MIT News says that a new study co-authored by an MIT economist suggests that international trade will do little to alleviate climate-induced farming problems. Instead, the report indicates that countries will have to alter their own patterns of crop production to lessen farming problems — and even then, there will be significant net losses in production under the basic scenarios projected by climate scientists.
The research uses an unusually detailed dataset that divides the Earth’s surface into 1.7 million grid zones and looks at agricultural output within them. It examines 10 crops, including wheat and rice. Across 11 of climate scenarios, the researchers found that internal changes in the types of crops grown were always more important than using global trade as a way of compensating for farming failures. The predicted effects of climate change on agriculture were much larger for some countries than others.