Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. “It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety,” he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, “and now it has stopped.”

The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to satisfy the daily needs of 20 million people. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia’s rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the closing of the mill last December.

The collapse of Australia’s rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months and has spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off violent protests in countries including Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Italy.

Drought affects every agricultural industry based here, not just rice — from shepherding, the other mainstay in this dusty land, to the cultivation of wine grapes, the fastest-growing crop here, with that expansion often coming at the expense of rice.

Drought's effect on rice has produced the greatest impact on the rest of the world, so far. It is one factor contributing to skyrocketing prices, and many scientists believe it is among the earliest signs that a warming planet is starting to affect food production.

Increasing frequency

While a link between short-term changes in weather and long-term climate change is not certain, the unusually severe drought is consistent with what climatologist predict will be a problem of increasing frequency.

It has already spurred significant changes in Australia's agricultural heartland. Some farmers are abandoning rice, which requires large amounts of water, to plant less water-intensive crops like wheat or, especially here in southeastern Australia, wine grapes.

The global agricultural crisis is threatening to become a political one, pitting the United States and other developed countries against the developing world over the need for affordable food versus the need for renewable energy. Many poorer nations worry that subsidies from rich countries to support biofuels, which turn food, like corn, into fuel, are pushing up the price of staples. With rice, which is not used to make biofuel, the problem is availability. Even in normal times, little of the world’s rice is actually exported — more than 90 percent is consumed in the countries where it is grown. In the last quarter-century, rice consumption has outpaced production, with global reserves plunging by half just since 2000.

All these factors have made countries that buy rice on the global market vulnerable to extreme price swings. Senegal and Haiti each import four-fifths of their rice. And both have faced mounting unrest as prices have increased.Scientists expect the problem to worsen in the decades ahead.

Effect of global warming

Scientists said the effect would be uneven, and enormous quantities of food would need to be shipped from areas farther from the equator to feed the populations of often less affluent countries closer to the equator.

The panel predicted that even greater warming, which might happen by late in this century if few or no limits are placed on greenhouse gas emissions, would hurt total food output and cripple crops in many countries. For farmers in a richer nation like Australia, the effects of the current drought are already significant. The rice farmers who do not give up and sell their land or water rights are experimenting with varieties or techniques that require less water. Australia now has some of the world’s highest rice yields for a given quantity of water.

Still, Australia’'s total rice capacity has declined by about a third because many farmers have permanently sold water rights, mostly for grape production. The accidental beneficiaries of these conditions have been the farmers who grow wine grapes in the same river basin where the Deniliquin mill stands silent.

It is more profitable to grow wine grapes as it require one-third of the irrigation water. All told, wine grapes produce a pretax profit of close to $4,942 a hectare, while rice produces a pretax profit of around $593 a hectare.
In addition to drought, climate change could produce more extreme weather, more outbreaks of pests and weeds, and changes in sea level as polar ices melts. Most of the world’s increase in rice production over the last quarter-century has occurred close to sea level, in the deltas of rivers like the Mekong in Vietnam, Chao Phraya in Thailand, and Ganges-Brahmaputra in Bangladesh. Yets some climate experts think that the effects of climate change may be mitigated, if not completely avoided.

Source: New York times