Net Zero Mandates Harming Crop Productivity Not ‘Climate Change’
A recent post by AgFunder News, a news site that covers “foodtech” and “agtech” startups and venture capital topics, reports that ‘climate change’ is harming the growth in crop productivity. This is false
The post largely parrots claims made in the latest U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Synthesis Report that ‘climate change’ threatens food production.
However, actual global food production data show no sign that crop production or yields have declined, rather, they continue to increase.
The article, “Climate change is slowing growth in agricultural productivity, latest IPCC report finds,” accurately observes that extreme weather like floods and drought can impact crop production.
It acknowledges that these impacts are “unevenly distributed”—which appears to be a euphemistic way of saying that the poor, or countries with non-modern agricultural sectors suffer worse when extreme weather occurs.
The post then asserts that although “agricultural productivity has increased over the last 50 years, climate change has slowed this growth…”
AgFunder News provides no evidence to back this claim because no such evidence exists.
Data from U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization for major food crops like corn, rice, soybeans, and wheat, for example, refute any claim production has declined during the recent period of modest warming. (See figure below)
Each of these crops has set new records for production repeatedly over the past few decades, including 2020, the supposedly “warmest decades on record.”
To the extent that there has been any slowing in the rate of growth of agricultural production, it is due to previously revolutionary technology like synthetic fertilizers and heavy machinery becoming common across the globe.
No ‘climate change’ “fingerprint” is seen in the overall production trends.
Indeed, growth has continued, even as many farmers have shifted to growing organic produce, which has reduced production of some crops, and as some nations are limiting the use of ‘fossil fuel’-based fertilizers and pesticides in an effort to ‘fight climate change’, as described by Climate Realism here and here, for example.
The latter is the only negative way whereby ‘climate change’, in this case, climate policy, is suppressing the rate of increase in crop growth.
AgFunder says “progress” is being made in moving agriculture towards “sustainable development,” ignoring the fact that so-called ‘sustainable farming’, eschewing modern fertilizers and pesticides, leads to lower crop production and yields.
Sustainability tends to place a focus on reducing the use of fertilizers and pesticides, and promoting more subsistence agriculture rather than modern industrial high-yield practices.
Even agricultural production in first-world nations, such as England, has suffered under policies their governments have implemented to reduce ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions from agriculture.
The Climate Realism post “Thanks, Epoch Times, for Reporting on How Net-Zero Policies Are Destroying British Agriculture,” describes how the U.K.’s net-zero policies, like paying farmers to leave fields unplanted and other measures that limit food production have led to produce shortages in grocery stores.
Regarding “least-developed countries,” as AgFunder puts it, they suffer greater harm when extreme weather events occur because they lack hardened infrastructure, not because ‘climate change’ is making the weather worse.
AgFunder opines that “for every $1 spent on climate-resilient infrastructure,” $87 was spent on other essential infrastructure that ignored “climate-resilience principles.”
“Adaptation finance” is important, but suppressing the industrial development of the Third World is not going to benefit farm production there.
Sri Lanka’s recent experience with eschewing fossil fuel-based agricultural chemicals presents a horrifying example of what happens when a government mandates “climate-friendly” and “sustainable” organic farming.
Within six months of the Sri Lankan government’s ban on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, rice yields dropped 20 percent while prices rose 50 percent.
Sri Lanka, once self-sufficient, had to import rice from China. People were starving, protests broke out, the president’s home was destroyed by rioters and the government fell. [pictured above]
Consumers, farmers, and other agricultural industry workers should not be fooled by AgFunder News or the IPCC, agricultural production is doing well, for now, but the policies pushed by climate alarmists—like those in the UK and Sri Lanka– will start to cause deaths from starvation if they become more widely implemented.
See more here climatechangedispatch
Header image: Wikipedia
Editor’s note: this reduction in the food supply is quite deliberate of course, and is part of the globalists plan to reduce the human population by any and all means.
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