Millions face starvation as world warms, say scientists
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Source: The Guardian
Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms.
As food experts gather at two major conferences to discuss how to feed the nine billion people expected to be alive in 2050, leading scientists have told the Observer that food insecurity risks turning parts of Africa into permanent disaster areas. Rising temperatures will also have a drastic effect on access to basic foodstuffs, with potentially dire consequences for the poor.
Frank Rijsberman, head of the world's 15 international CGIAR crop research centres, which study food insecurity, said: "Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect … will be taken away by climate change. We are not so worried about the total amount of food produced so much as the vulnerability of the one billion people who are without food already and who will be hit hardest by climate change. They have no capacity to adapt."
America's agricultural economy is set to undergo dramatic changes over the next three decades, as warmer temperatures devastate crops, according to a US government report. The draft US National Climate Assessment report predicts that a gradually warming climate and unpredictable severe weather, such as the drought that last year spread across two-thirds of the continental United States, will have serious consequences for farmers.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/apr/13/climate-change-millions-starvation-scientists
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...if you leave Africa out of the equation. Outside of Africa, the current birthrates are pretty close to replacement level, and the long-term trends are toward settling in under replacement level within a couple of decades.
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&idim=country:USA&dl=en&hl=en&q=fertility%20rates#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&ifdim=region&tdim=true&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false
is a good spot to look at that (or just google "fertility rates"
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Food production to feed 7 billion people, on the other hand, is a massive ongoing enterprise, where a whole complex infrastructure has to work to keep things moving along. It shouldn't be hard to realize that a monkey wrench in the works would be disastrous, when there's no more than a few days food supply at any given moment in most regions of the world, and the whole thing is set up now as a "market-driven solution". Brief and localized disasters can be responded to and mediated, but there is no structure that could address a systematic failure of any number of points.
