Climate Constraints, Grain Production Trend, and Crop Losses

Climate impacts on grain production, especially grain losses have always been a concern for farmers, traders, governments, international organizations, relief groups and policy makers for the purpose of balanced food supplies and demands, trade, and distribution of  aid to the nations in need. In the recent two decades, following such large-scale phenomena as population increase, climate warming, limitations in natural resources, anthropogenic consequences, and economic situation, national and international policy and decision makers expressed serious concern about food security and promoted assessment of long-term grain tendency in response to technology progress and climate change and also annual crop losses due to weather-related disasters. This presentation is focused on analysis of the global and regional tendencies in grain production due to agricultural technology and climate contribution. In situ data such as nearly 50-year crop yield for the major world-producing countries and around 100-year monthly precipitation and temperature for some regions were used in this analysis. Besides, large-area grain losses were investigated in terms of annual weather impacts, especially for such regional and global phenomenon as droughts. For inter- and intra-annual analysis of drought start, development and impacts, the satellite-based Vegetation Health (VH) system, data and products, developed at the USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), were used. The VH is operational system, which provides AVHRR-based satellite information for every 4-km of land surface and has 30-year data records. Drought monitoring is focused on early drought detection, estimation of its intensity, duration and area and prediction of yield losses. The results of this analysis indicate that in some of the main grain producing regions climate limitations (mostly a lack of natural moisture supply) caused sluggish grain production increase. Although the global temperature over the last 30 years is keeping increasing, drought parameters did not show stable trend in the major agricultural areas since 1981. The longer records of wheat yield show some upward tendency in drought-related yield losses, specifically in the regions where natural water supplies are deficient compared to thermal resources.