Expectations are that climate change will not cause serious shortages in American agriculture. In Brazil, substantially higher agricultural yields have been found possible in areas warmer than the US. Researchers from Plant Research International and Wageningen UR and Wageningen UR Greenhouse Horticulture, both part of Wageningen, contend this in a letter published in the scientific journal PNAS.
The letter is in response to an article by economists from Columbia University and the University of North Carolina that appeared in PNAS. The American researchers expect that the productivity of maize, soya and cotton in the US will sharply decrease if the current global warming continues. They predict declines between 30% and 82%.
The Wageningen researchers, under the direction of first author Dr ir Bastiaan Meerburg, find this a rather pessimistic view. They suppose that the Americans assume in their calculations that the occurrence of extreme heat, in particular, will create a problem for crops. Using this information, Meerburg et al have analysed the situation in the region Mato Grosso in Brazil. From the analysis, it turns out that the temperature in this region rises above 35 degrees Celsius 118 days per year, on average. These temperatures amply exceed those that the Americans name as their limit values in the United States. Despite this, this area achieves higher yields for soya and cotton, for example, than those that are currently being attained in the US.
"As a result, we don’t consider the situation as pessimistic as the Americans. Operational Management and race selection prove to play an important role in yield and can compensate for the negative effects of climate changes or even surpass them", the researchers say.