Press Release05.06.2002, Berlin

"World Food Summit + 5" in Rome: "Climate change will undermine agriculture in developing countries"

Prompted by the UN conference titled “World Food Summit: five years later” due to begin on Monday in Rome, the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) draws attention to the risks to agriculture posed by climate change.

Latest model computations show that the developing countries, above all, must expect yield losses due to global warming. South Asia, parts of South America (Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia), Central America and about two-thirds of all states in sub-Saharan Africa will be particularly affected. This development will endanger the livelihoods of millions of small farmers.

The computations indicate that agriculture in Russia, China, Canada and Argentina will be the winner of global warming. If warming exceeds a certain threshold, major impairment of agricultural production is expected in all regions.

The Council already noted these connections in its freshwater report. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg (Austria) recently published a detailed study on the impact of climate change upon world agricultural production. The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) arrives at similar results.

World Food Summit: five years later

The “World Food Summit: five years later” will convene on 10–13 June 2002. At the World Food Summit in 1996, it was agreed that the number of people suffering hunger must be halved by the year 2015. Climate change will make it even harder to attain this goal. The core issue of the upcoming conference is therefore how to alleviate world hunger better under more difficult conditions.