If you think the effects of climate change on our food supply are something only our children or grandchildren will have to deal with, think again. Sometimes all it takes is a trip to the local supermarket to get a snapshot of what more serious food disruptions may look like in the future.

Recently, while following my usual supermarket routine, I stopped at the dairy section to make my weekly purchase of a half-gallon of organic milk. Where I expected to find rows of my favorite brand, I instead found three empty shelves.  I thought little of the shortage, except to imagine that the supermarket must have had a rush on Stonyfield organic milk that week. (Perhaps a tour bus with California plates had passed through, loaded up with organic foodies who came to the Hudson Valley to spend a few bracing nights in a local campground?) I shrugged off the inconvenience, bought a different brand, and went home without giving it another thought.

The next week I went back to the supermarket, expecting to find my usual brand back in stock.  Instead, I was greeted by a sign reading, “Due to drought, Stonyfield and Organic Valley milk are not available.”

Just a little background here:  Stonyfield’s milk is supplied by Organic Valley dairy farms.  Organic Valley pursues a regional, cooperative sourcing model, supplying  milk, as much as possible, “close to home.” Here in the Northeast where I live, the supply of organic milk comes primarily from Vermont, Maine, and New York but also from the Midwest, including Iowa.

When I called Organic Valley customer service to find out what was going on, I was informed that the two-week-long disruption of milk supply at my local supermarket was “due to drought in the Midwest and the Northeast.” That information turned out to be consistent with data published by the Climate Data Center of the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which shows that some pockets in Organic Valley’s primary supply regions experienced moderate to severe drought during the 2013 growing season.

As it turns out, 2012 was also a bad year for some dairy farmers, like those in Iowa who supply milk to Organic Valley. Expressing the depth of their concern following the 2012 drought, 138 researchers and scientists from 27 universities and colleges across Iowa signed the Iowa Climate Statement 2012. The document reiterated that the state’s 2012 drought was “consistent with a warmer climate predicated as part of global climate change.” The statement concluded that “warming will continue as global emissions increase and greenhouse gases accumulate.” The scientists ended their statement with a prediction of increased incidence and severity of droughts as early as the 2020s.

This year, concerned Iowans continued to sound the alarm with this sobering opening paragraph of their Iowa Climate Statement 2013:

Our state has long held a proud tradition of helping to “feed the world.”  Our ability to do so is now increasingly threatened by rising greenhouse gas  emissions and resulting climate change.  Our climate has disrupted  agricultural production profoundly during the past two years and is  projected to become even more harmful in coming decades as our climate continues to warm and change.

Are we doing all we can to prevent climate change and disruptions to the food supply?

Unfortunately, the answer to that question falls somewhere between bad and worse. We’re just not rising to the challenge. Just last week Climate Action Network Europe and Germanwatch released their annual Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI).  The report examines actions taken by those countries responsible for over ninety percent of global energy-related CO2 emissions.  The report’s conclusions are not encouraging.  Although the United States has reduced emissions by eight percent over the past five years, we’re still ranked forty-eighth in the list of fifty-eight super-polluters.

(On the bright side, that puts us ten spots above neighboring Canada, ranked at the bottom of the barrel as an outlier that, according to the report, “shows no intention of moving forward with climate policy and therefore remains the worst performer of all industrialized countries.” Denmark, on the other hand, ranked highest, although the report leaves open the number 1, 2, and 3 spots in recognition that “no single country is on track to prevent dangerous climate change.”)

Let me be clear here and finish with this disclaimer. It would be ludicrous to claim that a minor two-week interruption of milk supply holds any equivalency whatsoever to the more serious climate-change related incidents occurring across the globe, particularly the sickening devastation that typhoon Haiyan visited on more than 9.8 million people in the Eastern Philippines.

However, the minor inconvenience of a disrupted milk supply or any other foodstuffs on our grocery shelves is a red flag that should say to those of us who acknowledge the coming danger that we should sit up and take notice.  The days of the reliable food supply that we have so blithely taken for granted may be coming to an end.

The post No milk in the dairy case? Climate change is to blame. appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Did you know that 40 percent of our food is thrown into landfills every year? That shocking statistic comes to us courtesy of the number crunchers at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Believe it or not, that means we’re throwing out the equivalent of $165 billion worth of nutritious and not-so-nutritious junk food. Imagine just for a moment the size of that fetid pile.  Imagine, too, that while we Americans waste almost half our food supply, 800 million people go hungry every day and two billion—a number representing more than one-third of the population of the planet—suffer from malnourishment.

Is it likely we’ll wake up one morning and discover we’ve experienced en masse an epiphany of compassion and responsibility, or we’ll suddenly decide to curb our profligate ways? I doubt it. Still, our wasteful food habits may be changing in the not so distant future. And you can bet that change won’t happen voluntarily. It may be foisted upon us unintentionally by some of the world’s largest corporations— Bayer (Germany), Monsanto (St. Louis), and Syngenta (Switzerland).  Together, the big bad three produce a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids and other insecticides, pesticides, and fungicides that scientists believe are creating a toxic witches’ brew that’s killing bee populations across the globe and threatening our food supply.

