Concurrent Sessions 1: THE CLIMATE: Climate Change and Agriculture

To open the panel, moderator Dennis Dimick put agriculture in the context of the global climate crisis by highlighting the fact that agriculture uses more water than any other human endeavor in the world, nearly 70 percent (see the early 2008 feature story from National Geographic). Theo Dillaha added to Dimick's global perspective that the greatest risk involved with climate change is to people in developing countries; this is largely because of the climatic changes that affect the growing seasons. As Dillaha explained, climate change is causing greater variability rather than just warming, as the commonly used, but often misleading term, "global warming" implies. Dillaha, speaking from his experience as program director at the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program, gave several examples from across the developing world of significantly impacted communities experiencing climate-related disruption to their agriculture.

Literally bringing the issue back to American soil, William Hohenstein, director of the Global Climate Change Program at the USDA, explained to the panel the conclusions of a recently published report from his agency detailing the current and projected effects of climate change on U.S. agriculture. These effects were manifold: water availability, pest migration, changing growing seasons, increased temperature stress on crops, livestock, and pollinators, variance in precipitation rates and types, and yield impact due to higher CO2 concentration. Jeffrey Moyer, also addressing U.S. agriculture, talked about the advantages that organic food production can have on mitigating the greenhouse gas emissions of large-scale agriculture. According to Moyer, the financial system isn't the only staple of the American economy that has been set up for failure; "I think it will become increasingly clear in the next few years that our food system is equally broken," said Moyer. In his opinion, conventional agriculture, and the policy structure that supports it, has created a system that does what is asked of it — provides cheap food, fiber products, and now sources of energy — but not what Americans should want from it — quality food products farmed using sustainable techniques that are not ecologically disruptive. Rodale Institute has found in its studies that organic farming techniques can not only produce the same amount of food as conventional farming, but that they can, according to Moyer, "sequester three times as much carbon."

Related Links:

• Global Climate Change Program (USDA): The Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture, Land Resources, Water Resources, and Biodiversity, May 2008.
• "Warming May Cause Crop Failures, Food Shortages by 2030," National Geographic News, January 31, 2008.
• "Farmer in Chief," Michael Pollan's letter to the next president, published in New York Times Magazine, October 9, 2008.

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