Opinion from the blog: Survival Acres: http://survivalacres.com/wordpress/?p=688
Localized Food Security:
Food security isn’t something that most people have given a lot of
thought to. But perhaps you should, because immediately upon the heels
of any natural disaster, peak oil, drought or any number of other
factors such as pests, pandemic or natural disaster, the world’s food
supply can be severely threatened, even to the point of causing a
nations collapse.
The world food stocks are in a global decline due to drought,
disease, climate change, soil loss, acidification, peak oil, bioethanol
production and pollution. These factors are worsening each year,
reducing our global food security to alarming levels.
The answer to these problems is relatively simple to identify, but
in real life, very hard to enact. What is required is localized
food security that is non-dependent upon excessive energy inputs
(ie., petroleum based) that meets the needs of it’s community and one
that encompasses a long term strategy.
Although there are many thousands of community gardens, and
millions of private gardens, their combined output remains woefully
inadequate to meet even the basic nutritional requirements of
300,000,000 people. Consider how much the average American family buys
each week at the supermarket. While this is probably excessive compared
to other countries (we do have a severe obesity problem) the
fact remains that it is the mega-corporations that are feeding America.
Now multiply this fact by every developed nation around the world and
most 2nd and 3rd world nations. The supermarket and the entire
mega-corporate agricultural industry is the essential lifeline that is
keeping billions of people alive today. And it is this lifeline that is
now seriously threatened.
In particular, the umbilical cord is the sea of cheap oil that we
have guzzled like a growing, gargantuan baby. As global oil supplies
dwindle, the ability of the world’s corporate farmers who are totally
dependent upon petrochemicals and vast fields to grow billions of tons
of crops is also dwindling.
Without corporate conglomerates and mega-industrial farms and
agriculture (and thousands of trawlers mining the oceans), the sad fact
is, the worlds population could not possibly survive. This is a
situation the needs to be changed, immediately and
with all possible haste because of the coming global food crisis.
Localized Food Security
The definition of this is the localized growing,
harvesting, storing, transporting, processing, packaging, marketing,
retailing, and consumption of locally produced food. Understanding the
logistics is relatively easy, but the actual production of
localized food isn’t. In fact, it’s very hard to
produce enough localized food to feed the population.
In “It’s Not Easy To Eat Local“, the author
notes that it is prohibitively expensive. Testing the concept of
“eating local”, the conference failed miserably to even find enough
localized food at affordable prices to feed the attendees. This
exemplifies what oil crash really means - food will be prohibitively
expensive.
If and when (because there is much room for doubt) localized food
production actually ramps up to full-speed, then (and only then) will
“eating local” even be possible. Until then, it’s another vapor-ware
type of promise for most of us, localized food production is at
present, woefully inadequate and prohibitively expensive to meet the
needs of the population. Notably, the conference above had only a few
more then 100 people in attendance!
It IS “all about price” when you consider availability
as they did, but in reality, there is much more then
availability to consider too. Growing the food is a huge, huge factor
and it is not as easy as it may appear. In fact, my own experience has
shown me that it’s pretty hard to grow enough food to feed yourself.
I’m not really a green thumb, not yet and I work 7 days a week, so
getting in the garden and getting it done right with seasonal
variations, soil, planting and adequate watering takes time. And you
make a LOT of mistakes. Personally, I find the idea of “growing all
your own food” rather ludicrous because 99% of us simply have no idea
how to do this or how much work and calorie expenditures this is going
to take. I’m very certain I’m expending more calories then I’m taking
in right now, making this effort a net loss, but the experience is
absolutely invaluable.
But this is indeed what needs to be done on a community level. The
days of transporting every morsel of food we eat an average of 1500
miles are soon to be over. Localized growing is the only option
we have. Localized food security means learning from all the mistakes
we’ll make as budding gardeners and unskilled and untrained
preservationists and dealing with all sorts of problems that will
seriously impact that actual consumable caloric output.
Learning How
It takes years to develop the proper skills, knowledge
and experience to even meet half of your daily calorie requirements.
