Climate change isn’t taking food off your table
Daily calorie availability per person worldwide has climbed from less than 2,200 calories in 1961 to more than 2,900 calories now. (McKeown / Getty Images)
No morning ritual is safe from climate alarm. In June, the journal Nature declared that coffee is “critically threatened by climate change” and described scientists racing to save your espresso from “extinction.” The New York Times blames sky-high coffee prices on climate-driven supply crunches in Brazil and Vietnam. And your olive oil? CNN and Bloomberg wail about a seemingly permanent “crisis,” with Mediterranean droughts foretelling a future in which an everyday staple vanishes for good.
The message is unmistakable: Global warming is coming for your family’s dinner table, and only sweeping climate policy can save it. The message is also wrong. Cut through the hype and food is both more plentiful and cheaper today, after adjusting for inflation, than it was during almost all of the 20th century.
Start with coffee, supposedly on its deathbed. This year, global coffee production is expected to set yet another record — more than double the world’s output of 50 years ago. Crops on the brink of extinction don’t deliver record harvests. And despite recent price bumps, the real price of coffee has trended downward since 1960. Adjusted for inflation, coffee this century has cost on average half of what it cost in the last century.
How do outlets like the New York Times get it so wrong? By inexcusably ignoring inflation — comparing coffee prices from the 1970s, expressed in the dollars of that day, with prices expressed in today’s dollars. By that standard, everything is at a record high, always.
Even Nature’s own reporting on coffee undercuts its ominous headline detailing “how scientists are fighting to save it from extinction.” Ethiopia keeps more than 12,000 arabica plants in living gene banks for breeding heat- and drought-tolerant varieties.
“I believe we have enough gene pool to fight climate change,” Kassahun Tesfaye, the Ethiopian plant geneticist leading the effort, says. Farmers in hotter regions are already switching to hardier coffee species that professional tasters can’t distinguish from fine arabica. That isn’t extinction. It is what agriculture has always been: adaptation and improvement.
The supposed olive-oil crisis collapses under the same scrutiny. According to United Nations’ food statistics, global olive-oil production has tripled since 1961 and doubled since 1990. Last year and this year, together with the exceptional 2018 harvest, mark record highs for production of olive oil. Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted prices have not increased and have even slightly declined since 1990. Again, better farming and expanded cultivation outweigh any climate effect.
Stories about food scarcity follow a formula: Take an isolated weather event, attribute it to global warming, skip inflation adjustment and ignore the long-term data. Natural year-to-year swings driven by economics, trade policy and subsidies get repackaged as apocalyptic trends. Rarely mentioned, however, is how much of the real price pressure on food comes from fertilizer and transport costs — inflated, ironically, by climate policies that raise fossil fuel energy bills for the essentials of farming.
Meanwhile, never mentioned are the ways climate change helps crops. Carbon dioxide is plant food, which is why commercial growers pump extra CO2 into greenhouses to produce more tomatoes. NASA satellites show that the planet has been greening for four decades, meaning the world has added additional leaves with an area equivalent to that of at least two times the Amazon rainforest.
Climate change will, on balance, hurt agriculture. But its impact is dwarfed by rising productivity. Another highly cited study in Nature from 2021 finds that without any climate change, global food-calorie production will increase 51% between 2010 and 2050. With extreme, unrealistic warming, it still increases by 49%. Across all models and scenarios, the difference in calories available per person amounts to one-tenth of 1%.
That’s because humanity keeps getting better at growing food. Cereal production has more than quintupled over the past century while real food prices have more than halved. The Green Revolution of the 1960s turned famine-prone nations into exporters through the widespread adoption of high-yield crop varieties, alongside expanded use of chemical fertilizers and improved irrigation.
India, once written off as a basket case dependent on food aid, quadrupled its rice production between 1961 and 2023 and is today the world’s largest rice exporter. Daily calorie availability per person worldwide has climbed from less than 2,200 in 1961 to more than 2,900 now. Global undernourishment has plummeted from roughly 1 in 4 people in the developing world in the early 1990s to fewer than 10% today.
The task now is to finish the job. Innovation should extend to under-researched crops like sorghum, cassava and millet — staples for 2 billion people in the developing world that have been largely ignored by commercial breeders. Investment in biotech, precision agriculture and drought-resistant crop varieties will do far more for the world’s poor — and for your grocery bill — than any emissions target.
We can keep feeding more people, better, by doubling down on what actually works: innovation.
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
