Crictical crops suffer as droughts worsen and heat increases

For all the wrong reasons, the summer of 2012 was a historic one for the American Midwest. Plagued by the worst drought the region had seen in decades, as well as weeks of high temperatures, one of the country’s most productive agricultural regions faced massive shortages in its annual corn crop, driving corn prices to a record high.

A new study, published Wednesday in Nature, argues that the American Midwest isn’t the only place to see staple crops like corn suffer in the face of extreme weather events. The paper, written by a team of geographers from the University of British Columbia, analyzed the effects that extreme temperatures, floods, and droughts have had on the last five decades of crop harvests. What they found was that both droughts and heat waves had a marked impact on a country’s crop production, cutting into cereal crops like wheat, rice, and maize by 10 percent and 9 percent respectively. Floods and cold spells, the study found, had no impact on crop production.

Read the ClimateProgress story - “Heat Waves And Drought Are Already Having A Devastating Impact On Important Crops.”