Week 6 Climate change and food

Lappé, Anna. 2010. Diet for a Hot Planet: The climate crisis at the end of your fork and what you can do about it. NY: Bloomsbury. Ch. 1 The Climate Crisis at the End of Our Fork. Optional: podcast
For some climate change basics, click here

What's the relationship between climate change and food? What needs to change? What can be changed to lower greenhouse gas emissions? 

In an interview with Anna Lappé, Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig, an agronomist at NASA explained that those who will be most affected and most vulnerable to climate change impacts on agriculture are those living in lower latitudes. High temperatures there lead to water stress through evaporation, the proliferation of pests and lower yields. As temperatures increase, production will become more difficult, increasing the vulnerability of people in these countries. Household and national economies in Sub-Saharan Africa depend on subsistence agriculture to much greater extent than places in the Global North so the impact of climate change will be felt in these poorer countries sooner and more drastically. As Rosenzweig points out, these countries have less capacity to adapt to the effect of the changing climate on agriculture because research and extension programs have been consistently defunded in the last few decades. Given that the US and Europe are historically responsible for the fossil fuel consumption that has affected the planet in the form of global warming, what positions, policies and programs (food related or not) might we support for these countries facing extreme vulnerability?