Dr. Cary Fowler is United States Special Envoy for Global Food Security. Speaking at a briefing organised by the Washington Foreign Press Center, Fowler gives insights into El Niño’s impacts on global food security. United States Bureau Chief OLUKOREDE YISHAU, who attended the briefing, reports that Fowler lists some of the impacts as reductions in economic growth and country-level impacts, low crop yield and more. Excerpts:
Reduction in economic growth
Typically with an El Niño you will see global reductions in economic growth and country-level impacts that can actually persist for years. You also typically see global declines in production of some of the major staple crops: wheat, rice, maize. Sometimes you’ll see a slight increase in soybean production, but the decreases globally speaking are of the rice, wheat, and maize can be anywhere from fairly marginal to up to 4.5 percent, which would be quite an event.
The El Niño events will – don’t have an impact on crop yields everywhere, on every hectare or land in the world, but on a quarter to a third of land, they do. We’re already seeing declines in fish harvest off the coast of Peru. And in fact just recently, Peru announced that it was suspending the anchovy harvest there for the first season. The last time they did that was a previous El Niño, 2014-15.
Historical angle
I can remember in the early ’70s when the failure of the anchovy crop there, which by the way was a main ingredient in animal feeds and fish meal, was one of the factors that started the dominos to fall and led to higher grain prices and eventually to the global food crisis that we saw in the early ’70s.
We have now fairly low global stockpiles of grain by historical standards. We also have, of course, the invasion and the war in Ukraine, which was one of the five top exporters of corn, of wheat, of sunflower, barley, which – and it’s affected those export markets tremendously, much of which was going to the Near East and to Africa. And you could expect in this kind of situation that with global stockpiles at low levels you would see more price volatility and see regional and local shortfalls. These could be in our future. From a food security perspective, I’m more – most concerned – and we’re keeping a particularly close, watchful eye on Southern Africa, on Central America, and Southeast Asia.
Studies
El Niño is also correlated, as a number of studies have indicated, with an uptick in conflict. It’s a threat multiplier, according to one study, doubling the chances of conflict in Africa and playing a significant role in over 20 percent of the conflicts there since 1950. Warmer, drier weather in the tropics reduces economic output. It affects individual productivity. And it, of course, intensifies the competition for scarce resources, especially where you have situations of ethnic fractionalization and inequality.
Droughts
Droughts, particularly those that persist over a multiyear period – three years or more – are very highly or more correlated with conflict and with food insecurity problems then otherwise. Floods, which you also see in some areas in El Niño years, are typically associated with much or rapid onset of conflicts and – that are much more confined in their area of impact.
So everything I’ve said so far is not to say that these things aren’t going to happen, that it’s guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination. But I think it’s fair to say that the odds have probably risen for additional food insecurity and conflict-related issues.
What America is doing about it
Well, we can’t change the weather overnight, but the State Department has been the catalyst for a number of programs, which I think are directly related to how the world is going to be responding to this El Niño and future El Niños. We have started a program we’re calling the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils and that’s focused on Africa, where we’re looking at the most nutritious crops for – that are traditional and indigenous crops in Africa and looking at how they will do in a climate-changed world so that we can make smart investments in the future for promoting the production of these nutritious crops that are also climate-adapted.
We have – under the Feed the Future program at U.S. Agency for International Development have put up a multi-country program in Africa that’s bringing drought-tolerant maize, for example, to millions of farms in Southern Africa, probably just in time.
Food insecurity statistics
We have more than 800 million food-insecure people in the world today. Interestingly, the amount of media attention that the global food crisis is getting has actually declined in recent months fairly substantially, so I’m really counting on you in this room and online to keep covering this issue to educate the public about the problem of global food insecurity.
Please take a look at our website on the State Department to get information, but mostly I want to tour the NOAA website. If you go to noaa.gov and you click, as I do very often, on the little temperature icon on the left, you will see the latest updates on climate, including today’s report that mentions that – describes how June was the hottest month on record for any June in the past. Also, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there’s FEWS NET, FEWS.net, which gives you an idea of how the food security situation, potential for famine is shaping up around the world.
So please continue to reach out to us. Call us; we’re available. We want to be able to explain as best we can, as best we can predict what’s happening. And I assure you that in the coming months we’re going to be working together to try to make those reports to you as substantive as possible.
