Verteilungskonflikte durch die Klimaschutzpolitik – Verschärft die EU die Hungerproblematik?

Climate change is one of the grand challenges of this century, but so is the eradication of hunger which is still present for roughly one billion people mainly in tropical countries. Both climate change and climate mitigation have an impact on the availability of food, especially in those regions that are particularly poor. Climate change is expected to affect most strongly the tropical regions thus reducing further the availability of suitable production conditions for agriculture. Climate mitigation can reduce the climate induced risk to food security, at the same time it has also a negative impact on food prices. First of all, climate policies raise the cost of energy which is an important component of the cost of agriculture. More importantly, many countries join the EU in supporting bioenergy production which directly competes with food production thus raising food prices. The world’s poor are most affected by such price increases since they spend most of their income on food products. Thus, increasing food prices directly translate into increasing hunger for those people. The current EU bioenergy policies are not yet strong enough to have a large impact on world markets. However, in the future bioenergy may pose a threat to food security for the poor.