Synchronizing food production can have disastrous effects

Crop failures are an important cause of food price spikes, conflict and food insecurity. The likelihood of local crop failures is catastrophic at the level of exacerbated when they happen at the same time, when our agricultural systems become more synchronized.

In a paper in Nature Ecology and Evolution, we seem to be growing up in the past few months, and we have seen it in the past, the synchronization of production between crops. This has, in turn, destabilized our total global calorie supply.

Our badysis calls for governments to think about ways of agricultural policies on trade, land reform, farm distributions, and cropping choice, can affect the stability of the food system as a whole, more than just concentrating on efforts to increase resilience in production.

Synchrony is bad news

Sometimes it's amazing to watch things move in synchrony. Like in synchronized swimming, or in a dance routine, or when an orchestra plays in concert. In nature, synchrony can be incredible when you watch, when when you are in a murmuring, or when large numbers of fish school. While most of the time synchrony can be an awesome show, when it comes to agriculture it is bad news.

In our badysis, we found that many of the world's largest crop failures have been marked by increases in synchrony. Examples include: when maize production dipped by 20 per cent in 1983, soybean production dipped by 14 per cent in 1976 and rice production dipped by eight per cent in 2002.

While these relationships may seem intuitive, our research quantified the degree to which things became synchronized under the historical record. Moreover, we found that when production became more globally unstable, it did not become widely available. That is, local production became more stable, but overall instability continued to rise (notably for soybean between 1961-68, and rice between 1969-76) -because synchrony increased.

Possible solutions

There are two ways we might mitigate the losses brought about by synchronous failure in crop production. Raising average production can be done, for example, through yield gap closure, or yield ceiling raising. Reducing the volatility in local crop production can be done, for example, by implementing climate smart cropping systems or developing infrastructure such as irrigation to resist environmental stressors.

We explore the extent to which these mitigation strategies can help offset the risk of a complete synchronized failure event. Remarkably, we found that we would need to reduce the production rate, and that it is unlikely that we will be able to achieve this goal.

Moreover, we found that even if we reduced the variation in production locally everywhere on the planet, we would need to do it by a factor of 10. In other words, while different mitigation strategies worked in different ways.

Outlook

The obvious thing to prevent major global crop failures would not be guaranteed in the first place. But the current trend in the world of food production, climate and how much Can we better design our food systems to be less synchronous? And what role do climate, market distortions, trade, land reform, and changes in farm sizes, distributions, numbers, cropping choices, and crop diversity play?

Many of these are open and unanswered questions that our study was unable to answer. But there is one thing we can say: synchrony matters. Our study shows that if we care about stabilizing the supply of food globally, then we need to start thinking about food systems as a whole, rather than in parts.

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