Tag: Rice

MSN Pushes Rice, Sugar, Tomato Crises – Despite New Crop Records

In particular, the article singled out rice, sugar, and tomato production as particularly ravaged by climate change. The objective facts, however, show just the opposite.

From ClimateRealism

By James Taylor

This morning, the MSN news feed that displays for millions of people when they open a new Internet tab prominently displayed an article titled, “The climate crisis is here, the ecosystem is starting to collapse.” Embedded in the usual debunked claims of worsening extreme weather were claims that climate change is devastating crop production around the world. In particular, the article singled out rice, sugar, and tomato production as particularly ravaged by climate change. The objective facts, however, show just the opposite.

Fake claims of tomato shortages. According to the article, “India’s Burger King has taken tomatoes off their burgers after this year’s crop failed and the cost of tomatoes has become prohibitively expensive.”

An anecdotal claim that Burger King is taking tomatoes off its hamburgers in some locations does not prove that climate change is destroying tomato crops. Instead, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO), global tomato production is faring quite well. In fact, the UNFAO reports that global tomato production has set new records an amazing 10 years in a row.

Sugar data is record sweet, not sour. The article continued, “The world’s largest sugar trader expects the coming season to see a deficit for the sixth consecutive year as unfavourable crop forecasts in India will reduce global stocks of the sweetener. ‘The world will be as close to running out of sugar as it can be,’ said Mauro Virgino, trading intelligence lead at Alvean, a trading house controlled by Brazilian producer Copersucar SA, in a recent interview.”

Claims by a trading professional who has a financial stake in leading people to expect higher sugar prices are neither evidence of declining sugar production nor evidence of any climate change impact. Fortunately, the UNFAO keeps meticulous data for world sugar production, also. According to the UNFAO, 2019 saw the largest global sugar crop in history. All 10 of the largest sugar crops in history occurred during the past 10 years. During the past 15 years, global sugar production has increased by more than 33 percent.

Rice crops continue to set records. Also, claimed the article, “Most seriously of all, rice yields across southeast Asia have fallen sending prices up across the board. A rapidly escalating rice crisis is unfolding in Asia that has put hundreds of millions of people at food security risk. … The poor rice yields are going to get worse in the coming months as due to the record high sea waters, this year’s El Niño effect is expected to be especially strong that will cause rice yields to fall further. The food issue and soaring prices in Yangon in Myanmar has already become so bad that residents are turning to charity run food banks for help as they are unable to feed themselves.”

The UNFAO, however, reports an entirely different story. According to the UNFAO, global rice production set a new record in 2021, the latest year for which data is available. All three of the three largest crop years occurred during the past three years. All five of the five largest crop years occurred during the past five years. All 10 of the 10 largest crop years occurred during the past 10 years.

The article focuses special attention on rice yields in India, China, and Myanmar. However, the growth in India’s rice production is even more impressive than the growth in global rice production. India has absolutely smashed its rice production records six years in a row. In China, 2021 was the second-highest rice crop in history. All six of China’s highest-ever rice crops were produced in the past six years. Myanmar rice production is declining – an aberration compared to the global trend – but that is because of Myanmar’s horrible domestic political situation, not climate change. As reported by Human Rights Watch, “Since staging a coup on February 1, 2021, the Myanmar military has carried out a brutal nationwide crackdown on millions of people opposed to its rule. The junta security forces have carried out mass killings, arbitrary arrests, torture, sexual violence, and other abuses that amount to crimes against humanity.” Blaming climate change for Myanmar’s declining crop production is giving a pass to political brutality and human rights abuses.

The overall global crop picture is amazing. It is not surprising that MSN, when cherry-picking its worst-possible scenarios to claim a global crop crisis created by climate change, cannot even find one or two outliers to support its misinformation. The objective fact, as shown definitively by United Nations crop data, is that crop production of nearly all kinds throughout virtually the entire world is setting is setting impressive and live-providing new records nearly every year. This is happening in concurrence with more atmospheric carbon dioxide and modestly warming temperatures.

James Taylor

James Taylor is the President of the Heartland Institute. Taylor is also director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy.

Taylor is the former managing editor (2001-2014) of Environment & Climate News, a national monthly publication devoted to sound science and free-market environmentalism.

Wrong, World Grain, Indian Crop Data Shows Production Is Increasing

This claim is a strange because weather patterns in India haven’t worsened significantly during the recent period of modest warming, and the crops discussed have all increased dramatically over the same time period.

