The Foods We're Not About to Lose
According to The Guardian, there are some “foods you're about to lose due to climate change.”
Among these foods we are collectively about to lose are beans, cherries, cocoa beans, coffee, and corn.
Here are the global trends in both yield and total production since 1990 for these five foods, using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) database.
Over the past quarter-century, yields of all crops have increasing trends, with the sole exception of coffee – whose yield is constant, with neither a decreasing nor increasing trend. Production of each crop has an increasing trend. There are no signs of either decreasing yield nor production trends.
One would reasonably imagine that if we were “about to lose” any of these foods due to climate change, a clear and undeniable negative trend in either yield or – more critically – production would be evident in the United Nations' global datasets. But we do not see any sign of this.
Maple syrup is another “food” that The Guardian states we are about to lose because of climate change. Yet a 2012 study from researchers at Cornell University shows the exact opposite. Canada's maple syrup production has skyrocketed about fourfold since the early 1980s, and the United States has seen nearly a doubling in production over this time frame.
Overall, it certainly doesn't look like we are about to lose any of these foods any time soon.