Why Our Food is So Dependent on Oil  

321 Energy has an editorial describing what WorldChanging would call the "Fatal Harvest" school view of industrial agriculture and the total dependency of the present day food system on fossil fuels.

"Eating Oil" was the title of a book which was published in 1978 following the first oil crisis in 1973. The aim of the book was to investigate the extent to which food supply in industrialised countries relied on fossil fuels. In the summer of 2000 the degree of dependence on oil in the UK food system was demonstrated once again when protestors blockaded oil refineries and fuel distribution depots. The fuel crises disrupted the distribution of food and industry leaders warned that their stores would be out of food within days. The lessons of 1973 have not been heeded. Today the food system is even more reliant on cheap crude oil. Virtually all of the processes in the modern food system are now dependent upon this finite resource, which is nearing its depletion phase.

Industrial agriculture and the systems of food supply are responsible for the erosion of communities throughout the world. This social degradation is compounded by trade rules and policies, by the profit driven mindset of the industry, and by the lack of knowledge of the faults of the current systems and the possibilities of alternatives. But the globalisation and corporate control that seriously threaten society and the stability of our environment are only possible because cheap energy is used to replace labour and allows the distance between producer and consumer to be extended.

However, this is set to change. Oil output is expected to peak in the next few years and steadily decline thereafter. We have a very poor understanding of how the extreme fluctuations in the availability and cost of both oil and natural gas will affect the global food supply systems, and how they will be able to adapt to the decreasing availability of energy. In the near future, environmental threats will combine with energy scarcity to cause significant food shortages and sharp increases in prices - at the very least.

WorldChanging has also published another of their "Postcards From The Global Food System" - this one describes how industrial agricultural practices have failed in the global South and the harm done by rich world agricultural subsidies and tariffs.

The food system in the South is slowly being re-molded. Agricultural policy developed on the basis of Northern lessons is changing the face of Southern food systems and agriculture. The consequences of this re-molding are clear to see --- given what we know of industrial agriculture in the North. It's leading to many of the problems identified by the Fatal Harvest School. We can no longer, however, think of these problems as unintended consequences. Coupled to these now known consequences are policies which are having somewhat more unique effects in the South.

The surplus of food in Europe and North America has the consequence that it’s detrimental to Western economic interests to have Southern countries producing food surplus to their needs. This becomes a fine line because a lack of food surplus means that any crop failure (due to a failure of rains or other reasons) has the potential of rapidly becoming a disaster because there are no buffers to protect populations. A vast array of mechanisms have been deployed to ensure that the South does not over-produce and flood Northern markets with cheap food and agricultural produce. The effect of these mechanisms has been to make Southern farming increasingly unviable from an economic perspective.

Trade barriers and tariffs make it so that Southern countries cannot afford to sell in the West. Farm subsidies in the OECD countries total some $300 billion annually. A fifth of the European Union’s total budget goes to farm subsidies. (See KickASS for more). They have two basic impacts. The first is to ensure that global commodity prices for agricultural products remain high, even as prices overall slowly drop over time. In percentage terms, Westerns spend perhaps 11% of their family budget on food, whereas Africans spend between 40-75%. The second is to ensure that North American and European commodity farmers can undercut all other sellers on the global market. For decades North America and Europe have used surplus crop as “food aid” -- often on the condition that recipient countries open their markets to Western products. Markets once open can be used to “dump” surplus. All these mechanisms, coupled with more direct trariffs -- which are simply a tax on products from a certain region -- further depress the market for local products, exacerbating the decline of local farming and agriculture.

It also explores the destruction of rural culture and the spread of agricultural monocultures that form the basis of food commodity production, and stresses the need to regenerate local food systems.

Local food systems in the developing world (particularly rural), are more concerned with figuring out for themselves how a plant can be used in a myriad of ways than with how to produce a product that can travel well down the industrial-ag supply chain. The plant is thus not treated as a commodity - it's treated as a food. It's not processed and sent off, coming back to communities in bags. Its usage is direct, diversified and deeply local.

Furthermore, in stark contrast to industrial agriculture, healthy local food systems deal with hundreds of species, not simply with four or five commodities. This is true in the developed as well as developing world. Take a walk through any farmer's market, say for example, New York's Union Square Greenmarket, and you'll see hundreds of species -- many that most of us won't recognise.

Many of the same problems that afflict industrial agriculture on the land are also beginning to crop up (pardon the pun) in the rapidly expanding aquaculture industry - hopefully more sustainable alternatives will be adopted.

As aquaculture has taken off, it has predictably followed the course of industrial agriculture, with fishy feedlots taking a cue from bovine feedlots -- crowded, chemicalized and polluting. So the rapid growth of interest and activity around 'sustainable seafood' is no surprise.

There are more standards, protocols and evaluation schemes emerging than you can shake a fish stick at: Marine Stewardship Council, Monterey Bay Aquarium, National Audubon Society, Blue Ocean Institute, to name a few. This week the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has just released standards and guidelines on Ecolabelling of Marine Fishery Products and Fish and Fishery Products from Marine Capture Fisheries.

Companies ranging from EcoFish to CleanFish are bringing product to market. Funding and investment efforts, including the Packard Foundation's philanthropy, the State of California's [transition fund] and the new SeaChange Investment Fund are trying to provide the capital. NGOs like Environmental Defense, Ecotrust's 'Salmon Nation' initiative, and PassionFish are educating consumers, producers and policy makers.

There are numerous approaches to sustainable agriculture on land, though it will probably take the demise of industrial agriculture for them to be widely adopted (with oil scarcity being the obvious cause of this demise), such as permaculture (apparently invented by australian Bill Mollison), organic farming and the integrated farming system.

Technorati tags: peak oil