Accumulating evidence suggests that agricultural production could be greatly affected by climate change, but there remains little quantitative understanding of how these agricultural impacts would affect economic livelihoods in poor countries. Here we consider three scenarios of agricultural impacts of climate change by 2030 (impacts resulting in low, medium, or high productivity) and evaluate the resulting changes in global commodity prices, national economic welfare, and the incidence of poverty in a set of 15 developing countries. Although the small price changes under the medium scenario are consistent with previous findings, we find the potential for much larger food price changes than reported in recent studies which have largely focused on the most likely outcomes. In our low productivity scenario, prices for major staples rise 10-60% by 2030. The poverty impacts of these price changes depend as much on where impoverished households earn their income as on the agricultural impacts themselves, with poverty rates in some non-agricultural household groups rising by 20-50% in parts of Africa and Asia under these price changes, and falling by equal amounts for agriculture-specialized households elsewhere in Asia and Latin America. The potential for such large distributional effects within and across countries emphasizes the importance of looking beyond central case climate shocks and beyond a simple focus on yields - or highly aggregated poverty impacts.

This paper presents data from six of the first countries incorporated into the Agricultural Lives of the Poor project: Ghana, Guatemala, India, Malawi, Uganda, and Vietnam.  Datasets were selected based on availability and depth of detail on consumption expenditures, sources of income, and agricultural practices.  Each of these survey components is necessary in order for ALP to focus on net consumption/production at the household level, and to understand expenditure and consumption behavior.  Net consumption and production data of individual crops and food groups is further disaggregated by subgroups formed on characteristics that include economic status, household attributes, livelihood strategies, calories available, landholding, tenure types, and agricultural input use.

This chapter looks more qualitatively at Asia as a single region and focuses more speculatively on the longer run. It is also more personal, since views of the 2025, like beauty, depend inevitably on the eyes of the beholder. The chapter begins by running history backwards via a thought experiment. Suppose in 1975 that one had been predicting the contours of the Asian maize economy in 2000. What variables and parameters would forecasters have missed in significant ways? This procedure turns out to be a very sobering exercise for anyone now predicting events in 2025.

During the eighteen months after January 2007, cereal prices doubled, setting off a world food crisis. In the United States, rising food prices have been a pocketbook annoyance. Most Americans can opt to buy lower-priced sources of calories and proteins and eat out less frequently. But for nearly half of the world’s population—the 2.5 billion people who live on less than $2 per day—rising costs mean fewer meals, smaller portions, stunted children, and higher infant mortality rates. The price explosion has produced, in short, a crisis of food security, defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as the physical and economic access to the food necessary for a healthy and productive life. And it has meant a sharp setback to decades-long efforts to reduce poverty in poor countries.

The current situation is quite unlike the food crises of 1966 and 1973. It is not the result of a significant drop in food supply caused by bad weather, pests, or policy changes in the former Soviet Union. Rather, it is fundamentally a demand-driven story of “success.” Rising incomes, especially in China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil, have increased demand for diversified diets that include more meat and vegetable oils. Against this background of growing income and demand, increased global consumption of biofuels and the American and European quest for energy self-sufficiency have added further strains to the agricultural system. At the same time, neglected investments in productivity-improving agricultural technology—along with a weak U.S. dollar, excessive speculation, and misguided government policies in both developed and developing countries—have exacerbated the situation. Climate change also looms ominously over the entire global food system.

In short, an array of agricultural, economic, and political connections among commodities and across nations are now working together to the detriment of the world’s food-insecure people...

By the turn of this century, sub-Saharan Africa had experienced twenty-five years of economic and political disaster. While "economic miracles" in China and India raised hundreds of millions from extreme poverty, Africa seemed to have been overtaken by violent conflict and mass destitution, and ranked lowest in the world in just about every economic and social indicator. In the May/June 2008 issue of the Boston Review, economist Edward Miguel tracks comparably hopeful economic trends throughout sub-Saharan Africa and suggests that we may be seeing a turnaround. Nine experts, including Rosamond Naylor and Jeremy Weinstein, gauge Miguel's optimism.

Climate change, as an environmental hazard operating at the global scale, poses a unique and "involuntary exposure" to many societies, and therefore represents possibly the largest health inequity of our time. According to statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), regions or populations already experiencing the most increase in diseases attributable to temperature rise in the past 30 years ironically contain those populations least responsible for causing greenhouse gas warming of the planet. Average global carbon emissions approximate one metric ton per year (tC/yr) per person. In 2004, United States per capita emissions neared 6 tC/yr (with Canada and Australia not far behind), and Japan and Western European countries range from 2 to 5 tC/yr per capita. Yet developing countries' per capita emissions approximate 0.6 tC/yr, and more than 50 countries are below 0.2 tC/yr (or 30-fold less than an average American). This imbalance between populations suffering from an increase in climate-sensitive diseases versus those nations producing greenhouse gases that cause global warming can be quantified using a "natural debt" index, which is the cumulative depleted CO2 emissions per capita. This is a better representation of the responsibility for current warming than a single year's emissions. By this measure, for example, the relative responsibilities of the U.S. in relation to those of India or China is nearly double that using an index of current emissions, although it does not greatly change the relationship between India and China. Rich countries like the U.S. have caused much more of today's warming than poor ones, which have not been emitting at significant levels for many years yet, no matter what current emissions indicate. Along with taking necessary measures to reduce the extent of global warming and the associated impacts, society also needs to pursue equitable solutions that first protect the most vulnerable population groups; be they defined by demographics, income, or location. For example, according to the WHO, 88% of the disease burden attributable to climate change afflicts children under age 5 (obviously an innocent and "nonconsenting" segment of the population), presenting another major axis of inequity. Not only is the health burden from climate change itself greatest among the world's poor, but some of the major mitigation approaches to reduce the degree of warming may produce negative side effects disproportionately among the poor, for example, competition for land from biofuels creating pressure on food prices. Of course, in today's globalized world, eventually all nations will share some risk, but underserved populations will suffer first and most strongly from climate change. Moreover, growing recognition that society faces a nonlinear and potentially irreversible threat has deep ethical implications about humanity's stewardship of the planet that affect both rich and poor.

The integration of the agricultural and energy sectors caused by rapid growth in the biofuels market signals a new era in food policy and sustainable development. For the first time in decades, agricultural commodity markets could experience a sustained increase in prices, breaking the long-term price decline that has benefited food consumers worldwide. Whether this transition occurs, and how it will affect global hunger and poverty, remain to be seen. Will food markets begin to track the volatile energy market in terms of price and availability? Will changes in agricultural commodity markets benefit net food producers and raise farm incomes in poor countries? How will biofuels-induced changes in agricultural commodity markets affect net consumers of food? At risk are over 800 million food-insecure people, mostly in rural areas and dependant to some extent on agriculture for incomes, who live on less than $1 per day and spend the majority of their incomes on food. An additional 2 to 2.5 billion people living on $1 to $2 per day are also at risk, as rising commodity prices could pull them swiftly into a food-insecure state.