Climate change and food security

IATP's Anne Laure Constantin is reporting from the global climate talks in Poznan, Poland this week.

We're getting closer to 1 billion... I'm not talking about the amount of money poured into banks and financial institutions over the past few months: we're way past that point already!

No. On Wednesday, the FAO announced that the number of people suffering from hunger has risen by 40 million in 2008, bringing the global number to 963 million.

The FAO identifies high agriculture commodity prices as the main reason behind this increase. And directly (through extreme weather events in some of the main grain producing regions of the world) or indirectly (through the search for alternative, allegedly climate-friendly fuels or through the anticipation of speculators looking for increasingly scarce natural resources), the threat of climate change has been a major reason behind this increase in prices.

The WFP, FAO, IFAD and IPCC all stress the vulnerability of the existing food system to climate change. They warn that if nothing is done in the very short term, the "perfect storm" we've witnessed in 2008 would become a "regular storm" in the coming decades. M. Huq, climate expert at IIED, stressed, "We should not be afraid of what the IPCC predicts. We should worry about what they cannot anticipate."

But when looking at how to stop the rise in hunger, we should take climate into account "as part of a nexus of multiple factors," said Martin Parry, formerly a member of the IPCC. This is what all food security experts here are emphasizing: preparing food systems for the climate change challenge implies strengthening their resilience and at the same time, that of rural communities. The food, fuel and financial crises, the climate crisis, and access to health and education are all very closely connected. Addressing one and not the others is bound to fail. A comprehensive approach to our food systems is more necessary than ever. In the words of FAO expert Alexander Muller, we need "a paradigm shift in agriculture."