April 30th, 2008 by John Gossop
There are many reasons why food production cannot keep up with population growth in the medium and long term such as loss of land, water shortages, improved diets and the use of cropland for biofuel production; but a real problem is modern farming’s huge dependence on finite resources including oil and gas.
There is of course an ongoing debate about the timing of Peak Oil. Some experts say that it is already here and that world production will soon go in to rapid decline while others say that new discoveries and the exploitation of shales and tar sands will allow production to keep up with demand for some time. Whatever the truth, the very high prices of the last few years have not caused the expected rapid production response and some big fields such as Cantarell in Mexico are in serious decline. We should realise that although there will be fluctuations in prices, the age of cheap oil is over.
In agriculture, the recent high prices are causing farmers all over the world to try to increase production, but it’s not all that easy. Most suitable land, and some that is unsuitable, is already being farmed. Rain forests are being destroyed, but mainly for biofuel crops while old cropland is being lost at the rate of 25 million acres every year.
Demand for the inputs needed to increase food production has sent the price of nitrogen, phosphate and potash fertiliser from about £145/tonne to over £300/tonne since last June. Pesticide prices have also soared and some products are hard to obtain. The price of land is also rising but the amount available here is not increasing although in eastern europe some neglected land is being brought back in to production.
We can, I think, expect some short term extra food production provided that climatic changes do not cause too much disruption, but like the oil industry, we do not have the resources to constantly keep up with increasing demand and any serious oil and gas shortages caused through Peak Oil or geo-political events would cause a similar or greater shortage of food.
We have allowed food production to become dangerously linked to the production of ever greater amounts of finite resources. If nothing is done to reverse that, disaster is inevitable.
Posted in Peak Oil, Threats to Food Supply | No Comments »
April 25th, 2008 by Leanne
Today the government is asking the media to tell listeners and readers not to panic buy fuel because of the Grangemouth oil refinery strike. But surely, asking people not to panic buy will have exactly the opposite effect. People who had not considered panicking will do so now.
This is just the sort of public reaction that will happen on a far exaggerated scale in the event of a REAL shortage of food or fuel.
Posted in Threats to Food Supply | No Comments »
Survivors of the catastrophe that will soon decimate the world population if nothing is done will be astonished that such a fundamental mistake could have been made. The mistake was to believe that we could use a finite and unreliable resource (fossil fuel) to supply an infinite need (food) in ever larger quantities
An incredibly serious situation has been allowed to develop which unless tackled will result in the starvation of a large part of the human population.
In a very short timeframe, only about 60 years, the human race has been able to successfully multiply it’s population and overcome the constraint that has for millenia kept population growth in check i.e. sufficient food supply.
This has been done by effectively turning fossil fuels in to food by
1. Replacing horses and oxen by fossil fuel driven machines so that the 30% land area previously needed to feed them became available for human food production.
2. Using fossil fuel derived fertilisers and pesticides to push yields to undreamt of levels.
If supplies of these fossil fuels were infinite, reliable, cheap, and caused no changes to the weather patterns upon which food production depends we would have no big problems.
Unfortunately, this is not the case but without fossil fuels in sufficient supply, food production would fail and famine would result.
By 2025 there will be about 8 billion people on earth, yet by then oil production will be in decline and crop destroying extreme weather events such as drought or floods are expected to be even more common than now.
This would be bad enough, but there are many other threats to world food supplies such as water shortages that mean the irrigated area of land is reducing.
Desertification, degredation and salination are losing us over 20 million acres of land each year.
A further 5 million acres are lost each year to paving over for cities, roads new industry and airports. This is often good quality, highly productive land on coastal plains.
Fuel crops now take up millions of acres of land that previously grew food crops and the area is expanding at an incredible rate as governments use subsidies to encourage the growing of these crops in an attempt to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to increase energy security.
An expanding population moving up the food chain. The world is expected to gain about 1.4 billion people by 2025, but perhaps more significant is the fact that a large part of the population of Asia and other fast developing areas are using more meat in their diet. A eat based diet needs much more land per person than the traditional grain based diet. In other words, we are going to need more food per person when there will be less food per person. In 1970 there was 0.28ha of farmland on average for each person on earth, but at current rates that will have fallen to 0.15ha by 2050.
Climate change is causing food production problems that will almost certainly get much worse. Successful crops depend on sufficient water at the right time through natural rainfall or less commonly through irrigation. Farmers plan cropping programs based on the expected water availability for their region and fairly small changes can result in much lower yields. This has been happening more frequently with droughts and floods in many areas. Climate scientists say this will get worse, reducing food production by amounts that can only be guessed at.
It could be starting now. The US Department of Agriculture recently a forecast US grain stocks at the lowest since 1949, and world stocks at their lowest since 1976. These stocks are now dangerously low and we desperately need a run of good harvests to rebuild stocks. Wheat is now around double the price it was just a year ago and consumers are now seeing this reflected in the price of bread, meat and most other foods. If we have a poor harvest in 2008, prices will really rocket as we will by then have almost no reserve stocks.
These shortages and high prices have been caused by three of the factors mentioned above, namely climate change, using crops for fuel, and increased demand from Asia. At some time we will be faced with a problem that could wipe out much of the worlds food production i,e. oil and gas shortages.
Without sufficient oil and gas, food production in the west would fail and in other less developed areas it would fall dramatically, yet we act as if these supplies are reliable and will last forever. This is plainly not the case. Supplies are finite, we are using far more each year than is being found in new discoveries and in the West, we are becoming dependent on unfriendly and unreliable suppliers. Most of the remaining oil is in the middle east where civil war between shi’ites and sunnis, war between Israel and Iran, conflict in Kurdish areas, the fall of the House of Saud, or concerted terrorist activity could cut off oil supplies . Little wonder that the US is desperate to stop Iran deploying nuclear weapons.
Similarly, up to 40% of the increased crop yields that have been achieved over the last 60 years have been due to the use of nitrogen fertiliser using natural gas as the feedstock. In Europe we are slowly becoming dependent on fertiliser made in eastern Europe using unreliable Russian gas.
Within a few short years a larger, more demanding population will need to be fed despite severe droughts and floods, water shortages and less cropland at the same time as oil and gas depletion and unreliability threaten the food supply system. But no one in government seems to know or care.
