By Linnea Lueken
One of the mainstream media’s favorite pastimes in recent years has been trying to scare the pants off everyone by suggesting that climate change is decimating crop production around the world. They are either lying intentionally, or mistaken. However, in either case, there is some journalistic malpractice going on, as well as a notable failure of logic.
We have all seen the stories, the favorites of the media usually have to do with foods that are popular semi-luxury items, depending on where you live, like cocoa beans, coffee, and wine.
For instance, Forbes put out an article claiming that cocoa, olive oil, rice, and soybeans are all “particularly vulnerable” to the effects of “climate-induced stressors.” I will be looking at this article as a case study of sorts for the kind of bad journalism I am talking about.
I am not going to get into whether or not extreme weather is getting worse or not, or climate specific subjects in this op-ed. What I am aiming to do is debunk the climate-related alarmism surrounding food production.
That Forbes article in particular stuck out to me because I already knew from the second sentence that it was nonsense based on previous work I have done looking into production and yields for all the crops listed. First, the bait and switch: Forbes’ article title, “Climate Change’s Toll On Global Agriculture: A Looming Crisis,” and introductory paragraph contain no indication that what is about to be discussed actually is not a global problem, but a regional one, and sometimes the problem does not exist at all.
For cocoa beans, they focus on West Africa, for olive oil the Mediterranean region, for rice they chose Italy and India, and for soybeans the United States and South America. In each of those regions, the overall trend for their crop production is positive.
Globally, every single crop listed by Forbes, according to data from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, has broken all-time records for production and yields year after year. On occasion, there is a less good year, but the trendline remains positive.
Since 1990, when the worst effects of climate change supposedly began to manifest, world production of cocoa beans has increased 132 percent, setting an all-time high in 2022. Olive oil has seen a rise of 124 percent. Overall rice production has risen 49 percent since 1990, and India alone saw a 75 percent increase. Soybeans, in part subsidized by the U.S. government, are certainly not struggling in this country, and worldwide soybean production has risen 221 percent.
All of this information is easy to find for the curious; you do not need to take Forbes’ or my word for anything.
This isn’t to say, again, that certain regions don’t suffer bad seasons, but this is a natural risk of farming, and nothing crop producers haven’t seen before. The media is fearmongering in order to weaken resistance to their preferred public policy goals.
There are, according to Our World in Data, around 570 million farms throughout the world. The vast majority of those are small farms, which make it exceedingly difficult for them to adapt to any weather, regardless of whether or not extreme weather is getting worse. Every single season, for every single crop, there is some region or individual farm suffering from poor yields due to the weather.
That is a whole lot of fodder for human-interest stories for propagandist journalists to choose between when they want to push a narrative. Since we are so connected worldwide now thanks to the internet and instantaneous communications, we get to hear about a wealth of stories that we never would have heard about otherwise, and likely would not even have been covered at all in the West. This generates a sense that crop failures are happening more often, but they’re not.
This also is not to say that global crop shortages do not or cannot occur – they do, they can, due to weather or geopolitical issues.
The best way to guarantee that those positive crop production trendlines reverse would be to ban the things the propagandists want us to ban, like diesel tractors, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers. Just ask the farmer of Sri Lanka. Or ask the people who never had those things but would like to have them, like the subsistence farmers of Africa.
My advice is to dig a little deeper when the media hypes crop failures because in most cases there is more going on than our journalist gatekeepers admit.
Linnea Lueken (llueken@heartland.org) is a research fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute.
Originally published by The Center Square. Republished with permission.
