Weather happens. With regard to Australia, the northern part of the country on average gets hit with about half a dozen decent cyclones every year. Although they do a lot of damage to the impacted regions, they don't really reduce the average rural output of the country as a whole.
I'd say that the article is a bit of an overreaction to what are basically normal events (if a little on the extreme side of normal).
Note that a five second google search found that 2009 was supposed to be the "end of the world" due to food shortages...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...t=va&aid=12252
The planet actually produces much more food than is actually needed, let alone consumed. The problems lie mainly in poor distribution. A reduction of 5, 10, even 25% of production is unlikely to cause everyone in the world to starve (there'd still be enough to feed everyone),
provided distribution was effective.