A number of India’s key crops are experiencing the effects of climate change, experts say. H Pathak, an investigator with the Indian Agricultural Research Institute’s Climate Change Challenge Program, said global warming isn’t limited to a rise in average temperatures. “It’s a little more complicated than that. There is for example also a rise in [...]
Tag Archives: agriculture
Damage from super-cyclone Yasi sends sugar prices to record high
Sugar prices broke over a three-decade high Wednesday as one of the strongest cyclones to hit Australia in a century slammed into the sugar-producing nation’s already flood-ravaged Queensland coast. Raw-sugar futures for March delivery broke 36 cents a pound in InterContinental Exchange trade, the highest price since November 1980. White sugar on London’s Liffe exchange [...]
15 year decline of white truffles linked to climate change
I asked John Magazino of Primizie Fine Foods, one of the leading truffle importers in the country, if he was noticing any decrease in demand. “If anything, there’s more,” he told me, adding that the global appetite for white truffles, especially the ones from around Alba, Italy, has utterly outstripped the harvest. From Macau to [...]
Warming maturing Indian wheat crops too quickly
Returning from northern India, agricultural scientist Andrew Jarvis said wheat farmers there were finding warming was maturing their crops too quickly. “The temperatures are high and they’re getting reduced yields,” Jarvis, of the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture, told reporters last month.
Yucatan ag yields down 50% over last 15 years due to higher temps
The first time Araceli Bastida Be heard the phrase “climate change” was on TV two years ago. Then she began to understand why strange things had been happening in her village. Tabi was in its second year of drought, and the corn that sustains the village was left stunted on the stalks. Farmers couldn’t bear [...]
Food prices higher on weather disasters linked to climate change
This month, the Wall Street Journal reports that prices of basic foods like milk, beef and cereal grain have risen sharply enough in the U.S. in recent weeks that major food producers like Kraft and General Mills have decided they must begin to pass the increased cost of supplies on to their customers in the [...]
Coffee prices spurred to 13-year high by drought in Brazil
Brazil’s coffee output in 2011 was already expected to drop to the lowest level in four years after a drought hindered flowering for the next crop, Bloomberg reported. Brazil’s National Coffee Council predicted that Brazil might harvest about 36 million bags of coffee next year, down from 47.2 million this year and 39.5 million in [...]
Rice production hit by Thailand floods
Thailand’s government approved a 2.9 billion baht ($97 million) special budget to help victims of the nation’s worst flooding in five decades, as authorities in Bangkok worked to strengthen the city’s defenses. The government will give 5,000 baht to each family in some of the worst-hit areas as part of its wider relief effort, Prime [...]
Crop viruses spurred by climate change in India
According to experts, India is the country most-affected by climate change. An increase in temperature by 0.5 degree Celsius has led to decrease in yield of 0.45 tonnes of wheat and 25-30 per cent of sugarcane/ hectare, they said. There is a paradigm shift in the nature, time and type of occurrence of viral and [...]
Decade-Long Decline in Plant Growth
Earth has done an ecological about-face: Global plant productivity that once flourished under warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline, struck by the stress of drought. NASA-funded researchers Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running, of the University of Montana in Missoula, discovered the global shift during an analysis of NASA satellite [...]
