Could the Midwestern Drought Cause a Global Crisis?

Could the Midwestern Drought Cause a Global Crisis?

The news from the U.S. Department of Agriculture wasn’t quite as it bad as it could have been. But the weekly report indicating that less than a quarter of this year’s corn crop can be rated as being in “good” or “fair” condition, compared to 62 percent of it at this time last year, was enough to send prices of both corn and soybeans back toward record highs.
That’s great news for investors – [but]...there’s the impact on government finances to consider, on both a local and state level: As meteorologist Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground noted recently, two of the three most costly disasters since 1980 have been droughts, not the more dramatic events such as hurricanes or floods.
Nor is the fallout only a matter of Americans paying $10 more on our average weekly grocery bill. (Not forgetting that for some, that, too, is an intolerable burden.) Because what is going on isn’t confined to North America; other grain-growing parts of the world, such as Russia and the Ukraine, are battling their own drought conditions, while European farmers are contending with the opposite problem, too much rain.
The result could be another food crisis that leaves the world’s poorest people unable to afford to purchase increasingly scarce and costly food, as the World Bank’s president, Jim Yong Kim, warned yesterday.