Excerpt
January 24, 2025, Audio: "Economist and HKS Professor Wolfram Schlenker says declining R&D funding for new agricultural technologies and protectionist agricultural trade policies could make climate-related food shocks more severe. The warning lights are blinking for the world’s food supply. At least that’s what 150 Nobel Prize and World Food Prize laureates said in a recently published open letter calling for a “moonshot” effort to begin ramping up of food production to meet the demands of a global population projected to reach 9.7 billion people by 2050. Harvard Kennedy School economist Wolfram Schlenker, the Ray A. Goldberg Professor of the Global Food System, says meeting those goals amid the headwinds of climate change will require urgent policy changes and, in some cases, policy reversals. Even as crop yields are under stress from rising temperatures and extreme weather events, public spending on research and development of new, climate-resistant crops and other food technologies has declined, Schlenker says. Additionally, many countries are also erecting more protectionist barriers around their domestic agricultural sectors, undermining the global free trade in staple food commodities that is essential to preventing severe agricultural shocks that can result in civil upheaval, mass migration, and global instability. In a groundbreaking 2009 study, Schlenker found that crop yields fall precipitously after a certain heat threshold. The study’s conclusions were validated just three years later when a heat wave over the U.S. corn belt saw yields drop by 25%. With 700 million people already classified as undernourished and the world having at least temporarily breached the crucial 1.5 degrees Celsius warming standard in 2024, the economics of food in the climate crisis era may be the most important problem nobody’s talking about. Schlenker joins PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli to discuss the ticking food crisis clock and explore policy changes that could make a difference."