- This summer's heatwave has drastically cut harvests across
Europe, plunging the world into an unprecedented food crisis, startling
new official figures show.
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- Separate calculations by two leading institutions monitoring
the global harvest show that the scorching weather has severely reduced
European grain production, ensuring that the world will not produce enough
to feed itself for the fourth year in succession, and plunging stocks to
the lowest level on record. And experts predict that the damage to crops
will be found to be even greater when the full cost of the heat is known.
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- They say that, as a result, food prices will rise worldwide,
and hunger will increase in the world's poorest countries. And they warn
that this is just a foretaste of what will happen as global warming takes
hold.
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- Sunshine and warmth are, of course, good for plants and
there were hopes that this year's good summer would produce a bumper harvest.
But excessive heat and low rainfall damage crops, and the heatwave - which
brought temperatures of more than 100F to Britain for the first time, and
gave France 11 consecutive days above 95F, killing more than 1,000 people
- has done enormous damage.
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- The US Department of Agriculture has cut its forecast
for this year's grain harvest by 32 million tons, mainly because of the
European crop reductions. On Thursday, the International Grains Council
- an intergovernmental body - reduced its own prediction even further,
by 36 million tons, as a result of "heat and drought, particularly
in Europe."
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- The damage has been most severe in Eastern Europe, which
is now bringing in its worst wheat crop in three decades: in Ukraine, the
harvest has been cut from 21 million tons last year to five million, while
Romania has its worst crop on record. Germany is the worst-hit EU country:
some farmers in the south-east have lost half their grain harvest. Official
British figures will not be published until October.
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- The final tally of the summer's damage is likely to be
worse still. Lester Brown, the president of Washington's authoritative
Earth Policy Institute, predicts that it will cut another 20 million tons
off the world harvest, making this a catastrophic year.
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- It has come at a time when world food supplies were already
at their most precarious ever. The world has eaten more grain than it has
produced every year so far this century, driving stocks well below the
safety margin to their lowest levels in the 40 years that records have
been kept. The amount of grain produced for each person on earth is now
less than at any time in more than three decades.
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- Until about a month ago, this year had been expected
to produce a reasonable harvest, allowing some recovery. But the heatwave
has now ensured that it will make things even worse, and experts say that
the crisis will deepen as global warming increases.
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- Grain prices have already increased, and Mr Brown warns
that in coming years they may move to a permanently higher level. This
would encourage greater production, he says, but at the expense of the
world's hungry, who could then afford even less food, and of the environment,
as farming intensified.
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=438726
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