Copyright 2010 The New York Times
January 13, 2010
Crops in India and China face climate-change risk
In the Blogs: Green Inc.
John Collins Rudolf
China and India, which make up about 37 percent of the global population, face a future of sharply lower crop yields as a consequence of climate change, leading scientists in both nations warned recently.
Yields from rain-irrigated wheat could drop by 44 percent by 2050 under warmer conditions forecast by climate models, the Indian farm scientist M.S. Swaminathan told reporters during the 97th Indian Science Congress last week.
Mr. Swaminathan is considered the architect of India's "Green Revolution" for his work in the 1960s developing high-yield grain varieties that ended decades of severe famine.
India continues to suffer from high inflation in food prices and widespread chronic hunger. Such problems will be vastly worse if global temperatures continue to rise, Mr. Swaminathan said.
"For every one degree Celsius rise in mean temperature, the wheat loss is estimated to be of the order of six million tons per year," he said, according to The Hindu newspaper.
India's total wheat production was about 75 million metric tons in 2009.
China could face a similar climate-induced grain crisis, Zheng Guoguang, director of the China Meteorological Administration, the official weather forecasting agency in China, warned in a December essay in an influential Communist Party journal. Yields of rice, wheat and corn could fall as much as 37 percent by 2050 because of increased drought conditions and other climate impacts, Mr. Zheng estimated. Citing Mr. Zheng's essay, a statement by the Chinese Meteorological Association urged the country's leaders to focus on adapting to, rather than mitigating, climate change.
"Since climate change is an objective fact, it is more realistic and urgent for China, a big developing country, to adapt to than mitigate climate change," the statement said. "So China should put adaptation as top strategy of addressing climate change and put enhancing grain production and ensuring food security as first task."
Global-warming emissions from China and India continue to rise and will account for about 34 percent of global emissions by 2030 — up from just 13 percent in 1990, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
India and China will be crucial for any global treaty to restrain emissions; the recent Copenhagen accord, which both countries endorsed, urges, but does not require, steep cuts in emissions.
