The world can't stop floods but can keep food channels open

From Turkiye to the United States, Japan to Spain, floods are wreaking havoc across the world. Europe and the US are being hit by both heat waves and floods. 

And Asia is currently facing deadly floods.

While Europe and the US are weighing their preparations for adapting to extreme weather events like rain, heat and drought to save lives, concerns for most of the world are more immediate – will there be enough food?

Be it a flood in India or a drought in Australia, countries like Bangladesh stand to suffer from higher prices and uncertain supplies of food grains.  

As El Niño conditions have developed, Southeast Asia is fearing drought while parts of Asia, including neighbouring India, are facing severe flooding – raising worries over the future supply of rice to the world market.

Added to the concern is a man-made one, the Russia-Ukraine war, that has made a key route of global supply of wheat through the Black Sea vulnerable. 

As the latest extension of the grain deal expires on 17 July, the channel from the world's food basket – Russia and Ukraine – to the rest of the world will be at stake further if Russia does not agree on any more extensions. 

The food supply route needs to stay uninterrupted to prevent the repeat of wheat price volatility.

Meanwhile, rice prices in Asia have surged to the highest level in more than two years as importers build up stockpiles on fears that the onset of El Niño will parch plantations and damage crops, says a Bloomberg report.

The staple's price has climbed to $535 a tonne in Thailand, while India, the world's biggest rice grower and shipper, is considering a rice export ban which might send already lofty global prices further higher, another report warns.

Prolonged drought or flood means a low output of wheat in Australia, soybean in America and palm in Malaysia, leading to reduced supplies and higher prices in the global market.  

Over the past 50 years, weather-related disasters, turbo-charged by man-made global warming, have resulted in over two million deaths and economic losses amounting to $4.3 trillion, says a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) study. 

Extreme weather events are again at their height in 2023, leaving a trail of destruction in many parts of the world - from the East to the West. 

Extreme heat exceeding 110 degrees F is expected to hit the southwestern USA including Arizona, California and Nevada this week, with local governments searching for strategies on how to keep residents safe. 

Other parts of the country are facing different events - severe storms and heavy rainfall caused extensive flooding in New York's Hudson Valley, with experts warning that the US is "nowhere close to ready" for dangerous climate threats like last week's flooding in Vermont. 

Rising seas and worsening storms may expose more places to such climate threats that could easily consume the US government's entire budget for climate resilience, media reports suggest. 

Fierce flash floods, caused by heavy rainfall, swept through Spain's Aragón region. Earlier reports showed severe rainfall, floods and landslides battered northern Italy and central Europe, including parts of Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary and Croatia.  

Southern Europe is in the grip of a heatwave with July temperatures set to break records. Countries like Spain, France, Greece, Croatia and Turkey may see thermometres rising above 40C (104F) under the impact of heatwave Cerberus, named after the three-headed monster that features in Dante's Inferno, BBC says.

From France to Portugal, many countries across Europe had record temperatures in the summer of 2022. An area larger than Luxembourg was burned in forest fires. 

Climate change will make climate-related natural hazards like droughts, forest fires, heatwaves, storms and heavy rain even more intense and more frequent, warns the European Environment Agency, feeling that Europeans must adapt and prepare for life in a changing climate.

Swathes of southwestern China are facing severe floods, with the country's President Xi Jinping urging stronger efforts to protect lives and property. Scientists have warned of a worse July with more miseries from multiple natural disasters, including typhoons and high temperatures in China.  

Torrential rain in southwestern Japan has triggered severe floods and mudslides, while Turkiye had to declare red alerts in 16 provinces as the Black Sea Region experienced severe floods in earlier weeks. 

Pakistan had its worst flooding in history last year, still leaving a lot of scars. 

In India, extremely heavy rainfall has flooded the national capital Delhi and several states, including Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, and Haryana. 

Monsoon rain-fed rivers overflow, damaging roads and civic infrastructure and causing deaths. They damage crops, causing concern for future food supplies, both to local and global markets.

Any such events in India are, therefore, reasons for concern in Bangladesh that sources from India first, in case of any food emergency. Though rice import is not yet a concern for Bangladesh due to a good stock in warehouses and a more-than-projected 2.15 crore tonne Boro rice harvest this year, none can be sure about any weather emergency.

