It is rare that the New Yorker talks about food security, but last week, the magazine had an interesting article by Amy Davidson on climate change and food security, which it illustrated by discussing the (almost-forgotten) Great Famine of 1315-1317:
One of the most important insights of recent studies is that, when the climate changes, it can do so swiftly and relentlessly. It is possible, in a human lifetime, to see sea levels rise and ice shelves break away, and, when they do, nothing about what happens next can be taken for granted. The climate record is full of sudden disasters. … The Great Famine looks like a fourteenth-century example of what we now call extreme weather. … We have built cities and economies on assumptions about the seasons that may prove unstable. The best models we have now project that, as a consequence of climate change, the frequency of extreme-weather events, from superstorms to droughts, will increase sharply.
A particularly alarming prospect is the sustained failure of the South Asian monsoon. The food supply for more than a billion people relies on the rains of the monsoon season. Models suggest that, in the next century, monsoons will become more and more erratic and extreme. A failed monsoon can mean that the rain hasn’t come, or that it has come in the wrong place for the wrong amount of time. In recent years, India has experienced droughts but also floods, like the one that wreaked havoc in Chennai in December.
Given that the New Yorker article alludes to the possibility of a great famine, it might be wise to remember Amartya Sen’s words in a 1980 World Development article:
