Climate Change to Cause Massive Food Disruptions

Climate Change to Cause ‘Massive’ Food Disruptions

Feb. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Global food supplies will face “massive disruptions” from climate change, Olam International Ltd. forecast, as Agrocorp International Pte. said corn will gain to a record, stoking food inflation and increasing hunger. Said Olam: “The fact is that climate around the world is changing and that will cause massive disruptions.”

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-- Last year was the warmest on record, together with 2005 and 1998, according to the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization.

-- Food prices have become too high for some developing countries to buy the agricultural products they need, raising the risk of food riots, French Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire said earlier this month.

-- Protests, prompted in part by rising food prices, spread across North Africa and the Middle East in the past month, driving Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali into exile after 23 years in power and ending Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule

-- Shrinking global food supplies helped push the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization’s World Food Price Index to a record for a second month in January. As food becomes less available and more expensive, “hoarding becomes widespread,” and prices of wheat and other grains are more likely to rise than decline in the next six months.

-- Corn futures surged 90 percent in the past year, while wheat jumped 80 percent and soybeans advanced 49 percent as the worst drought in at least half a century in Russia, flooding in Australia, excessive rainfall in Canada, and drier conditions in parts of Europe slashed harvests.

-- Global warming may help lift the prices of corn, wheat and rice by at least two-thirds by 2050.

-- Hoarding of agricultural products will intensify.

-- With demand growing and stockpiles dwindling, prices will remain high “if there is any supply disruptions in any part of the world,” Olam’s Verghese said. “We’re experiencing that today in the grains complex, the cotton complex and the coffee complex.”

--Cotton stockpiles will plunge to the lowest since 1996, according to USDA data.