NEW DELHI (Commodity Online) : Crops losses due to global warming remained as the major threat the entire human race is facing and the facts point to yet another global food shortage just a few years after the food crisis of 2007-08.

Every six seconds a child on this planet dies of hunger. Last month, the International Food and Policy Research Institute calculated that lower crop yields due to global warming will reduce worldwide calorie availability 7 per cent by 2050.



Climate change is another cause for urgency. Higher temperatures reduce crop yields while spurring a proliferation of pests and plant diseases.

And that an especially vulnerable South Asia will suffer the biggest drop in crop yields, with rice output falling 14 per cent in the region due to global warming alone.

A ferocious debate between advocates of natural farming methods and those arguing for a new agricultural revolution based on genetically modified (GM) crops.

"Chemicals destroy the sustainability of productivity in the long run," insists P.C. Kesvan, a fellow at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Institute in India.

But other Indian economists and scientists are clamouring for genetic engineering, saying GM is no different from traditional plant hybridization save that it's faster and more efficiant.

India so far allows GM seeds only in cotton production, not for edible crops.

China has used hybrid rice to boost crop yields from two tonnes per hectare in the 1960s to more than 10 tonnes in 2004. And Chinese scientists are aiming for 13.5 tonnes by 2015.

But modified crops and leading-edge pesticides and fertilizers are a flashpoint for conflict among anti-hunger advocates.

In a report released last week, UNICEF found that nearly 200 million children in poor nations have stunted growth resulting from malnutrition.

The determining factors in famine are mostly man-made. They include civil war and political instability in many, if not most undernourished regions.

Protectionism in affluent nations that removes the incentive for developing-world farmers to enhance crop yields in the hope of earning export revenue.

A sharp decline in affluent-world donations of agricultural assistance to underfed countries. A growing scourge of crop failure related to global warming.

World food output must ramp up by 70 per cent over the next four decades to feed the estimated 2.3 billion more people on the planet by 2050 – or a total global population of 9.1 billion.

Achieving that goal will cost an estimated $44 billion a year in annual agricultural assistance, compared with the $7.9 billion spent now.

That money is needed for more and better irrigation systems, state-of-the-art machinery, training for farmers, new and upgraded road networks to get food to market, disease-resistant seeds and fertilizer.

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