Effect of Global Warming on Food Security: An Indian Perspective

Introduction

Food is the basic necessity for the survival of humans on the earth and the prevailing system of food consisting of Production, Processing, Packaging, Storage, Transport, Retail, Consumption, Waste and Loss like stages, feeds, and provides livelihood to over one billion population around the world. There has been an increase of more than 30 percent of the food supply per capita since 1961 (Stuart, 2015). However, in recent years, global warming has posed out various issues cocerning to world agriculture and the Food security system. The food system gets affected by both the climate-related factors (increasing temperature, water level, land degradation, etc.) as well as non-climate factors (demand, income growth, population level, etc.). The climate and non-climate factors are also impacting the food security system in terms of its availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability (Raza et al., 2019). The impact of climate change has been seen both ways positively as well as negatively; in higher latitude regions the climate change has affected positively in recent decades for the yield of some crops like wheat, sugar beets, and maize, while it has affected negatively in lower latitude regions for the yield of crops like wheat and maize (Ali et al., 2017). Drylands mostly those in Africa, South America, and high mountain regions of Asia have seen the significant impact of climate change on their food security system (IPCC, 2019). The effects of global warming have been largely seen on the agriculture economies than on the industrial countries. Food alone is responsible for 26 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (Ritchie, 2019). The developing economies are mostly agriculture-based economies and are based mostly in the warmer parts of the Earth. So, any increase in the temperature beyond the limit will rather than increasing reduce the output of agriculture (European Environment Agency, 2015). Further, food production also contributes the global warming as before reaching the plates, it goes through the process of production, packaging, transportation, preparation, and serving (FAO, 2017). All these activities lead to directly or indirectly in the generation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. For instance, in the case of the European Union, agriculture accounted for 10% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in 2012 (Olivier and Peters, 2020).

Not only ecological systems but also human life got affected by the acceleration of global warming, therefore, making global warming a significant issue both at the national and international level (World Meteorological Organization, 2021). In addition to that rising and growing population leads to having an impact on the livelihoods and environment as the competition is rising between energy, water, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, transport mining, and other sectors (FAO, 2017). In the case of India, the majority of the regions are considered to have tropical climates. The different regions in India show a wide diversity of temperatures. However, the monsoon season dominates the climate of India (Pradhan, Singh, and Singh, 2019). The effect of global warming on the climate of India has lead to climate disasters in the form that according to a study, out of 35 states, 27 are being disaster-prone and the most frequent disaster is on the foods (Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, 2011). Moreover, the present situation of pandemic covid-19 has only added to the plight of climate change over the food security system worldwide and India is not an exception. The pandemic has hit India at the beginning of 2020 and since then to curb its spread various steps have been taken by the government including lockdown to protect human lives. However, ordinary people and the local food security system have a radical impact of the adopted measures in India (Pothan, Taguchi and Santini, 2020). In light of the above considerations, the present study aims to examine the impact of climate change on food security in India. For this, the impact of carbon emission will be analyzed on the agriculture value added in India. Additionally, it will scrutinize the effect of climate change on food security during COVID-19 and try to explore the remedial measures and opportunities in the post-pandemic situation.