Climate change isn’t taking food off your table

This article generally aligns with a Center Right point of view. Learn more about this AI-generated analysis

The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.

Ideas expressed in the piece

• The column argues that media and scientific coverage of climate change routinely exaggerates threats to everyday foods such as coffee and olive oil, relying on dramatic anecdotes, isolated bad harvests and nominal (non–inflation-adjusted) prices instead of long-term, inflation-adjusted data.
• The piece contends that coffee is not “on its deathbed,” noting that global coffee production is projected to hit record highs, more than double levels from 50 years ago, while real coffee prices have trended downward since 1960, indicating greater affordability rather than looming scarcity.
• In discussing coffee, the article argues that what is often portrayed as impending extinction is better understood as agricultural adaptation: Ethiopia’s large arabica gene banks and farmers’ shift to more heat- and drought-tolerant coffee species are presented as evidence that breeding and switching varieties can preserve both supply and quality.
• The column similarly challenges claims of an olive-oil “crisis,” pointing to United Nations statistics showing that global olive-oil production has tripled since 1961 and doubled since 1990, with recent years among the highest on record and inflation-adjusted prices roughly flat or slightly declining, implying that better farming practices have outweighed any climate-related yield losses.
• More broadly, the piece maintains that alarming food stories follow a pattern: an extreme weather event is attributed to climate change, inflation is ignored, and structural drivers such as fertilizer, transport and energy costs—often pushed up by climate policies that raise fossil-fuel prices—are downplayed as key contributors to higher grocery bills.
• The article acknowledges that climate change will, on balance, harm agriculture, but argues that its impact on overall food availability is small compared with the gains from improving productivity; it highlights modeling suggesting that even under extreme warming, projected global food-calorie production between 2010 and 2050 still rises almost as much as in a no–climate-change world, with only a tiny difference in calories available per person.
• To support this view, the column points to historical trends: cereal production has more than quintupled over the past century while real food prices have more than halved, and the Green Revolution transformed countries formerly dependent on food aid, such as India, into major exporters as high-yield varieties, fertilizers and irrigation spread.
• The piece notes that daily per-capita calorie availability has risen from under 2,200 calories in the early 1960s to over 2,900 today, while the share of undernourished people in the developing world has fallen from about one-quarter to under 10%, framing these gains as evidence that innovation and productivity growth have outpaced population growth and climate pressures.
• The column emphasizes that climate change also has positive agronomic effects, especially higher atmospheric carbon dioxide, described as “plant food,” and global “greening,” and presents commercial greenhouse CO₂ enrichment as an example of how elevated CO₂ can boost yields; this framing echoes agronomy research suggesting that rising CO₂ can increase global crop yields by roughly 1.8% per decade, offsetting some warming-related losses in the near term^[6].
• The article concludes that the best way to secure future food supplies and keep prices low is to double down on innovation—biotechnology, precision agriculture, drought-resistant crops and breeding of under-studied staples such as sorghum, cassava and millet—rather than relying primarily on aggressive emissions targets, arguing that such investment will do more for the world’s poor and for consumers’ grocery bills than sweeping climate policy commitments.

Different views on the topic

• Critics point to empirical research indicating that climate change has already reduced global food production, with one multi-crop study estimating about a 1% decrease in consumable calories across ten major food crops, and finding especially negative impacts in Europe, Southern Africa and Australia as well as declines in caloric availability in nearly half of food-insecure countries^[2].
• Opposing analyses argue that the cumulative effects of rising temperatures, water stress and more frequent extreme weather events are already eroding agricultural productivity, increasing crop failures and threatening farm livelihoods, particularly in vulnerable regions that have fewer resources to adapt^[1].
• A growing body of work concludes that climate change is reducing both the quantity and quality of food production and weakening food systems’ resilience, suggesting that long-term climate impacts on yields and stability may be larger and more disruptive than implied by focusing on global production totals alone^[1].
• Several reviews project that under high-emissions scenarios, yields of major staples such as maize, wheat and soybeans could fall substantially by the end of the century, with estimated declines on the order of 12–35% depending on crop and region, challenging the assumption that continued technological progress will reliably outpace climate-related losses^[1][5][6].
• A Stanford-led analysis summarized in a Nature study finds that rising temperatures will dampen global capacity to produce food from most staple crops even after accounting for economic development and on-farm adaptation, and concludes that producer adaptations alone are unlikely to fully offset the negative effects of continued warming on yields^[4].
• Research on “safe climatic space” for food production suggests that if greenhouse gas emissions continue on a high trajectory, roughly 20% of today’s global crop production and 18% of livestock production could face unprecedented climate conditions by late century, with up to about 31% of crop and 34% of livestock output potentially pushed outside historical climate bounds, underscoring the scale of risk to current farming regions^[5].
• The same “safe climatic space” study argues that committing to a low-emissions pathway would dramatically shrink the share of global food production exposed to unprecedented climatic conditions, and uses this finding to support calls for strong mitigation alongside adaptation as a way to protect long-term food security^[5].
• Opposing commentary stresses distributional concerns, noting that even if global calorie production continues to grow, climate-driven yield declines and greater variability are projected to hit low-latitude and lower-income regions hardest, heightening risks of hunger, malnutrition and forced migration despite continued gains in some temperate, wealthier regions^[1][2][5].
• In contrast to the column’s emphasis on CO₂ fertilization and greening, many crop-physiology studies emphasize that CO₂ benefits depend on adequate water and nutrients and can be undermined by heat stress, drought, pests and elevated ozone, concluding that the net effect of climate change on sustaining yield growth at the rates needed to meet future demand remains a “credible threat” even if global averages in the near term appear modest^[1][6].
• For coffee specifically, a systematic review of climate impacts concludes that climate change is expected to reduce worldwide coffee yields on average and shrink the area suitable for coffee cultivation by 2050, leading many researchers and industry observers to warn of heightened long-term supply risks and more frequent “systemic shocks” to coffee markets, despite current high production levels^[3].
• Overall, critics of the column’s framing argue that while historical gains in agricultural productivity have been remarkable, the emerging evidence that climate change is already slowing productivity growth and increasing risk, combined with projections of substantial future losses under high emissions, supports a strategy that couples agricultural innovation with robust efforts to limit warming, rather than relying on innovation alone to secure the world’s food supply^{[1][2][4][5][6]}.