Heating means pests breeding and spreading faster, warn scientists, with simplified current food system already vulnerable

The destruction of food supplies by crop pests is being supercharged by the climate crisis, with losses expected to surge, an analysis has concluded.

Researchers said the world was lucky to have so far avoided a major shock and was living on borrowed time, with action needed to diversify crops and boost natural predators of pests.

The key global crops, wheat, rice and maize, are expected to see the losses to pests increase by about 46%, 19% and 31% respectively when global heating reaches 2C, the scientists said.

  • WanderingThoughtsEnglish
    8·
    18 hours ago

    And in 10 years food prices shoot up everybody is crying “who could have seen this coming!”

    “Our ever simpler agricultural systems are vulnerable but are maintained by fungicides and pesticides, which is OK as long as they work,” Bebber said. “But we’ve got the evolution of pesticide resistance and we’ve got to think hard now about whether we want to use diversification as a strategy to help make our systems more resilient.”

    Profit and efficiency say no to diversification and usually every time some policy is adjusted for this, we get a farmers driving their tractors through the capital in protest.