Not for rice alone, Indian supplies matter to the market here even for kitchen items like green chilli, besides onion--which is almost a common phenomenon. When green chilli soared to a historic high of Tk800-Tk1000 per kg earlier this month, the government allowed emergency import of Indian green chilli and there was an immediate impact on market prices, though still hovering around Tk300 per kg in Dhaka's kitchen market. 

Climate events played the main role here, too. Prolonged heat waves dried chilli fields during the early summer months and continuous rains caused damage to the surviving ones ahead of the harvest. Imported chilli seems to be a stopgap solution at least for some more time, market sources say.

Had there not been climate events, there should not be a short supply of chilli as annual consumption is estimated at 5 lakh tonnes, while around 6.25 lakh tonnes are produced in two seasons-- summer and winter, agriculture experts believe.

More monsoon rains are welcome for the next Aman paddy plantation, but they raise concerns about floods as well.  

More rains will lessen the need for irrigation, as was the case last season, amid a cry for electricity and fuel. Aman is the second largest rice crop, which is said to give 1.5 crore tonnes of rice. The output of this crop depends largely on the rain condition and prospects look good so far, agriculture extension officials say.

However, concerns about any sudden flood-- caused by excessive rains either in the country or in upstream India-- always remain, as Bangladesh is a downstream country. Parts of India are flooded with rivers overflowing banks, major cross-border rivers have started to swell here too. 

Rivers in the Sylhet region started swelling due to heavy rains in early July, raising fears of early flood in the major rice-growing region, as happened last year. Teesta and Padma are also rising, breaking banks and devouring cropland and houses in Kushtia and some northern districts.  

Floods, be it at home or in Asian neighbours, are reasons for worry about the price and supply of rice.

Rice prices are already at an 11-year high, Reuters said. Local traders fear if rice output is affected by El Nino conditions anywhere in Asian rice hubs, the price of staples for over 3.5 billion people, mostly in Asia, might shoot up further, disrupting food security for millions of global poor. 

Tropical Asia produces 90% of the world's rice, with India alone accounting for 40% of global supply. Bangladesh is one of the six major rice producers, which include China, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. Despite official figures of near self-sufficiency, Bangladesh still needs to import some rice to meet the emergency, which, though not significant compared to total rice produced locally, matters to supply and price stability in the local market. 

For wheat, imports remain the main source, mostly from India in recent years.

Therefore, droughts and floods in any part of the world are concerns for Bangladesh and other food-importing countries, as they relate to the question of a basic need for a vast population - securing enough food on the table.

The good news is that Asia's major rice growers, including India and Thailand, have produced more rice than last year as farmers expanded farm areas to reap benefits from better crop prices and greater access to fertilisers, suggests a Reuters report quoting UN FAO's economist Shirley Mustafa.

Mustafa expects a higher Asian rice output this year as farmers in India, Thailand and Pakistan planted rice in a greater area. 

Bangladesh's Aman plantation outlook also looks good as of now. But the future is not guaranteed. 

Any uncertainty in global supply also adds to the concern. Major trade bodies in Bangladesh expressed their worries as the Black Sea Grain Initiative agreement is set to expire on 17 July. They urged the government to strongly pursue the extension of the deal to keep open the vital lifeline for global food security as Bangladesh is among 45 countries that largely depend on the route for major supplies of wheat and fertilisers.

Continued facilitation of Ukrainian and Russian exports of food and fertilizers thus remains crucial to global food security. By extension, any lapse in the grain deal risks severely jeopardising the availability and affordability of food for millions around the world: a situation that will have truly damaging social, economic and – above all – human consequences, warned the business bodies last week.

Single weather events like floods cannot be linked with climate change. But extreme events, such as heavy rains and frequent flooding, and longer heatwaves are certainly impacts of climate change. 

The world is committed to cutting emissions to limit the rise of temperature in the coming decades. Until that happens, man-made interventions should not stop the supply of food and farm inputs, so that the world can share the available grain in times of damage from extreme weather events which are beyond human control.