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TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2009 11 AM EST

FOOD SECURITY: THE REAL AGENDA FOR COPENHAGEN

Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, discussed why food security is the central issue underlying the U.N. Climate Change Conference this December in Copenhagen.

For the 193 national delegations gathering for the U.N. Climate Change Conference, the reasons for concern about climate change vary widely. Delegations from low-lying island countries are principally concerned with rising sea level. Southern European countries are concerned about less rainfall and more drought. Countries in East Asia and the Caribbean are worried about more powerful storms and storm surges.

Brown says, “This climate change conference is about all these things, and many more, but in a very fundamental sense, it is a conference about food security.”

•  Climate change is melting the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and raising sea level, which will reduce rice harvests in the rice-growing river deltas of Asia.

•  Glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau whose ice melt sustains the major rivers of India and China—and the irrigation systems dependent on them—are fast disappearing.

•  For each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the norm during the growing season, crop scientists expect a 10-percent decline in wheat and rice yields.