From ClimateRealism

ByLinnea Lueken

A recent article on World-Grain.com (World Grain‘s online publication) says Indian crops like rice, corn, and wheat, are being forced to adapt to climate change. This claim is a strange because weather patterns in India haven’t worsened significantly during the recent period of modest warming, and the crops discussed have all increased dramatically over the same time period. Data indicate harvests are not being negatively impacted by stronger or weaker monsoon seasons, or other weather events.

The article “Study: Indian crops adapt differently to climate change,” reports that the International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI) recent Global Food Policy 2022 report claims “climate change may push 90 million Indians toward hunger by 2030 because of a decline in agricultural production and disruption in the food supply chain.”

Supply chain issues, geopolitics, and weather are unpredictable, yet Indian agricultural production trends over the past decades of global warming show a relatively steady increase in the major crops examined. Climate Realism has discussed Indian weather and food production, here, here, and here, as a sample, indicating that India’s weather has not become more extreme or unpredictable, and its crops are doing well. Nothing has changed since these documents were posted.

Rice, a major staple food crop for India, has seen a nearly unbroken increase in production and yield since the 1960s. Indian rice production skyrocketed 265 percent, with recent years actually seeing an increase in the slope of production gains. (See figure 1 below)

This is despite, and possibly because of, the fact that average global temperatures and CO2 emissions have risen during the same time frame. The growth in CO2 has enhanced crop growth and improved plants’ water use efficiency.

The World Grain article covers a study done by researchers at the University of Illinois which looked at 60 years of crop data in India, focusing on rice, corn, and wheat. They found “farmers have been able to adapt to temperature changes for their corn and rice crops but not for wheat.”

This is an odd claim, because production and yield data for all three crops show dramatic growth during the period of modest warming. Naturally farmers in different parts of India adapt to different weather events and trends differently, depending on the kind of crop being grown.

The article reports that highly productive farming regions that use modern industrial farming techniques are less impacted by short term weather events, or the fluctuations of monsoon season, than less developed areas. World Grain reports that the researchers say, “there are two ways by which the crops can adapt: the farmers can change their management practices or switch to varieties that are more resilient.”

Again, this seems obvious.

Looking at the overall trends, between 1960 and 2021, the same time-period covered by the study, corn and wheat, the two crops besides rice discussed in the article, production and yield data show dramatic increases for both:

  • Corn production has risen 235 percent;
  • Corn yields have increased 633 percent;
  • Wheat production has increased 896 percent;
  • Wheat yields have increased 307 percent. (See Figure 2 below)

The hypothesis that these trends will suddenly reverse in the next seven years is completely unjustified.

Of particular note is the fact that the study suggests wheat farmers have been unable to adapt to a changing climate, yet production and yield data on wheat indicates that, adaptation or not, wheat farmers are doing just fine.

For as long as agriculture has existed, farmers have had to adapt to changing weather and climate conditions. The increasing yields and production for major crops in India refute any claim that climate change is having a net-negative impact on Indian agriculture.

India is a large country, containing a number of different biomes, each with their own regional climates from tundra to tropical rain forest. Some ecosystems are and will continue to be more suitable for certain crops than others, and farmers should be expected to adapt their planting to those conditions.

World Grain should have fact checked the IFPRI’s 2022 food policy report before uncritically parroting its easily falsified claims. If it had, it could have delivered justified good news about Indian agriculture, rather than generating unreasonable fear about climate change’s impacts on farm prospects in the country.

Linnea Lueken

Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”

Linnea Lueken

Climatists Against Growing Rice, Because . . .Methane

“In fact, there is no climate emergency and there will not be one,
with or without new regulations on methane emissions.”

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

Beautiful rice terraces in the moring light near Tegallalang village, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia.

M Dowling reports at Independent Sentinel They’re Coming for Your Rice, But We Always Have Bugs.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Rice feeds half the world

The top rice producers are in Asia The world’s top rice producer is China, at 214 million metric tons. India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam are next. In Africa, Nigeria (6.8 million) is the largest producer. Brazil (11.8 million) and the United States (10.2 million) are also top producers, according to 2018 data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

But Now This Warning

VIDEO: Rice is to blame for around 10 percent of global emissions of methane, a gas that over two decades, traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide. Scientists say that if the world wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rice cannot be ignored. pic.twitter.com/46GgkaGPgK

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) April 16, 2023

The new “crisis” came at us in 2019 from Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum:  This is how rice is hurting the planet   Global rice production is releasing damaging greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, doing as much harm as 1,200 average-sized coal power stations, according to the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates around 770 million tonnes of rice were produced in 2018, with China and India responsible for approximately half of that amount.

