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Africa's Agriculture Vulnerable to Breakdown Under Climate Change
Africa has been responsible for less than 3 percent of global emissions due to fossil fuel burning, and preliminary research suggests it may even be a net carbon absorber.
Yet Africa’s future if climate change continues apace looks grim: the devastation of its farms and fisheries, flooding of its river deltas, and the ruin of its mangrove swamps and coral reefs. Such damage will be worsened by Africa’s awesome poverty, because the continent has far less money to spend on adaptation and mitigation than the industrialized West.
So far, too little attention has been paid to global warming’s impact on African agriculture. Its vulnerability to breakdown has been put into sharp relief by recent droughts and the global food crisis. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report notes,
By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent. Agricultural production, including access to food, in many African countries is projected to be severely compromised. This would further adversely affect food security and exacerbate malnutrition.
The working paper observes that agricultural systems will be “severely compromised” by anthropogenic climate change. For Africa, this will be particularly cruel. Researchers note that agriculture contributes between 10 and 70 percent of GDP across the continent. In turn, they observe that
In other countries, additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50 percent during the 2000-2020 period, and reductions in crop growth period. … A recent study on South African agricultural impacts, based on three scenarios, indicates that crop net revenues will be likely to fall by as much as 90 percent by 2100, with small-scale farmers being the most severely affected.
Of course, such estimates were made based on the now-outmoded 2007 IPCC projections. The worst-case scenarios of those models are now assumed to be totally realistic, if not downright conservative.
Some numbers from the recent study on global warming’s impact on world agriculture by economist William Cline highlight the immensity of the problem. Even if carbon fertilization, the process wherein increased carbon in the atmosphere accelerates plant growth, occurs to the fullest extent, the continent’s total agricultural production will fall by 6 percent, and it will fall by 18 percent if that doesn't pan out.
But such numbers are seriously skewed by Egypt, which is both a major agricultural producer as well as an outlier with respect to changes in agricultural production. Its yields are expected to increase as temperatures increase. Excluding Egypt, the continent will suffer production losses ranging from 19 percent with carbon fertilization to 29 percent without it.
The panorama appears yet bleaker when one looks at individual countries.
In Mali, Niger, the Sudan and much of the Horn of Africa and West Africa, arid or semi-arid agriculture will likely be wiped out. 
More broadly, swathes of the Horn of Africa will lose 94 percent of their agricultural production, with or without carbon fertilization, Cline found. Senegal will lose over 80 percent in either scenario, and the Sudan, close to 80 percent, as well.
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Comments
Time for change is at hand, but we are dawdling
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on March 30, 2009 - 9:59am.
Nothing I can think of can be more vital to a good enough future for the children than a global flow of ideas regarding the population dynamics of the human species on Earth. A virtual mountain of scientific knowledge supports the near-universal understanding that a finite planet with the size, composition and frangible ecology of Earth cannot be expected to much longer support an endlessly growing number of human beings worldwide, many too many of whom appear to be willfully choosing to increase in an unbridled way their conspicuous per-capita consumption and unnecessary overproduction of stuff.
With the hope of promoting necessary discussion of the subject of global human population growth, I would like to share a recent email from one of our most respected colleagues, Dr. Gary Peters, a splendid contributor to the blogosphere.
begin----
"Steve has mentioned the work below but I'm not sure how many of you have actually been able to look at it. It is solid and worth your time, especially if you have an interest in population growth and any variation on the idea of sustainability.
Gary
P.S. For those who like such data, the world population now grows by close to 220,000 people per day."
end ---
If you will, please rigorously examine the presentation, World Food and Human Population Growth.
Usual objections to the research of Russell Hopfenberg, Ph.D. and David Pimentel, Ph.D., have focused the human community's attention upon "Demographic Transition Theory." Although this theory is descriptive in character, the demographic transition theory has been widely shared, consensually validated and erroneously deployed, by many too many demographers and economists in particular, as a tool for effectively predicting the end of population growth soon and the automatic stabilization of the human population on Earth in the middle of Century XXI.
With remarkable clarity the research of human population dynamics by Hopfenberg and Pimentel shows us that, as a predictor of the increase or decrease of absolute global human population numbers, the theory of the demographic transition is fatally flawed and directly contradicted by more adequate scientific evidence.
While the theory of the demographic transition does offer a useful historical view of recent patterns of human population growth, its value as a tool to forecast the increase or decrease the population numbers of the human species worldwide can now be seen, in the light of new research, as fundamentally defective.
If the human family continues choosing to keep doing precisely what we are doing now as absolute global human population numbers skyrocket toward a projected 9+ billion people, can reason or common sense possibly support the idea that future outcomes regarding human population growth will be any different either from the results we are seeing now or the results which have been occurring throughout recorded history?
Perhaps someone will kindly explain what you think will happen that would effectively lead to the stabilization of population numbers of the human species in the year 2050, given the fully anticipated young age distribution of the global human population at that time?
At the midpoint of the twenty-first century, what do you suppose hundreds upon hundreds of millions of fertile young people, who are expected to be capable of reproducing, will be doing with their sexual drives and instincts other than what their ancestors did for thousands of years?
Psychologists have often commented about such circumstances in this manner: doing the same things over and over again while fully expecting that a new succession of events will somehow magically occur is an example of extreme foolishness.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
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