Africa's agriculture vulnerable to breakdown under climate change

Solve Climate: ...Africa’s future if climate change continues apace looks grim: the devastation of its farms and fisheries, flooding of its river deltas, and the ruin of its mangrove swamps and coral reefs. Such damage will be worsened by Africa’s awesome poverty, because the continent has far less money to spend on adaptation and mitigation than the industrialized West.

So far, too little attention has been paid to global warming’s impact on African agriculture. Its vulnerability to breakdown has been put into sharp relief by recent droughts and the global food crisis. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report notes, “By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent. Agricultural production, including access to food, in many African countries is projected to be severely compromised. This would further adversely affect food security and exacerbate malnutrition.”

The working paper observes that agricultural systems will be “severely compromised” by anthropogenic climate change. For Africa, this will be particularly cruel. Researchers note that agriculture contributes between 10 and 70 percent of GDP across the continent. In turn, they observe that, “In other countries, additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50 percent during the 2000-2020 period, and reductions in crop growth period. … A recent study on South African agricultural impacts, based on three scenarios, indicates that crop net revenues will be likely to fall by as much as 90 percent by 2100, with small-scale farmers being the most severely affected.”

Of course, such estimates were made based on the now-outmoded 2007 IPCC projections. The worst-case scenarios of those models are now assumed to be totally realistic, if not downright conservative….

"Drought has turned farmland into useless soil and sand" A farmer examines the soil in drought stricken Niger during the 2005 famine. Still from a Voice of America TV report