John Magrath

How much is climate change responsible for the recent escalation in food prices? That's a hard question to answer, but there are at least 3 ways in which it is influencing events.

One is that the wrong policies on biofuels have increased prices, as Oxfam's Robert Bailey has recently pointed out. The rush to grow biofuels came about initially more as a way to support agriculture and farmer's incomes (i.e. subsidise, basically) than as a response to climate change; then the oil price crisis accelerated it. Oxfam's report shows that most biofuels are useless (or worse) at reducing carbon emissions and may well be responsible for something in the order of 30% in the increase in food prices. One SUV tank of corn-based ethanol could feed a poor person for a year. The biofuel madness is a stark warning that "obvious" or supposedly painless responses to climate change that seem to allow us to continue consuming as before may be anything but. And it's a warning of the danger of letting climate change policies be captured by particular interest groups.

Second, climate change isn't necessarily about big, extreme "weather events" (yet, anyway). It's currently more insidious than that. When I was in Uganda in March - as I've written in previous blogs - farmers kept saying that it's just getting harder to grow things. Especially food crops. Cash crops like cocoa do OK, but if there's no food to buy in the market with the cash you get, you can't eat money. In their experience climate change means the every day weather just isn't right, and it's certainly not benign. It rains harder and in bursts; in between storms the sun beats down more fiercely; and the seasons seem all mixed up. So people in countries like Uganda are growing less just at the time when the prices of what they import to fill the gap are going up.

But third, there are "big" events happening. Take Australia. Australia exports two-thirds of its agricultural produce and it's the world's second largest exporter of wheat and canola, and the largest barley exporter. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2006-07 wheat production fell by 57%, barley by 55% and rice by 84%. This is what the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology said in May: "The combination of record heat and widespread drought during the past 5-10 years over large parts of Southern and Eastern Australia is without historical precedent and is, at least partly, a result of climate change".

The present drought looks to be the latest culmination of a change in the island continent's climate that set in with startling abruptness only in the late 1960's, within living memory, as much of the Southern Hemisphere warmed up. Fortunately, politics can shift even more quickly; one election saw Australian political attitudes towards climate change alter dramatically. New Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's first act in power was to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the ratification coming into force last March. Will we see a similar breakthrough in the USA come election time?