气候危机冲击粮食系统，食品价格面临上涨压力

[music] Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts radio news.

There's a good chance that [music] you're listening to this podcast while eating. And sorry, I come to you today with [music] bad news. Your food is likely to get more expensive. Extreme weather events this year are starting to hurt food production in serious ways. And in our [music] tightly linked world, it means everyone's food bill is likely to go up. And wait, there's more bad news. What you're eating also [music] has a carbon cost.

Food production accounts for about 25% of planet warming emissions. The majority [music] of those emissions come from raising the animals we slaughter and eat. I'm Akshhatraati. This is Zero, Not a Doom and Gloom podcast. So this week we'll talk about how to make our food system more secure and less harmful. [music] Joining me on Zero is Paul Barren, a British Academy global professor at the Oxford Martin School specializing in how our food, energy, and economic systems can change fast enough to avoid the worst of the climate crisis.

Paul, welcome to Zero.

Lovely to be here.

There's plenty of extreme weather to talk about from wildfires to heat waves, droughts to hurricanes. There's a huge number of impacts to people and animals and nature. But I want to focus on the food system. How bad is it?

I would say it's very bad. We have systemically underestimated the impacts of climate change from crop models over time. The crop modeling community is actually really excellent at this. Very much doing the validation and the verification of what the models are putting out. And paper after paper is showing that we're underestimating the impacts.

Well, you're a scientist. scientists do good work. You're saying scientists have done good work, but people haven't followed up. The people in power haven't followed up. If the alarm is real and big and given this summer, everyone's feeling it. Why hasn't it quite sunk in for governments? I think because there is a delay between the impacts of climate change on food systems, the increasing amount of that over time and also the transmission through to prices.

So what we see is we see that climate change is now contributing to increasing prices around the world. We know that increasing food prices is one shorefire way to increase political instability through cost of living crisis even more extreme sort of state breakdown events like in Syria. And it's not saying that climate change is, you know, the the thing or even the main thing, but what it is doing, it is layering on top of all these other stresses that we sort of deal with over time.

We take the punches of all sorts of things in human societies, and we can't do that any longer due to this climate change. So, just to give you one example of the inflation over time. One study found that we should be expecting between 1 and 3 percentage points extra food price inflation by 2035. That's year onear. Uh, so that's very significant. Now, if you layer on top of that straight of Hormuz, if you layer on top of that Ukraine, uh, grain interruptions, if you layer on that El Nino, you're looking at a situation where you've got a big slug of inflation coming through, but it hasn't happened yet.

You know, as food system scientists and and as climate scientists, you know, we're looking at this and we know it's coming, but it hasn't appeared yet on the receipts. So, the politicians aren't noticing, they're not reacting in the way they need to. We had Javier Blas who is a Bloomberg opinion columnist on the show and he looks at soft commodities and he talked about how in the Iran war crisis you're not quite feeling the food inflation impact because there were bumper years between the Ukraine crisis and the Iran war starting and there was just a bunch of stored food that is now coming into market and thus the prices are low.

But the Ukraine crisis did give us a flavor of what a really extreme supply crisis can do to food prices. Now maybe this super El Nino is not a Ukraine crisis equivalent, but it's going to do plenty of harm. We had Columbia professor Mingfanking who talked about the large impacts that El Nino will have on the world, but specifically what do you think this super El Nino is likely to do to food production? I think that it is going to throw a system that's already struggling to adapt, already struggling with climate and geopolitical problems into even further challenges.

Previous El Nino are interesting because you see varied impacts around the world and on average previous Elnos are not necessarily always bad for total global food production. The problem is it's off a baseline that's already very high now. And so now you've got a really big El Nino coming off a baseline that's already high with geopolitical instability and you've also got a running down of the resilience over time. I mean, you know, there's a really good specific example in the UK.

You know, we've got this situation now where farmers are feeding the stored forage for the animals that they would have stored for winter now, which means they're going to have to buy in, you know, some farms are going to have to buy in hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of feed during the winter because they don't have it because of this drought. Now this is the second year we had that because the grass stops growing over the over that certain temperature.

We've had two hot years and what this means is you're running down that resilience at the very point at which you need it when El Nino comes and makes things more chaotic. Now there are specific regions in the world which will see huge problems and damage and actually you know various UN agencies are already sounding the alarm for subsahara and Africa 45 million people potentially uh becoming food insecure extra on top of what it is already.

Um, and this is largely because of the way the precipitation patterns change due to El Nino. You've also got situations in Brazil, uh, in the Amazon. The Amazon is set under this Elino probably to dry quite a bit. This is during a period where it's already on a knife knife edge really in terms of deforestation, uh, in terms of the the the stability of the rainforest itself. So, I have heard other scientists who are, you know, Amazon specific scientists say they're very worried about this next, I would say, 6 to 12 months.

We also had a note from our neighboring country. French growers said that because of these successive heat waves, five of them. There's been a 25% shortfall in kuettes, 35% in lettuce, 40% in peas, 60% in broccoli and in some places 100% for artichokes. So these are things that people will likely maybe with the lag start to feel. Are there any countries taking this food security seriously and putting in place policies to start to address it?

There are countries that are doing parts of the picture. That's a very good point about France. I mean we we import in the UK for example uh very very dependent on imports and about a quarter of our imports come from uh the Mediterranean and it's really our nutrient supply. We don't just need to think about security in the terms of calories. we need to think about it in terms of you know the vitamins we need you know um and the micronutrients that we need and I don't know of any country that's looking from the very beginning of the picture right to the very end except perhaps Denmark now Denmark has seen I guess in a sense the writing on the wall in the sense that they are much more existentially exposed due to climate change due to sea level rise and so there's a real feeling there they've had a number of very big TV shows for example families like ours by Thomas Vindterberg the famous um director and I think there's an understanding in that country that you know look you know we're on the line here um and what they did is they built a tripartite agreement across industry government NOS's and farmers uh and what they did was develop a plant-rich action plan u