The Hindu Business Line : ‘Climate change may affect quality of life of farmers’

As it hurts agricultural productivity and environment, climate change could also have an adverse impact on the quality of life of farmers and tourism industry, particularly in the developing countries.

Climate change will have a telling impact on the farmers. It will be harder for them to carry on in the increased temperatures, Mr M.V.K. Sivakumar, Chief of Agricultural Meteorology Division, WMO (World Meteorological Organisation), told Business Line.

Recognising this, the WMO and UN Habitat (the UN body on human settlements) have started working to address this issue, he said.

Tourism sector

The idea was to provide better living environment to improve their quality of life.

“It will have an adverse impact on tourism industry too. If summers get hotter it will have a bearing on the tourist arrivals,” he said.

Mr Sivakumar was here to take part in the inaugural of the International Symposium on Agrometeorology and Food Security. The symposium is being held at CRIDA (Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture).

He felt that it was important to focus on the enormous losses farmers faced in the event of natural disasters. “They lose their entire income. This issue has not received enough attention,” he said.

Farm yield

Earlier, addressing agrometeorologists from various countries, Mr Sivakumar said agricultural productivity has come down over a period of time.

“Growth of world agricultural output is expected to fall to 1.5 per cent per year over the next three decades and further to 0.9 per cent per year in the succeeding 20 years to 2050, compared with 2.3 per cent per year since 1961,” he said.

Pegging the world’s population at 7.5 billion by 2020, Mr Sivakumar said that the farmers would have to produce 40 per cent more grain by that year to meet the increasing global demand for cereals.

Stating that agriculture accounted for 70 per cent of all water use in the world, Mr Sivakumar said the per capita use of water has decreased from about 700 cubic metres per year since 1980.

“More than 1.2 billion people live in areas of physical water scarcity and by 2025 over three billion people are likely to experience water stress,” he said.

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