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One tenth of rise, wheat, corn and many other crops have been wiped out by heat waves and droughts in countries that have been hit by extreme weather conditions between 1964 and 2007, revealed new study. A paper published Wednesday in Nature analyzed data of the impact caused by floods, droughts and extreme temperatures on the crop harvests of these countries. "People already knew that these extreme weather events had impacts on crop production," said Navin Ramankutty, a geographer from the University of British Columbia and an author of the report. "But we didn't know by how much, and we didn't have a basis for how that might change in the future."

Dr. Ramankutty and his team studied about 2,800 weather catastrophes like Ethiopia drought between 1983 and 1984, heat wave in Europe in 2003 etc. They also examined the data of several cereals including oats, barley, rye and maize that are grown in 177 nations across the world. They revealed that every drought affects a country's crop production by 10% and the heat waves by 9%. They also revealed that the floods and cold spells do not impact the agricultural produce. There has been a loss of as much as 3 billion tons of cereal production between 1964 and 2007 that is caused due to droughts and heat waves. "We don't think about it much, but rice, wheat and maize alone provide more than 50 percent of global calories," Dr. Ramankutty said. "When these grain baskets are hit, it results in food price shocks, which leads to increasing hunger," according to New York Times

As the population all over the world is increasing, the food production is also required to increase so that these extra mouths can be fed. For the world to meet these demand, they need to increase their production and do so efficiently, said Pedram Rowhani, a land-change scientist from the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, who is another of the study's authors, said New York Times