Simmering calamity: Asian food harvest will dip by 30 per cent

NEW DELHI: Amid studies stating that global warming has caused a fall in the yield of some of the world’s important food crops comes more bad news.

A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body that has been assessing global warming since 1990, said there would be a 30 per cent drop in food grain production in the Asian region. The result: skyrocketing food prices and starvation.

The report is expected to be adopted by the IPCC at a meeting in Brussels starting today. The first report came out in February.

Many Asian areas have already seen a decline in grain harvests, owing mostly to global warming. In addition, chronic flooding, heat waves, and droughts could be blamed for the drop in output.

The IPCC findings say grain harvests will drop by between 2.5 and 10 per cent in the 2020s, and 5 and 30 per cent in the 2050s, compared with the amount harvested in 1990.

Even if temperatures rise by just 0.5°C in winter, India’s wheat harvest would take a bad beating. Should they rise by 2°C, rice harvests in China could plunge between 5 and 12 per cent, according to the report.

Higher seawater temperatures in the area spreading from East Asia to Southeast Asia would drastically change fish habitats, with minnows in tropical seas most at risk, which would see fish catches decline.

The melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, which serve as a natural reservoir, would lead to a scenario that could threaten the lives of more than 700 million people.