When the US Department of Agriculture finalized its calculations in January, the findings were startling: 2022 was a disaster for highland cotton in Texas, the state where the coarse fiber is mostly grown and then sold around the world in the shape of tampons, cloth diapers, gauze pads, and other products.
In the largest loss ever recorded, Texan farmers abandoned 74 percent of their planted crops—nearly 2.5 million acres—due to heat and dry land, the hallmarks of a megadrought exacerbated by climate change.
That crisis has contributed to raising the price of tampons in the US by 13 percent in the last year. The price of cloth diapers shot up 21 percent. Cotton balls were up 9 percent and gauze bandages were up 8 percent.
All of that was well above the overall US inflation rate of 6.5 percent in 2022, according to data provided by market research firms Nielsen IQ and The NPD Group.
This is an example of how climate change is transforming the cost of daily living in ways that consumers may not realize. West Texas is the main source of highland cotton in the US, which in turn is the third largest producer and largest exporter of the fiber.
The West Texas crop collapse will spread beyond the US, onto store shelves around the world, economists say.
“Climate change is a secret driver of inflation,” said Nicole Corbett, a vice president at Nielsen IQ. “As extreme weather continues to impact crops and production capacity, the cost of daily necessities will continue to rise.”
On the other side of the world, in Pakistan, the sixth largest cotton producer in the highlands, half of the country’s cotton crops were destroyed by floods made worse by climate change.
Experts say the impact of global warming is spreading with consequences that could be felt for decades to come.
By 2040, half of the world’s cotton-growing regions will face “high or very high climate risk” from drought, floods and wildfires, the nonprofit Forum for the Future reported.
Scientists project that heat and drought exacerbated by climate change will continue to reduce harvests in the American Southwest.
Cotton is a “leading crop,” said Natalie Simpson, a logistics expert at NY University at Buffalo. “When the weather destabilizes it, you see changes almost immediately.
“This applies to anywhere it is grown. And the future supply that everyone depends on is going to look very different than it does now.”
For decades, cotton growing in the American Southwest has depended on the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches beneath eight western states, from Wyoming to Texas.
However, the Ogallala is declining, in part as a result of climate change, found the 2018 National Climate Assessment, a report issued by 13 US agencies.
That’s the same region that was abandoned by more than 2 million people during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, caused by severe drought and poor agricultural practices.
John Steinbeck chronicled the trauma in his epic “The Grapes of Wrath,” about the exodus from Oklahoma of a family of cotton farmers.
Lately, the novel has been on the mind of Mark Brusberg, a meteorologist for the Department of Agriculture. “The last time this happened, there was a massive migration of growers from where they couldn’t survive anymore to a place where they were going to try,” he explained.
“However, we have to figure out how to prevent that from happening again.”
In the years since, the farmland along the Ogallala returned to flourish as farmers drew from the aquifer to irrigate their fields. But now, with increasing heat and drought, dust storms are making a comeback, the National Climate Assessment found.
Climate change is projected to increase the duration and intensity of drought in much of the Ogallala region over the next 50 years.
Last spring, Barry Evans, a fourth-generation cotton farmer near Lubbock, Texas, planted almost 1,000 acres of cotton. He harvested 200. “This is one of the worst growing years he has ever seen,” he said. “We’ve lost a lot of the Ogallala Aquifer and it’s not coming back.”
When Evans started growing cotton in 1992, he could irrigate about 90 percent of his fields with water from the Ogallala, he said. Now that’s down to 5 percent and counting, he noted.
Kody Bessent, the executive director of Plains Cotton Growers, which represents farmers who grow cotton across 4 million acres in Texas, said the land produced 4 to 5 million bales of cotton in a typical year.
Production in 2022 is projected to be 1.5 million bales—a cost to the regional economy of $2-3 billion, he said.
Sam Clay of the Toyo Cotton Company, a Dallas merchant who buys highland cotton from farmers and sells it to mills, said the collapse had left him struggling to get by.
“Prices are through the roof and all this is passed on to consumers,” he said.
Farmers like Evans say they would like expanded government funding for disaster relief programs to cover the impact of the drought, and pay farmers to grow cover crops that help retain moisture in the soil.
But some economists say it may not make sense to continue supporting a crop that will no longer be viable as the planet continues to warm.
“Since the 1930s, government programs have been critical to growing cotton,” said Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis. “But there’s no particular economic case for growing cotton in West Texas as the climate changes.”
In the long run, it could simply mean that cotton is no longer the main ingredient in everything from tampons to fabrics, “and we’re all going to be using polyester,” Sumner said.
By: CORAL DAVENPORT
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6605383, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-10 16:00:07
#Hundreds #cotton #plants #lost #Texas #due #strong #heat #waves