Nature - "Significant" Areas Of SS Africa Will Be Unfit For Corn, Bean, Banana Cultivation By 2100

[hatrack]

Climate change will leave swaths of sub-Saharan Africa unable to produce staple crops such as maize, bananas and beans by the end of the century, according to a report that calls for an urgent transformation of the region’s agriculture.

The study, led by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), says that rising temperatures and droughts will force “significant areas” to find alternative crops, improve irrigation systems or even abandon crop-based agriculture completely by the year 2100.

The authors warn that time is running out and say delays in taking the necessary adaptive steps now will further jeopardise food security and undermine the fight against poverty. Their report, published in Nature Climate Change, examines the likely impact that climate change will have on the nine crops that make up half of the food produced in the region: bananas; cassava; beans; groundnuts; maize; sorghum; yams; pearl millet and finger millet.

Although six of the crops are expected to remain stable despite moderate and extreme changes, up to 60% of bean-producing areas – and up to 30% of those growing maize and bananas – are projected to become unviable by the close of this century. Failure to switch to beans that can cope better with heat stress could prove particularly devastating: the report predicts that 1.85m hectares (4.6m acres) of bean-cropping systems in Uganda and Tanzania – which between them produce 41% of sub-Saharan Africa’s beans – will be unable to do so by 2100.

EDIT

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/mar/07/bananas-bleak-future-staple-african-crops-decline-beans-protein

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. As usual, the desperately poor get hit first and hardest when colonial exploiters screw everything

up for everyone.

We've got a couple of choices. Elect the guy who realizes climate change is real and requires drastic changes, the woman who at least admits it's real, but actually pushes policies that make it worse, or some bozo who won't even admit it exists.