to worse. The erratic rainfall and heatwave in India and China are rocking the food boat further, while the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war could mean a severe negative impact on the ability of the two big grain bowls of the world to feed it.
As a result, the comfort of abundant supply (production and ample stock) around the year in most parts of the world is evaporating. Rice, a staple food for several billions, is set to log its largest shortfall in two decades in 2023.
An unpredictable food supply if plotted against an increasing human population in the coming decades should induce chills of anxiety into the minds of governments and agencies and more importantly the common man. The World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Risks Report already picks a looming food supply crisis as one of the world’s top threats for this decade. Add black swan events, economic shocks, and conflicts to the list of causes and one would find apocalypse staring at us in the immediate future. Reports of 800+ million people, in 2023, searching for their next meal so that hunger does not kill them shows that an apocalypse no longer remains a theme for science or climate fiction. Global Report on Food Crises clearly identifies extreme weather as main contributor to the problem in 12 countries in 2022, up from 8 in 2021.
To add to the woes in the coming years is El Nino, which is expected to arrive in 2023/2024 to shake hands with the world’s food supply; an event that is linked to widespread crop failures in different parts of the world, as research clearly points out. Flash floods, flash droughts, and flash heatwaves in different corners of the world can serve as trailers to full-length apocalyptic feature films in the making. While we are devising ways of protecting human lives from these extreme events through better prediction, early responding, fortifying our defences and adapting, the naked crops in the fields will pay the price and subsequently humanity will as well for not protecting them.
An FAO report warns that without broader changes on a socioeconomic and environmental level gates to the dystopian future will be thrown open and everyone will have to walk through it, sooner or later. Recent images from Pakistan showing desperation to secure every grain shows how the climate crisis can easily birth a food crisis and subsequently a larger societal crisis. The Covid crisis recently proved how shocks to complex, human-made complex societies can easily take down the system and undo decades of development.
Speaking of the solutions, there are no silver bullets to deal with this crisis. Technological-utopianism is not a panacea to this crisis. Inventing extreme weather crop varieties, creating better weather forecasting systems, agriculture that draws on less of natural resources, streamlining global logistics and other measures will certainly help, but so will individual actions given that 11% of the recorded food wastage globally happens in our households (one third of the global food produced is wasted). Every drop of grain saved will matter. Grains will turn into gold.
Now, if you are one of those who suffer from normalcy bias (human tendency to respond to threat warnings with disbelief or minimization, and to similarly underestimate a disaster’s deleterious effects) then handling of Covid-19 is a good example. Exercise Sygnus (2016, UK), Exercise Alice (2016, UK), Operation Dark Winter (US, 2001), Atlantic Storm (US, 2005), Clade X (US, 2018), Pandem (EU, 2015) and numerous other pandemic plans, studies and guidelines forewarned against the threat of a pandemic, and laid out possible responses and mitigation strategies.
Thus, the moment to act is now because the truth is “hunger games” are awful.
Kinchit Bihani is the author of Homo Unus: Successor to Homo Sapiens
