The Economist: “The high cost of food is one reason that protesters took to the streets in Tunisia and Egypt.”

Nobelist Krugman: "It sure looks like climate change is a major culprit" in the extreme weather that has run up food prices
February 7, 2011

The expert consensus on the key role that high food prices have played in MidEast protests continues to grow (see my multi-part series on food insecurity). Indeed, governments in the region themselves are so concerned about the threat of food insecurity to their stability, they are starting to stockpile grain, which, ironically, will further drive up prices, as The Economist explains in their February 3rd edition.

Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman also weighs in with a major NYT column, “Droughts, Floods and Food” (excerpted below), which also makes the connection I have been focusing on between extreme weather (driven in part by climate change) and food prices.

UPDATE: And don’t miss the UK Guardian’s new piece today, “Failure to act on crop shortages fuelling political instability, experts warn.”

First though, the Wall Street Journal provided us some more insight into the role extreme weather is playing in the food-price run-up in their article last week, “When Will Russia Resume Grain Exports Again?”

Russia stopped grain exports last summer after the worst drought to hit the country in over a century ravaged the country’s harvest and cut production by nearly 40%. The ban sent shockwaves through international markets and propelled wheat prices to highs not seen since the 2007-08 food crisis.

That impact is, I think, well understood — see Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.” But now it’s clear that the unprecedented heat wave and drought didn’t just devastate the country’s harvest at the time — it has hurt their current harvest:

Acreage for 2011 winter grains fell nearly 3 million hectares short of forecasts after the drought made the ground too hard to plant. In the Volga and South Ural regions, which account for around 20% of the total area seeded, the problems were particularly acute and plantings may need to be replaced in spring.

“Farmers are facing a huge problem to get their grain in the ground and have a decent crop for 2011,” said Peter Biermann, general manager of grain export operations at Swiss grain trader ASTON FFI.

The extraordinary devastation wrought by Russia’s drought should be especially worrisome to anyone concern about the future impacts of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions. Tamino calculated (at length) that global warming made the Moscow heat wave roughly eight times more likely: “Without global warming, this once-in-a-century-or-two event would have been closer to a once-in-a-millenium event.”