The report, Advancing Global Food Supply in the Face of a Changing Climate (pdf), urges the Obama Administration to step up research funding – especially in developing countries – to help make up a projected gap in future food supply.
It also warns America's Corn Belt could face yield declines of more than 25 percent by mid-century - unless there are new advances in agriculture to compensate for hotter temperatures, changing rainfall and more aggressive weeds and pests under climate change.
The report, due to be released at a high-level conference in Washington, DC on Thursday, is the first to factor in the effects of the slow-motion collapse of the Western Antarctica ice sheet on future food security.
Two independent studies last week warned the retreat of the Western Antarctica ice sheet was unstoppable – and could lead to sea-level rise of up to 4 meters (13 feet) over the coming centuries.
Those rising seas would displace millions of people from low-lying coastal areas - and wipe out rice-growing areas across Asia, Gerald Nelson, a University of Illinois economist and author of Thurday's report, said.
"That sea-level rise would take out half of Bangladesh and mostly wipe out productive rice regions in Vietnam," Nelson told The Guardian. "It would have a major effect on Egyptian agricultural areas."
The projected levels of sea-level rise, due to the retreat of ice in West Antarctica, pose a far greater threat to future food supply even than that envisaged in the United Nations' IPCC report in March, Nelson said.
"A sea level rise of 3 meters (10 feet) over the next 100 years is much more likely than the IPCC thought possible," the report said.
Antarctic Ice Collapse Could Devastate Global Food Supply
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