Russian angle
Last year we saw almost immediately a very sharp spike in food prices when Russia invaded Ukraine and stopped ships from getting out of the ports. What I would say in regards to Türkiye’s role is it’s been essential, and we’ve counted very much on Türkiye playing this positive role. And we expect it will continue to do that and we wish it much, much success.
Ukraine
Ukraine was – has been a breadbasket for the world. It’s been one of the top five exporters of important food grains. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has drastically affected exports from Ukraine. We are very hopeful – well, we would be overjoyed were that – were the Black Sea Grain Initiative to be extended. It’s scheduled to expire next week. We – there are indications in the media that Russia will not renew that agreement. That’s quite unfortunate. It comes just ahead of the main harvest period in Ukraine when we would hope to be getting much-needed food out into the world market.
Working with allies
We applaud and have worked closely with our European allies on the solidarity lanes to enable Ukraine to ship grain out of Ukraine, but through – not through the ports, which is most economical and most convenient, but over land. But long term, this is an issue that is most troubling, frankly, from a food security standpoint. We know that much of the land in Ukraine has been degraded, it’s been bombed, it’s been mined. The farmers, they are on the front lines not just of a shooting war, but a war – but a food security battle as well. And in this kind of situation, I think particularly with the onset of an El Niño, we need all of the food, such as is being produced in Ukraine, onto grain – onto the world markets where it can satisfy a growing demand.
As long as we are in an era where we have more and longer extremes of weather, then from a food security perspective what we have to be careful about and committed to is getting the fundamentals right. Fundamentals for food security are having healthy, fertile soils and adapted crops, adapted to both the weather and to market conditions.
Fertile soils are soils that will help plants be more resilient. They will hold the water more and therefore better enable the plants to withstand drought. And of course, if you don’t have adapted crop varieties in the field, you’re stuck.
So one of the things that the United States Government I think is quite committed to doing and we at the State Department are in partnership with the African Union and the Food and Agriculture Organization at the UN to put more attention, bring more attention and more investment to the traditional and indigenous crops, starting in Africa, that have so much more potential to provide for food security in those – in those areas.
There’s no preventing an El Niño, but there is, as Dr. Kapnick said, ways of predicting what’s coming some months in advancing and for us to be giving you kind of an early heads-up about what we should be looking for in terms of food security and conflict in the coming months.
The linkages between food insecurity
There have been quite a few academic studies, and they’re easy to find. Actually, there are academic studies that go back almost 2,000 years on the effect of high temperatures on the incidence of conflict, and the mediating factor there is actually food production.
But most recently we’ve seen a numbler of academic studies principally dealing with Africa and food issues there, in part caused by weather conditions – heat, drought and such. There are a number of studies which link Arab Spring, even, with high temperatures and rise of food prices and such. So you can begin to draw – there are many factors, of course, involved in conflict, and I wouldn’t want to say that it’s a straight causal line between high temperatures and conflict. But you can understand pretty easily how high temperatures affect economies, food production, food prices, et cetera, which play a big role in instigating conflict.
The crops
Well, I think the probability has obviously risen for hotter and drier weather in Central America. We – there are a number of factors that went into my saying that we were concerned about – in particular about Central America, Southeast Asia, Southern Africa, and I could even add to it South Asia.
Part of it is simply looking at the historical El Niño patterns and what they’ve – what kind of weather conditions that they’ve created. We know that in terms of crops that the effect is quite – can be quite pronounced on maize, a key crop in Central America; another reason why I would be concerned about Central America.
And finally, another reason which typically gets overlooked is the problem that we’ve had in recent – well, the last year or two with fertilizer applications. As you probably know, last year was a year in which we had scarcity of some types of fertilizer and very high prices. Those prices have continued to be high in local currency terms. And in particular, I’ve been looking at the – at potash fertilizers. That’s not the fertilizer that a lot of people look at. And potash, however, is a fertilizer that’s bankable in the sense that farmers can apply it, it will stick around in the soil for a while. Farmers will typically apply it when the prices are good, and not apply it when they’re high.
What does potash do? Well, it doesn’t give you immediate boost in yields, but what it does do is it gives the plant more stamina to deal with environmental conditions. So if you have tough environmental conditions such as is produced in an El Niño, and you’ve gone multiple years without applying sufficient rates of potash, then you make yourself more vulnerable. And the three regions that I mentioned are all regions where we believe that there has been under-application of this particular kind of fertiliser.
