By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:04PM BST 13 Jun 2009
For the second time in little
over a year, it looks as though the world may be heading for a serious food
crisis, thanks to our old friend "climate change". In many parts of
the world recently the weather has not been too brilliant for farmers. After a
fearsomely cold winter, June brought heavy snowfall across large parts of
western
There was midsummer snow not just
in
None of this has given much cheer
to farmers. In
In
In Europe, the weather has been a
factor in well-below average predicted crop yields in eastern
Europe and
There are obviously various
reasons for this concern as to whether the world can continue to feed itself,
but one of them is undoubtedly the downturn in world temperatures, which has
brought more cold and snow since 2007 than we have known for decades.
Three factors are vital to crops:
the light and warmth of the sun, adequate rainfall and the carbon dioxide they
need for photosynthesis. As we are constantly reminded, we still have plenty of
that nasty, polluting CO2, which the politicians are so keen to get rid of. But
there is not much they can do about the sunshine or the rainfall.
It is now more than 200 years
since the great astronomer William Herschel observed a correlation between
wheat prices and sunspots. When the latter were few in number, he noted, the
climate turned colder and drier, crop yields fell and wheat prices rose. In the
past two years, sunspot activity has dropped to its lowest point for a century.
One of our biggest worries is that our politicians are so fixated on the idea
that CO2 is causing global warming that most of them haven't noticed that the
problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, with all the
implications that has for whether we get enough to eat.
It is appropriate that another
contributory factor to the world's food shortage should be the millions of
acres of farmland now being switched from food crops to biofuels, to stop the
world warming, Last year even the experts of the European Commission admitted
that, to meet the EU's biofuel targets, we will eventually need almost all the
food-growing land in Europe. But that didn't persuade them to change their
policy. They would rather we starved than did that. And the EU, we must always
remember, is now our government the one most of us didn't vote for last week.