In February 2024, parts of Vietnam and surrounding countries saw temperatures soar into the triple digits for an extended period; in July, the cost of the coffee the country produces spiked by 100 percent. The massive flooding that hit Australia in 2022 was followed just months later by a 300-percent jump in the price of lettuce grown there. In Ghana and the Ivory Coast, another 2024 heat wave came just two months before a 280-percent leap in global cocoa prices.
“Recent spikes in the price of food were often associated with heat, drought and heavy precipitation conditions that were so extreme as to completely exceed all historical precedent,” wrote study authors from Spain, Germany, the UK, and elsewhere. They point out that food price changes will certainly have other inputs beyond those extremes, but the correlations are hard to ignore.
Along with the examples above, they found connections between drought in the western US and 80 percent higher vegetable prices across the country, a 36-percent spike in South African maize prices after a March 2024 heat wave, nearly doubled onion and potato prices in India following a hot streak in May of that same year, and more. In some cases the correlation wasn’t to an individual food product but across the board, like the 50-percent jump in Pakistan following the devastating August 2022 flooding.
The “exceed all historical precedent” is a key point. With 2024 breaking all records for global heat, beating out 2023, the world has seen a recent acceleration in warming that was likely partially driven by an El Niño but also has left scientists at least somewhat confused. Alongside that spike we are seeing more and more rainfall, heat, and other events that would have been literally impossible without the kind of warming we have; we just don’t know what such events can do to food systems, since we have never faced them before. Other recent research showed that even with adaptation to some of those extremes, many crops will be at risk.
“Importantly, these climate-driven food price spikes can aggravate risks across a range of sectors of society,” the authors wrote. The obvious and immediate risk will be to food-insecure people around the world, with higher prices likely increasing risks for malnutrition and starvation — yet another way the changing climate will disproportionately impact the world’s poor. Downstream of that, though, could be broader disasters: “Anecdotal evidence from across history often cites food price increases as a precursor to political unrest and social upheaval.”
We’re currently on track for around 2.7 degrees C of warming, based on policies around the world. At that level, the sort of extreme events that we’ve barely seen at all to this point will be commonplace. “New records for extreme conditions will continue to be set, further from those to which agricultural production and economic systems are currently adapted,” the authors wrote. “This underlines the necessity and urgency of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, associated increases of climate extremes, and the consequential disruptions of food production.”
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