The place where most of the world's people could first begin to feel the consequences of global warming may come as a surprise: in the stomach, via the supper plate.

That's the view of a small but influential group of agricultural experts who are increasingly worried that global warming will trigger food shortages long before it causes better known but more distant threats, such as rising sea levels that flood coastal cities.


The scale of agriculture's vulnerability to global warming was highlighted late last year when the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an umbrella organization representing 15 of the world's top crop research centres, issued an astounding estimate of the impact of climate change on a single crop, wheat, in one of the world's major breadbaskets.

Researchers using computer models to simulate the weather patterns likely to exist around 2050 found that the best wheat-growing land in the wide arc of fertile farmland stretching from Pakistan through Northern India and Nepal to Bangladesh would be decimated. Much of the area would become too hot and dry for the crop, placing the food supply of 200 million people at risk.