And how big is the industry that produces and distributes these poisons?  In the U.S. alone the industry is worth more than $12.5 billion annually, and there are approximately 350,000 pesticide products produced and used in our food supply, in our home gardens, and on our greener-than-green weed-free lawns and golf courses.

Do you feel your progressive antennae beginning to twitch?  You should. After all, mentioning positive social change in the same sentence as the corporate world is surely anathema to the progressive spirit. But like it or not, here’s what could happen if the steady increase in chemical controls in agriculture isn’t halted. We’ll be forced to follow the path of Southern Sichuan, China, where pears and apples have been hand pollinated since the 1980s, when the uncontrolled use of pesticides killed off the province’s honeybee population.  If that’s the future of agriculture in the U.S., you can be sure the diversity of our food supply will shrink, and with the attendant price spikes, we might finally be forced to curb our wasteful ways.

How important are pollinating bees to our food supply?

One-third of our food supply (or one in every three mouthfuls) depends on bee pollination.  Do you crave blueberry pancakes or strawberry jam on toast? Bees are trucked in to pollinate Maine’s blueberry crop and Florida’s fields of blueberries and strawberries. Snacking on almonds for their health benefits? It takes 1.5 million bee colonies to pollinate California’s 750,000 acres of almond trees. Do you look forward to grandpa’s hot-out-of-the-oven, crusty apple pie every autumn? The quintessential American pie and the apple orchards of New York and Washington states might become a nostalgic memory if bee die-off isn’t reversed.

And how seriously has the bee population shrunk?  The number of hives in the U.S. is the lowest in fifty years. Since 1990 25 percent of the managed bee population has disappeared. This year in the U.S. alone annual colony loss is estimated at 40  to 90 percent (depending on location) of the bee population.

Bees shmees. They’re just a nuisance, so who cares?

Bees are about so much more than just the occasional painful encounter in the flowerbed.  It’s time to think seriously about what will happen when our bee-loud places go silent.  Colony-collapse disorder, or bee die-off, represents one of those connect-the-dots moments when we need to think about the big picture.  In order to see the big picture, you sometimes have to start small and personal.

And you can’t get more personal than the foods you love. Visualize some of the seasonal ingredients in your perfect summer meal. Maybe it would include a salad of sliced avocados topped with sweet spring onions and some almonds.  Slices of run-down-your-chin fuzzy peaches.  A bowl of deep red cherries with some sugary watermelon slices stuck in along the edge.  Hefty servings of moist apple-walnut-cinnamon layer cake or an old-fashioned blueberry buckle.

What would summer be without such pleasures to look forward to?  Imagine you could no longer afford to buy about one-third of the foods you now consume, including more than forty fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains. And shall we even dare to mention that most sacred of foodstuffs—chocolate—and how bees pollinate the cacao beans that feed our indulgence?

When the bees disappear and they’re no longer around to do the pollinating work for us, the price of food will skyrocket.  One group, the British Beekeepers Association, has considered the consequences. If the British bee population were to suddenly disappear and people were to take over the task of hand pollinating, it’s estimated that Britain would need a workforce of thirty million dexterous individuals.

Will we muster the political will to save the bees and preserve our food supply?

The story of an earlier pesticide, DDT, is instructive.  After its introduction in 1939, DDT became the most widely used pesticide in the world.  It took twenty years, but  concerns about human health and damaging biological effects finally resulted in the banning of DDT in eighty-six countries—not including the U.S.  The U.S., always a regulatory laggard because of the outsized influence of the agribusiness lobby, followed suit in 1972. Today it looks like history might be repeating itself.

This month, reflecting concerns about the danger of colony collapse, fifteen of the twenty-seven members of the European Union voted to pass a two-year, EU-wide ban on the use of three neonicotinoids manufactured by Bayer and Syngenta while additional studies on their impact on bees can be conducted.

Commercial beekeepers in the U.S., fearing for the viability of their industry, are starting to take action as well. The beekeepers recently filed an emergency petition with the EPA to suspend the use of pesticides linked to honey bee deaths.  Their action followed upon the conclusions of more than thirty peer-reviewed studies linking the class of neonicotinoids that attack insects’ nervous systems to the shrinking numbers of bees.

In July Representatives John Conyers (D-MI) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) introduced the Save America’s Pollinators Act (H.R. 2692).  The act calls for suspension of the use of neonicotinoids until full scientific review can demonstrate no harmful impact on pollinators.

These efforts to rein in the most harmful effects of the industrial chemical complex are commendable.  But will it prove to be too little, too late? When the bees are no longer around to do their work, the fruits and vegetables we take for granted will become so pricey that only the wealthiest among us will be able to enjoy them.  Can’t you just see it?  A marketing campaign in the bee-deprived future might feature labels that declare “Food for the 1%.” That’s a cure for our wasteful ways I’m sure none of us will welcome.

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