Corn prices to spike due to climate change

A new study suggests that corn prices could spike in the near future due to climate change.

The research said that devastating heat waves could force US corn producers to move crops northward towards the Canadian border to avoid crop failures.

“The likelihood of increasing occurrence of severe hot events in response to increasing global greenhouse-gas concentrations poses a particular risk for field crops,” the researchers said, according to Bloomberg.

"Even one or two degrees of global warming is likely to substantially increase heatwaves that lead to low-yield years and more price volatility."

Noah S. Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford and the author of the study, found that climate change’s influence on corn price volatility may be more important than fluctuation caused by oil prices or energy policies that mandate biofuels in the future.

“Frankly, I was surprised that climate had the largest effect of these three influences,” said Diffenbaugh, according to Futurity.

“These are substantial changes in price volatility that come from relatively moderate global warming.”

The study suggests that on top of moving northward, farmers should develop more heat-tolerant corn varieties in order to deal with the problem.

The research was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.