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Food and drink

The really big (bleak) food picture

The Global Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change just wrapped up two weeks ago in The Hague. The event was organized by various national governments, including the Netherlands as host nation, along with the World Bank and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

With its mandate to come up with ways of producing adequate world food supplies while reducing carbon emissions in the long-term, while also contending with more and more people at the same time (there will be 40 percent more mouths to feed in the next 30 or 40 years) the conference was a kind of preemptive policy mash-up before the UN Climate Change Conference coming up in Cancun at the end of November.

The Cancun conference will be the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP 16) and sixth meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 6). It pretty much constitutes the next chapter after COP 15/CMP 5 meeting held in Copenhagen last winter where so many headlines were made as policy makers tried to hammer out a world agreement on reducing carbon levels after the Kyoto Accord expires in 2012, and everyone from activists to scientists advocated for policies that would limit the increase in global temperatures to two degrees Celsius - the threshold identified scientifically as beyond which the planet gets into real trouble.

Not to bog down here in extraneous details, but I have a little story to inspire you to plough on:

First, note that when it comes to such UN meetings, media seems to think that the names and terminology are too complex or confusing for readers so they get insultingly reductive. Last year, "Copenhagen Summit" or simply "Copenhagen" became the unofficial name for the climate conference rather than the simpler but less familiar acronym COP 15. Of real embarrassment, "COP" was sometimes confused as shorthand for Copenhagen, rather than for "Conference of the Parties".

My little story is that when I was in London last year at the World Conference for Science Journalists, I was amazed at the number of regular Londoners I met outside of conference walls who were totally unfazed by these supposedly complex names and acronyms. Not only did they know the terms and use them conversationally, they also knew what the meetings were about, who was attending, what the issues were, what progress had or hadn't been made, and why.

They'll rattle off "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" as quick as Bob's Yer Uncle and can tell you what it's been up to, to boot. Many Aussies can do the same - and I'm not talking about nerds or policy wonks, just regular people.

 

All of which is to point out that I purposefully didn't insult you with a cutesy, simplistic metaphor to lure you into this week's column because I say, grow up Canada and inform thyself about climate change and international issues surrounding it because major changes are afoot on this planet whether we stick our collective head in the sand or not.

So here's a sober, straight-up pill about some of the latest international news on food supplies and climate change, along with an equally straight-up argument about why, if you don't know what they are already, you should plug some of these names into Google right now and start informing yourself about these issues - righteous global citizen and conscientious closet activist that you are. It's time to get past the reductive oversimplification we've been inculcated with for myriad reasons, not least of which is a hollowed out, coddling mainstream media and a plutocratic, neo-con fear-mongering federal government hell bent for disaster on a reckless path of isolationism and retarded policies from the 1950s that won't - repeat, will not - help us meet the future as the rightful and responsible global citizens Canadians can and should be.

(Should I now tell you how I really feel?)

The fact is that while the non-binding Copenhagen Accord that was the culmination of COP 15, to which 130-plus countries have voluntarily signed on to and which cited the need for "deep cuts" to carbon emissions, held to the two-degree rule, it doesn't look good.

As COP 16 and ever more conferences unfold, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has just released its latest report and apparently the two-degree limit is already unreachable.

To explain, the IEA is an autonomous intergovernmental agency with its headquarters in Paris that was struck after the oil crisis of the 1970s to coordinate emergency oil supplies and advise member countries. Its mandate has now broadened to "incorporate the 'Three E's' of balanced energy policy making," namely energy security, economic development and environmental protection.

Besides its overarching conclusion that "the energy world is facing unprecedented uncertainty," the IEA report analyzes three global energy scenarios. One scenario - the analysis of new policies which include recent promises to reduce carbon dioxide emissions - shows they are "collectively inadequate" to meet the Copenhagen Accord's goal of holding the global temperature increase to below two degrees Celsius. Rather, current promises will result in a likely temperature rise of more than 3.5 degrees in the long term.

What will a global temperature increase of 3.5 degrees mean for food supplies? Think about everything, from glaciers disappearing in the Andes and Himalayas  - and the Rockies -and subsequently drying up traditional water supplies for crops and livestock, to the fact it takes scientists an average of 10-12 years to breed new plant crops capable of contending with new patterns in the spread of diseases and rainfall; from the desertification of areas previously able to grow food, to flowering tree crops blooming at unusual times when pollinating insects are not present.

And no, Canada is not immune to consequences, direct or indirect. You only need to look at the unusual growing conditions farmers in Pemberton Valley contended with this year and the landslide caused by the melting of Capricorn Glacier.

The Global Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change has long identified a global food security crisis and plugs on with another unreachable goal of reducing by half the number of undernourished people (about a billion) by 2015. UN reports have already identified that 99 percent of climate change effects will be felt by developing countries. What do we think these people will do to find food and water?

As for that gun suggested in the sub-head, it's not for self-defense. It's to start the revolution that will bring about real policy changes for sticking to the two-degree limit.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who still believes the pen is mightier than the sword, or gun.