Part 3 Disaster Risk Drivers and Cascading Impacts
KENYA. View of a dry corn field in Kolewa, where a gender-transformative approach developed by FAO and its partners is implemented to achieve equality and empowerment for women in commercial agriculture.
©FAO/Patrick Meinhardt
©FAO/Patrick Meinhardt
Key messages
- Understanding systemic drivers of disaster risk – such as climate change, pandemics, epidemics and armed conflicts – and their cascading impacts on agricultural production, value chains and food security is key to building resilient agrifood systems.
- Attribution science can be used to demonstrate the degree to which climate change is increasing the occurrence of yield anomalies, and consequently is reducing agricultural production. Although the analysis contains high levels of uncertainty, estimates of loss and damage for four country-crop pairs – soy in Argentina, wheat in Kazakhstan and Morocco and maize in South Africa – show mostly negative impacts on yield that range from 2 to 10 percent.
- Pandemics such as the COVID-19 related emergency can have a significant effect on agriculture. Data from food-insecure countries shows that the COVID-19 pandemic created considerable problems for farmer access to input and output markets, such as constraints to access mechanized equipment, a shortage of labour, and in some cases, reductions in areas planted by up to 50 percent.
- The 2019–2020 spread of African swine fever had wide-ranging negative impacts at the global level, causing substantial socioeconomic losses. In 2020, pork production in China decreased by 26 percent in comparison to 2017 levels, and knock-on effects on production and prices were recorded in other countries such as the United States of America, Brazil, Mexico, Canada and the Philippines.
- Armed conflicts have a significant impact on agriculture and food security, as demonstrated by recent assessments in Somalia, the Syrian Arab Republic and Ukraine. Although the Post-Disaster Needs Assessment in Conflict Situations provides guidance on estimating losses and damages, this framework should be further developed to provide better information to foster risk reduction during armed conflicts, and, PDNAs in conflict situations carried out more systematically.
