Giving Compass' Take:
- Katherine Martinko writes about a National Geographic prediction for the decline and alteration of food staples we often take for granted.
- What role can you play in addressing climate change and the food sustainability consequences it brings?
- Learn how you can improve your giving to fight climate change.
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A writeup in National Geographic's Earth Day 2020 magazine by Daniel Stone lists seven "charismatic foods" that we can expect to "morph in appearance, nutritional value, availability, and price as growing regions shift and farmers turn to warm-weather crops."
1. Coffee: Warmer, wetter weather is driving up infestations such as coffee leaf rust and the berry borer in high-altitude locations that used to be unsuitable to such pests. All coffee is currently grown in the so-called Bean Belt, which "wraps around the circumference of the planet and comprises 70 countries, including Vietnam, Brazil, Colombia, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Central American nations." Other countries could become more suitable to coffee production as a result of the warmer weather, but they too would be susceptible to unpredictable and more extreme weather patterns.
2. Bananas: The cheapest, most versatile fruit in the supermarket could disappear someday if an aggressive fungus called fusarium wilt (or Tropical Race 4) is not brought under control. Already it has decimated crops in Africa, Asia, Australia, parts of the Middle East, and most recently Colombia, where a state of emergency was declared last summer.
3. Wine: A study from earlier this year found that, with a 2-degree Celsius global temperature increase, suitable wine-grape growing regions in the world could shrink by as much as 56 percent. Make that 4 degrees and we'd lose 85 percent.
4. Olives: National Geographic writes that "early frosts, heavy rain, and wind halved Italy's production last year. Such extremes could limit crops in many places." Indeed, TreeHugger reported in 2017 that hot muggy weather had attracted fruit flies and bacteria to Italian olive groves, that heat waves had decimated parts of Greek crops, and floods in Spain had ruined even more.
Read the full article about National Geographic's four foods by Katherine Martinko at TreeHugger.