A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
So a question popped into our minds as we listened this week to NPR's Climate Solutions series. We've been hearing about how climate change has made it harder to grow our food, which had us wondering, could there be a time in the near future - even in the U.S. - when it's harder to find foods we commonly eat? Our co-host Leila Fadel spoke with Tim Searchinger about food scarcity. He's technical director for agriculture, forestry and ecosystems at the World Resources Institute.
TIM SEARCHINGER: Climate change probably doesn't have a big impact on our food prices here in the U.S. right now. It could be for something. So for right now, for example, chocolate prices are high because cocoa has had terrible drought in West Africa, where the vast majority of cocoa is produced. But as a whole, our food prices aren't that much influenced by climate change both because in the West, we still have kind of abundant food production because, actually, most of the price at the grocery store isn't the price of food paid to the farmer. It has to do with transportation, processing and retail costs.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
So let's talk about outside the U.S. How is food production around the world being affected by climate change right now?
SEARCHINGER: First of all, even in the U.S., it is true that our yields have probably gone down significantly because of climate change relative to what they otherwise would. And elsewhere in the world more significantly affected, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. But the bigger issue is that we have more droughts and big rainfall events, and these are causing acute food insecurity problems.
FADEL: And so some of this mass migration that we're seeing really across the world - towards Europe, towards the United States - are the downstream effects of people being unable to access food where they are?
SEARCHINGER: Yeah, some of it. Some of it you can actually kind of track, like the migration of people from Central America. And, of course, some of that are people who are food insecure. Climate change is just exacerbating problems that already exist. So sub-Saharan Africa - about 40% of all the children are stunted. This is one of the best measures of food insecurity. This means that the children are significantly shorter because of a lack of proper nutrition. And then some of those people choose to migrate.
FADEL: So for people listening, what would you say to them about the individual things they can do to be more green in the way they eat and the way they consume?
SEARCHINGER: So the single most important thing is probably to eat less beef. In the U.S., it's maybe around 40% of our land use and emissions, and it's about 3% of our calories. So that's the one pretty easy thing to do. A second is don't waste so much food. We waste a staggering quantity of food. Maybe a third thing would be to encourage companies to show that they're reducing their emissions and their land use requirements. So all these food companies that we buy things - we should be pressuring them, encouraging them to get into the act.
And I think that the big issue - and I think a lot of people don't appreciate - is the simple effect of the quantity of land that we devote to agriculture. So agriculture is roughly half of all the world's vegetated land. And that has huge implications for the climate. So I think part of it is also to basically be attentive to the government policies and say, hey, really, what we need you to do is figure out ways to reduce the amount of land that is used to produce food.
FADEL: Tim Searchinger is a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. He's also a senior research scholar at Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Thank you so much for your time and your insights.
SEARCHINGER: Thank you for having me.
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