Flooding isn’t strictly necessary for rice to grow – it’s an efficient way of preventing the spread of invasive weeds. It’s so fundamental to how many rice farmers operate that it’s not easy to imagine it being grown any other way…

Microbes that feed off decaying plant matter in these fields produce the greenhouse gas methane. And because rice is grown so prolifically, the amount being created is not to be sniffed at – around 12% of global annual emissions.

This crisis is as bogus as the rest of the asbsurdities Schwab conjures up.
Dr. William Happer at C-Fact explains the issue with methane gas.

“Methane, the molecule CH4, is the main constituent of natural gas. Animals like cattle and sheep belch methane as they chew their cud. They are able to get more energy from forage by digesting some of the cellulose with the aid of methane-generating microorganisms in their stomachs. Termites use the same trick to digest wood. Microorganisms in soils, notably rice paddies, also emit large amounts of methane.”

“Few realize that large increases in the concentrations of greenhouse gases cause very small changes in the heat balance of the atmosphere. Doubling the concentration of methane – a 100% increase, which would take about 200 years at the current growth rates – would reduce the heat flow to space by only 0.3%, leading to an average global temperature change of only 0.2 °C. This is less than one-quarter of the change in temperature observed over the past 150 years.

“Most of the predicted catastrophic warming from greenhouse gas emissions is due to positive feedbacks that are highly speculative, at best. In accordance with Le Chatelier’s principle, most feedbacks of natural systems are negative, not positive.

It wouldn’t do much!

“So, even if regulations on U.S. methane emissions could completely stop the increase of atmospheric methane (they can’t), they would likely only lower the average global temperature in the year 2222 by about 0.2 °C, a completely trivial amount given that humans have adapted to a much larger change over the past century while reducing climate deaths by over 98%. And U.S. regulations will have little influence on global emissions, where producers are unlikely to be as easily cowed.

“Given that consumption of fossil fuels is likely to increase over the next few decades as developing countries pull themselves out of poverty, restrictions on U.S. oil and gas production will simply shift production to autocratic nations such as Russia, which have much higher methane-emissions rates than U.S. producers do.“

“In fact, there is no climate emergency and there will not be one,
with or without new regulations on methane emissions.”

“However, you can bet that if the Biden administration is successful in promulgating regulations on oil and gas producers, it will expand these efforts into ranching and agriculture, which emit about the same amount of methane as energy production. No sector of the economy will remain untouched by the EPA’s long arm of climate regulations.“

Give Daisy and the Rice Farmers a Break!

Background Post Climatists Aim Forks at Our Food Supply

The attack on world food supply has four prongs to it, just like the forks in the image.

1.  Exaggerate the Minor Climate Impact of Methane (CH4)

2.  Oppose Methane from Livestock as a Fossil Fuel, like Coal and Oil.

3. Freak Out over N2O as an Excuse to Ban Fertilizers

4.  Meat Shame People’s Diets Because Vegans Love Animals

Blame rice for global warming!? ‘Rice is to blame for around 10% of global emissions of methane’ – ‘Rice cannot be ignored’

The climate agenda cannot handle a decentralized world. They need to control the means of production, the distribution of food, and control of the movement of people.

From Climate Depot

AFP: “Rice is to blame for around 10 percent of global emissions of methane, a gas that over two decades, traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide. Scientists say that if the world wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rice cannot be ignored.”

Climate Crackpots Blame Global Warming on Rice – “Now it is firmly ensconced among the climate change cult that eating meat is killing the planet and you must ‘eat ze bugs’, the same people have a new target, rice.”

#

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano comment: “The big picture is this: This isn’t necessarily about shutting down rice production. This is about the climate agenda coming from the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, academia,the corporate world, identifying every facet of modern society as being a climate ‘problem’ that needs managing and thus a takeover.  So whether we’re talking about transportation, whether it’s airlines, whether it’s gas-powered cars, whether it’s eating meat, whether it’s high-yield agriculture, it’s all allegedly creating a ‘climate emergency’ and thus global elites want to take over and ‘manage’ them. They are looking for a managerial revolution. They want to put themselves in charge of saving the planet and thus put themselves in charge of all aspects of modern society.”

By: Admin – Climate Depot

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano comment: The big picture is this: This isn’t necessarily about shutting down rice production. This is about the climate agenda coming from the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, academia,the corporate world, identifying every facet of modern society as being a climate ‘problem’ that needs managing and thus a takeover.  So whether we’re talking about transportation, whether it’s airlines, whether it’s gas-powered cars, whether it’s eating meat, whether it’s high-yield agriculture, it’s all allegedly creating a ‘climate emergency’ and thus global elites want to take over and ‘manage’ them. They are looking for a managerial revolution. They want to put themselves in charge of saving the planet and thus put themselves in charge of all aspects of modern society.

