Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftspolitik 1-2008

Climate change is one of the grand challenges of this century, but so is the eradication of hunger which is still present for roughly one billion people mainly in tropical countries. Both climate change and climate mitigation have an impact on the availability of food, especially in those regions that are particularly poor, state Gernot Klepper and Mareike Lange. Climate change is expected to affect most strongly the tropical regions thus reducing further the availability of suitable production conditions for agriculture. Climate mitigation can reduce the climate induced risk to food security, at the same time it has also a negative impact on food prices. First of all, climate policies raise the cost of energy which is an important component of the cost of agriculture. More importantly, many countries join the EU in supporting bioenergy production which directly competes with food production thus raising food prices. The world’s poor are most affected by such price increases since they spend most of their income on food products. Thus, increasing food prices directly translate into increasing hunger for those people. The current EU bioenergy policies are not yet strong enough to have a large impact on world markets. However, in the future bioenergy may pose a threat to food security for the poor.

Achim Brunnengräber discusses in his essay the European energy and climate protection policy and its effects on developing countries. Are their nutrition problems being detereorated or do additional exports establish opportunities for a sustainable development? He argues that coherence of energy security and climate protection policy, as aimed by the European Commission, cannot be achieved by the measures taken so far. First of all the author discusses the primacy of competition policy while, in the second place, strategic selectivity of climate instruments will be dealt with. Thridly, the “faith in technology“ will be approached and the fourth issue is dedicated to agrofuels and the commodification of developing countries’ ressources. As a result the EU energy and climate policy is about to aggravate nutrition problems. What is needed is a Transformation to a sustainable economy to realigning the north-south divide on the one and to overcome inconsistencies between energy security and climate policy on the other hand.

Michael Bräuninger and Leon Leschus point out, that food demand is strongly correlated to population growth and income growth. Both will lead to a strong demand increase in the future. At the same time, the agricultural products will increasingly be needed as energy resources. Boundaries to production growth are given by resources such as land and water and by efficiency of production. Current projections show that until 2030 there will be no global shortage in food production. Availability of land and water is sufficiently high to increase production. Furthermore efficiency of production can be increased. However production and demand are very unevenly distributed in world. Free market prices and open borders are central for the production increase in regions with corresponding potentials.