Peak Oil and The Global Food Supply  

Energy Bulletin has posted a transcript of Richard Heinberg's recent address to FEASTA. The talk focusses on the future agriculture in a post peak world, touching on Catton's "Overshoot" (which seems to be cropping up a lot lately) and Liebig's Law, the decreasing amount of arable land available per person, the deterioration of farmland, alternatives to "the green revolution" and the experience of Cuba in a post-oil mini-world (a less depressing alternative to consider than North Korea, where the locals are apparently reduced to foraging for grass, according to the LA Times anyway). His conclusion echoes the message of his books - economic localisation, in this case, localised food production combined with policies supporting this.

Eco-agricultural advocates often contend that there is plenty of food in the world; existing instances of hunger are due to bad policy and poor distribution. With better policy and distribution, all could easily be fed. Thus, given the universally admitted harmful environmental consequences of conventional chemical farming, the choice should be simple.

Some eco-ag proponents are even more sanguine, and suggest that their methods can produce far higher yields than can mechanized, chemical-based agriculture. Experiments have indeed shown that small-scale, biodiverse gardening or farming can be considerably more productive on a per-hectare basis than monocropped megafarms.8 However, some of these studies have ignored the energy and land-productivity costs of manures and composts imported onto the study plots. In any case, and there is no controversy on this point, Permaculture and Biointensive forms of horticulture are dramatically more labor- and knowledge-intensive than industrial agriculture. Thus the adoption of these methods will require an economic transformation of societies.

Therefore even if the nitrogen problem can be solved in principle by agro-ecological methods and/or hydrogen production from renewable energy sources, there may be a carrying-capacity bottleneck ahead in any case, simply because of the inability of societies to adapt to these very different energy and economic needs quickly enough, and also because of the burgeoning problems mentioned above (loss of fresh water resources, unstable climate, etc.). According to widely accepted calculations, humans are presently appropriating at least 40 percent of Earth’s primary biological productivity.9 It seems unlikely that we, a single species after all, can do much more than that. Even though it may not be politically correct in many circles to discuss the population problem, we must recognize that we are nearing or past fundamental natural limits, no matter which course we pursue.