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Food scarcity affects many people around the world. As the world’s fifth largest exporter of agricultural goods and fourth largest exporter of wheat, Canada can help. Canadian food exports contain enough calories to feed more than 180 million people.

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We often hear that cutting carbon emissions is a priority because climate change is causing world hunger and even Canada will be hit by higher food prices and less choice. These alarmist claims are far from true, and the policies that usually accompany them would hurt, not help.

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Over the past century, hunger has declined dramatically. In 1928, the League of Nations estimated that more than two-thirds of humanity lived in a constant state of hunger. By 1970, malnutrition afflicted just one-quarter of all people. Since 2008, fewer than one in ten people have been chronically hungry, although both COVID and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have increased the percentage from a low of just over seven per cent in 2017 to nine per cent in 2023.

Hunger is way down because incomes have risen dramatically and humanity has become much better at producing food. We have more than quintupled cereal production since 1926, and more than halved global food prices. At the same time, extreme poverty has dropped sharply, allowing parents to buy their children more and better food.

There is obviously still more to do, but securing food for the vast majority of the world has been a great chapter in the human development story.

As we move towards 2050, continuing increases in incomes will almost eradicate extreme poverty. At the same time, food prices will likely decline slightly or stay about the same, as even more people switch to higher-quality, more expensive foods. All credible forecasts see even lower levels of malnutrition by mid-century.

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The impact of climate change on food supply is often portrayed as terrible, but in reality it means things will continue to get much better — only slightly more slowly. Most farmers will be affected, with conditions better for some and worse for others. On balance, the outcome is likely to be worse, but only slightly so. One peer-reviewed estimate shows the climate impact on agriculture is equivalent to reducing end-of-century global GDP by less than 0.06 per cent.

Carbon dioxide is a fertilizer. Tomato producers routinely pump it into their greenhouses to boost productivity. It has a similar impact across the living world. Since the 1970s, the rising concentration of CO₂ has caused the planet to become greener, producing more biomass. Satellites show that since 2000 the world has so many more green leaves their total additional area is larger than Australia.

Models show that without climate change world food production in 2050, measured in calories, will be 51 per cent higher than in 2010. But even with extreme, unlikely climate change, it will increase 49 per cent. Across all models and scenarios, the difference in calories per person is one-tenth of one per cent

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The graph shows actual malnutrition deaths of children under five years of age from 1990 to 2021 and adds World Health Organization (WHO) forecasts beyond that, both with and without climate change. Since 1990, the average number of children dying has declined dramatically — from 6.5 million to 2.5 million a year. This is a great success story.

The WHO expects the decline to continue, with annual deaths halving again. In a world with climate change, deaths continue their trend decline, but slightly more slowly. Unfortunately, the tiny improvement from eliminating climate change dominated media coverage of the WHO study, rather than the much more dramatic decline that occurs regardless of climate policy.

Climate campaigners responded to the study by demanding radical emission cuts. But climate policy is the slowest, costliest and least impactful way to help. It takes more than half a century to have any measurable impact and costs hundreds of trillions of dollars, and it will at best help increase available calories by less than one-tenth of a percentage point. In contrast, a focus on increasing economic growth is over one hundred times more effective, boosting available calories by over 10 per cent. Moreover, it would work in years, not centuries, and deliver a host of other, obvious benefits.

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A second problem is that cutting emissions increases most agricultural costs, pushing up fertilizer prices, making gas-powered tractors more expensive and increasing competition for agricultural land from biofuels and reforestation. Most models just ignore these costs and instead, like the WHO, simply imagine a world without climate change. But it turns out that cutting emissions harms food production much more than climate change does. Surprisingly, a green, low-carbon world produces less and more expensive food and leaves over 50 million more people hungry by mid-century.

The reality of climate and agriculture is that expensively reducing emissions, even dramatically, would have a tiny impact on food production. As a cure, it’s worse than the problem it seeks to fix.

Financial Post

Bjorn Lomborg is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. This is the fourth of 10 articles, running here Tuesdays and based on a forthcoming series to be published by the Fraser Institute.

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