Self-appointed earth saviors seek to manage every aspect of our lives to save us from the ‘climate catastrophe.’ So it’s not that they want to ban rice eating, but they’re claiming that rice production contributes to the ‘climate crisis’. The climate agenda demand that rice production has to be forever altered and turned over to a corporate government collusion to ‘fix’ the problems with rice agriculture. Of course, these globalist plans mean that you need big agribusiness corporations which have sold out to the climate agenda to manage rice production, and this means small farmers and agrarian countries are going to be at the mercy of corporate agriculture, taking over more and more of food production.

Every aspect of modern society is untenable due to our ‘climate crisis.’  It includes limiting freedom of travel, home thermostat controls, restrictions on your appliances, limiting the ability to eat meat, and bans on gas-powered cars. They’re doing all of this without a vote of democracy. A corporate government collusion that uses the climate agenda to manage every aspect of modern society.

They’re collapsing our current system, they’re collapsing our energy, our food, our transportation, and they’re collapsing our free speech, and they’re putting themselves in charge because they are claiming we can’t leave rice production as is, or that we need to radically alter livestock practices and agriculture and transportation or we are doomed.

If we don’t hand over the keys of modern society over to this small group of managers, we are led to believe that people left to their own devices will literally create a climate crisis, create inequity and racism, and in order to save the Earth, climate bureaucrats need to be in charge of everything because they believe we live in a finite world, and everything has to be managed.

We are told we must consent to live in a technocracy where we will be ruled by experts who know better than us. So they’re going to tell nations where rice is a fundamental food that they can’t have agriculture the way they’ve done it for thousands of years because the climate can’t handle it. And therefore, big corporate agribusiness, in collusion with governments and international organizations, are going to come over and basically regulate the small and medium-sized farms out of existence. We’re seeing this attempt happening in real-time in the Netherlands. They’re killing up to 12,000 family-run, generational farms with net zero climate rules on on fertilizers. And big agribusiness will inevitably take over in this big corporate takeover of farms. 

See:The Great Food Reset has begun – Net Zero restrictions on farms designed ‘to squeeze small farmers from the market, allowing them to be bought out by multinational agribusiness giants’

See: JOHN LEWIS-STEMPEL in Unherd: About 70% of global farmland is owned by 1% of “farmers”. Agri-business now rules the roost. Four companies — Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus — control 90% of the global grain trade. Similarly, four companies — ChemChina, Corteva, Bayer and BASF — control 66% of the world’s agricultural chemicals. These businesses are hardly renowned for their care of the environment. Likewise, politicians. The post-Second World War intensification of agriculture, promoted in the West by national governments and the nascent EU as a path to food security, has starved the soil and exhausted crops.

Morano: The climate agenda cannot handle a decentralized world. They need to control the means of production, the distribution of food, and control of the movement of people.

It’s basically what the ruling classes have done for generations: Those in charge always come up with a reason why the rest of us cannot be free, why the rest of us cannot make these choices for ourselves. And the reason du jour is the climate crisis is forcing them to literally transform our modern way of life.

They are actively collapsing our energy, food, and transportation. They’re pushing insect-eating as an alternative source of protein. And this is the United Nations doing this. It’s the World Economic Forum doing government.  Bill Gates, America’s number one farmland owner in the U.S. has publicly stated that his goal is to get the entire Western world off of eating livestock meat and instead eating his billions of dollars invested in lab-grown meat made in steel vats and literally printed from 3d printer. See:Your Future Meals Could Come From A 3D Printer ‘to combat climate-related food insecurity’, Researchers Say – ‘Food paste is squeezed through a syringe’ into 3D printer

TheGreat Food Reset: ‘Lab-grown meat’ harvested in ‘massive steel vats’ edges closer to fed approval & U.S. dinner plates – As EU approves human consumption of worms & crickets

Morano: This is our future — if we allow it.  First, they came for your energy, then your transportation, then your meat and high-yield agriculture, and now they’re coming after rice production. The climate agenda just keeps expanding its reach and is moving rapidly to gain control of global food production so that they can manage it in a ‘climate friendly’ way. And many of the people pushing these policies believe they are altruistic. They actually think they’re saving the planet by doing this, and they are preventing the rest of us — the unwashed masses from destroying the planet.

Related: 

Climate science shock: Methane’s unexpected cooling impact unveiled