Food Fears

Following up on his NYT column on crop failures and climate change yesterday (and the apparently unrelated report on the same subject at The Guardian Saturday), Krugman notes:

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization issued an alert Tuesday that a severe drought was threatening the wheat crop in China, the world’s largest wheat producer, and was even resulting in shortages of drinking water for people and livestock.

He links to to the full NYT article here, and concludes, "If China has to import wheat, too, that’s seriously ungood."

Nope, tell everyone it's Obama's fault, and if we just cut taxes and dropped the socialism, free market forces would encourage crops to be more productive. That makes it doubleplusgood!

Followup: He also has a good post on how gradual climate change can lead to a comparatively sudden increase in extreme events... nothing new, I guess, but a nice, lucid explanation.