Can We Expect Food Prices to Always Be Rising?

There are plenty of forecasts of coming famine due to the climate crisis, but Americans are finding out—and as times go on, we are finding out more and more clearly—that in our land of plenty there are chronic pressures on food production because of climate change, and this means there will be chronic price pressures on food prices.

In an article in Nature Communications, “Risks of synchronized low yields are underestimated in climate and crop model projections,” this argument is laid out and laid out convincingly.

The article introduces its subject this way:

Extreme weather events like heatwaves, droughts and extreme precipitation can adversely impact crop production and food security. Global warming is increasing the frequency and intensity of weather extremes and the likelihood of their simultaneous occurrence globally. Extremes occurring in close temporal vicinity can lead to outsized societal impacts, often beyond the sum of each extreme occurring in isolation. In particular, synchronized crop failures due to simultaneous weather extremes across multiple breadbasket regions pose a risk to global food security and food system supply chains with potential disproportional impacts for import-dependent regions.

For those who like this sort of information, there were sixteen footnotes for the above-cited paragraph. As an old hypertext guy, I can openly admit that I like this sort of thing.  I’ll admit to not including these in the paragraph, for decency’s sake.

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