Food security and climate change

It has been said that future wars will be fought over water. Climate change and the inability of countries to share water resources will make this come sooner.

During a 2019 Mekong basin drought, the upper reaches in China received record rainfall, but dams kept nearly all of it from flowing downstream causing serious repercussions for agriculture in Vietnam and other countries in the region.

In Africa, Ethiopia is building dams at the source of the Nile River, causing a major concern in Egypt, which has been dependent on its flows for centuries. Things will only get worse as drought brought by climate change dries up water sources that are the lifeblood of nations.

Climate change has been in the news lately, but I am sure very few of us have given it much thought. The meeting in Glasgow emphasizes its importance, but it is essentially a talkfest.

Sure, we worry a bit when we hear rising sea levels making Manila another Venice. But it all seems so far into the future. Our time frame is short because we have been in survival mode for so long. Makaraos lang has been our national strategy.

Many of us find it hard to understand how a rise in world temperature by a few centigrades can cause so much havoc. But we are starting to feel changes in weather patterns that affect us badly. Typhoons have become more destructive. Longer dry seasons have curtailed our ability to grow enough food.

Just because our carbon footprint isn’t much doesn’t mean we should do nothing. At the very least, we have to take care of ourselves because like it or not, we are victims. We have to take measures to minimize the negative impact of climate change on our lives.

Other than being prepared to deal with typhoons, floods, and landslides or what we call disaster mitigation measures, climate change also means we have to assure our food security. Yet, our leaders have hardly talked about how they are future-proofing our agricultural sector.

The impact of climate change aside, we have as a nation neglected our farmers. Our farm productivity has always been low so that we import quite a bit of our food needs.

Our farmers have always been poor. When the current generation of farmers become too old to farm, we are likely to have a crisis of not having enough farmers to produce our food. Their children would rather be OFWs or test their luck in Metro Manila.

Approximately 10.9 million Filipinos were employed in the agricultural sector as of 2018, accounting for 26 percent of national employment and providing around 10 percent of our GDP.  We have a fast growing population, more people to feed, making food security an ever present concern.

Modernization of our farm sector has not progressed much. It should have received a boost courtesy of the Rice Tariffication Law. But we haven’t heard much about how the program went.

In the meantime, climate change has made traditional farming passed down from generation to generation obsolete. Uneconomical farm sizes, thanks to mindless agrarian reform, have added to the sector’s woes.

Our food security is clearly vulnerable to climate change. Every year, we experience natural disasters like typhoons, floods, and droughts that cause significant losses in crops and livestock  production.

But there is no significant government program responding with some urgency to the need to develop climate-smart technologies to  help our farmers. Bahala na.

This failure is dangerous. Climate change disrupts food availability. If farmers are unable to grow our food in sufficient quantities, prices will rise for the consumer. We may also become dependent on other countries for our food needs, assuming they have surplus to spare because they too will feel the challenge of climate change.

Worse, our poor farmers will have little to eat themselves. And with the urban poor unable to cope with rising food prices, food riots cannot be discounted.

With the longer dry season in recent years, the scarcity of water available for irrigation brings down farm productivity. Because our major agricultural crops like rice, corn, sugarcane, etc are rain-fed, the lack of rain severely reduces crop yields.

The wet season is becoming shorter and marred by intense typhoons that damage crops, adding to the misery of our farmers. The cost impact of climate change has been estimated at about P145 billion annually through 2050.

Since all these destructive changes are happening globally, there will be reduced supply of crop and livestock commodities, resulting in higher world commodity prices. That, in turn, impacts on our entire economy.

It is important to develop agricultural adaptation and growth strategies not only to maintain domestic agricultural production, but also to support broader economic growth. Unfortunately, the little that we are doing will be further undermined by corruption.

As it is, Congress has not supported the budget needs of the agriculture department. Year after year the proposal is slashed. They asked for P284 billion, but only got P85.6 billion for this year.

“While the agriculture sector contributes about 10 percent to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), it gets a measly share of total national appropriations, at three to five percent in the last 10 years,” Agriculture Secretary William Dar laments.

What we need to see in a new administration is a commitment to support agricultural adaptation to climate change. It will require an inter-agency program to come up with a response that will matter to farmers and our ability to produce our own food.

Then again, our leaders are more interested in politics, Charter change, federalism, and other such concerns and not so much with useful programs that will protect future generations of Filipinos from food scarcity. They only get interested in agriculture when they can profit from things like fertilizer scams.

Let us elect leaders who know how to make the right priorities or the future of our children and grandchildren will be bleak.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco