Food prices will climb everywhere as temperatures rise due to climate change – new research

By Jessica Boxall, Michael Head, University of Southampton

Climate change, and specifically rising temperatures, may cause food prices to increase by 3.2% per year, according to a new study by researchers in Germany. As climate change continues to worsen, this price inflation will mean more and more people around the world don’t have a varied and healthy diet, or simply don’t have enough food.

The new analysis shows that global warming could cause food price inflation to increase by between 0.9 and 3.2 percentage points per year by 2035. The same warming will cause a smaller rise in overall inflation (between 0.3 and 1.2 percentage points), so a greater proportion of household income would need to be spent on buying food.

This effect will be felt worldwide, by high and low-income countries alike, but nowhere more so than in the global south. As with various other consequences of climate change, Africa will be worst affected despite contributing little to its causes.

Our own research on food security in Ghana, west Africa, gives a sense of what price inflation might mean in practice. The The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change describes west Africa as a “hotspot” of climate change, with models predicting extreme rising temperatures and reduced rainfall. With more than half of the population being directly dependent on rain-fed agriculture, Ghana is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

We recently carried out a study in Mion, a rural district in the north of the country. We spoke to almost 400 people, and very single one of them told us they had experienced some level of food insecurity in the previous 12 months. Some 99% said climate change was at least partly to blame.

Additionally, 62% were moderately or severely food insecure, with 26% experiencing severe food insecurity (going without food for an entire day). These percentages are much worse than Ghana’s national averages (39% and 6% respectively), but similar to some of the poorest countries in west Africa such as Togo, Burkina Faso and Benin.

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