Climate change is driving up food inflation globally – with catastrophic health effects
Global South countries, especially the continent of Africa, will bear the brunt of this, as is the case with other consequences of global warming.
Climate change, and specifically rising temperatures, may cause food prices to increase by 3.2% per year, according to a new study by researchers in Germany. As climate change continues to worsen, this price inflation will mean more and more people around the world don’t have a varied and healthy diet, or simply don’t have enough food.
The new analysis shows that global warming could cause food price inflation to increase by between 0.9 and 3.2 percentage points per year by 2035. The same warming will cause a smaller rise in overall inflation (between 0.3 and 1.2 percentage points), so a greater proportion of household income would need to be spent on buying food.
This effect will be felt worldwide, by high and low-income countries alike, but nowhere more so than in the global south. As with various other consequences of climate change, African countries will be worst affected despite contributing little to its causes.
Our own research on food security in Ghana, west Africa, gives a sense of what price inflation might mean in practice. The The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change describes west Africa as a “hotspot” of climate change, with models predicting extreme rising temperatures and reduced rainfall. With more than half of the population being directly dependent on rain-fed agriculture, Ghana is particularly...
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