BC food security professor surprised by drought research

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — When talking about climate change, it’s easy to get caught up in faraway images of melting icecaps or struggling ecosystems, but there is one aspect that could especially spell trouble close to home, drought.

Navin Ramankutty, a UBC Professor in Global Food Security and Sustainability, says he was surprised by research that suggests advanced countries, like Canada, may be hit harder by droughts associated with climate change than developing countries.

“We expected the results to be the other way,” Ramankutty said.

He and his colleagues looked over data from 170 countries over the past half century.

“Developed world agriculture tends to be typically monoculture, having the same kind of farming practices across large areas of land and this kind of agriculture typically is very good at producing very high yields when climates are to be stable, but maybe they are less resilient to weather shock.”

He says, in developing countries farmers sacrifice high yields for diversity and focus on minimizing risk because they typically don’t have insurance and price supports to fall back on.

“We really should be thinking about the Canadian west at this point but last summer we had a drought year in BC as well so I would say yes, we should be thinking about the future being very different then what we’ve been used to.”

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