Man-made or natural, disasters have taken a massive toll on global agriculture over the past 30 years, according to a groundbreaking new report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Released Friday, the report, The Impact of Disasters on Agriculture and Food Security, estimates that disasters have cumulatively cost a staggering US$3.8 trillion in lost agricultural production. That corresponds to an average loss of $123 billion per year or 5% of annual global agricultural gross domestic product (GDP).
The report is the first to provide a global estimate focusing exclusively on the losses in crops and livestock. It suggests that the real cost might be higher if the losses in fisheries, aquaculture, and forestry sectors were included.
Defined as serious disruptions to the functioning of a community or society, disasters can include such calamities as climate change, pandemics, epidemics and armed conflicts.
The climate crisis is having a significant effect in amplifying existing agricultural risks – with multiple high temperature records broken in 2023, along with episodes of extreme floods, storms, droughts, wildfires, and pest and disease outbreaks - but recent pandemics and armed conflicts, namely the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have also contributed to losses experienced in the agrifood sector.
Alarmingly, disaster occurrences have surged from 100 annually in the 1970s to around 400 in the past two decades, the report said.
“Agriculture is one of the most highly exposed and vulnerable sectors in the context of disaster risk, given its profound dependence on natural resources and climate conditions,” said FAO Director-General QU Dongyu in the foreword to the report. “Recurrent disasters have the potential to erode gains in food security and undermine the sustainability of agrifood systems.”
The report reveals that over the last three decades, disasters inflicted the highest relative losses on lower and lower middle-income countries, up to 15% of their total agricultural GDP.
The report also indicates that losses related to major agricultural products are showing increasing trends. For example, disaster-related losses in cereals over the past 30 years amounted to an average of 69 million tonnes per year, equal to the entire cereal production of France in 2021. Meats, dairy products and eggs showed an average estimated loss of 16 million tonnes per year, corresponding to the whole production of meats, dairy products and eggs in Mexico and India in 2021.
The report outlines three key priorities for action, including improving data and information on the impacts of disasters on all subsectors of agriculture; developing and mainstreaming multisectoral and multi-hazard disaster risk reduction approaches into policy and programming at all levels; and enhancing investments in resilience that provide benefits in reducing disaster risk in agriculture and improve agricultural production and livelihoods.
Source : Syngenta.ca