Unless you have been blessed with perfect soil, abundant sunshine,
ideal weather and an absence of bugs, parasites, rodents, you’ll
discover like I’m discovering that “growing your own” isn’t easy at all.
The motivation to do this and stick to it, learning from your
mistakes must be there too. Hungry people are highly motivated (and
dangerous), but hungry people make terrible farmers. The likelihood
that a crop will be ruined, or the seeds eaten (think Irish potato
famine for case histories) or the sheer impatience of hunger pains of
having to wait and adequate length of time before you can really have
something worthwhile to eat.
Without a survival food storage, the majority of people simply
won’t make it. It takes (at least) one entire season or longer for a
crop to produce harvestable food. Factoring in crop loss at every step
due to bugs, infestation, depredation, honeybee loss, variable climate,
drought, theft, processing loss, preservation mistakes, and even
personal illness and health conditions, the idea of “feeding yourself”
or even the community becomes dicey as hell.
If like me, you don’t live in an area with good soils, long
growing seasons or adequate sunshine (all three are factors here), then
growing your own becomes extremely challenging. This year, I built
earthboxes, and they’re working okay, but they’re not perfect and
they’re inadequate to meet my individual needs. At best, I can grow
some vegetables, but nothing even close to my daily calorie
requirements. I would need a greenhouse full of these containers to do
so (for one person).
We’re a nation of “know nothings” when it comes to personal
survival. And we need to immediately admit that fact.
Dishonesty or denial of this fact isn’t going to help. We’re all
alive and owe our existence right now to the experts that do exist, and
they’re scattered pretty far and wide. Fewer and fewer farmers are
being used to feed the world. Using my town for example, not
one of these people lives here. So we’re left with forging our
own path and making our own mistakes, which we must do right now while
we have a small window of time left to us to survive from these
unavoidable mistakes.
Book learning just doesn’t cut it either. I have a personal
library that I keep adding to, but it’s inadequate when it comes to
understanding everything that you need to know. There is no
replacement for experience (and proper climate, soil, sunshine, etc.,).
If we are really serious about localized food security, we must start
immediately to implement these efforts, because if we don’t, we are all
facing severe food shortages as the world powers down.
Energy Decline and Costs
There is another side to this issue that bears mentioning too.
Earlier, I mentioned that food will become prohibitively expensive due
to the lack of localized growers. That’s true and this will take quite
some time to change. The other reason food will become prohibitively
expensive is the mega-farms will start shutting down as localized
growing attempts to ramp up. Their market base will shrink. Their farms
and their productive output will shrink too as oil supplies dry up or
become so prohibitively expensive in their own right that farmers
simply quit. Whatever they do produce will be outrageously priced.
Food IS oil and vice versa in our modern society. I’ve covered
this issue before, but in a nutshell the planting, fertilizing,
watering, harvesting, processing, packaging, distribution, storage and
selling of food today is only possible because of the ocean of oil we
consumed. Those days are soon over. When the oil goes - we go.
Nothing has been found to replace the portable energy found
in oil, nothing. The only way to prevent our demise
from happening is localized food security.
Take a look around in your community. What is grown
there? Does it depend on huge quantities of outside energy inputs (oil
or hydro or whatever)? What about fertilizers and insecticides? What
kind of harvesting and processing equipment is used? Does that depend
on a constant supply of cheap oil too? How far does your localized food
actually travel before it’s available to you to eat?
Or better yet, check out the stocks of food in the grocery stores
near you. America has a 3 days supply of food on the shelf and a
limited back up of food in warehouses in distribution centers. A single
seasons crop failure can have national impacts. Bear in mind that we’d
not be importing food anymore from Mexico or Argentina or Chile because
oil prices would prevent that. How far has that food on the shelf
traveled? The American average is 1500 miles. Will that food
selection and variety always be there when oil reaches $100 a barrel?
$200 a barrel?
The answer to these questions for most of us is depressing as
hell. Now examine your growing season, how climate change is affecting
this, whether an adequate water supply can be truly relied upon, soil
composition and compaction, and a host of other factors. Can your
community actually “grow your own”? I’ve traveled a great deal of the
western U.S. and the answer is most definitely “NO” for many cities and
towns I’ve visited. There are too many people to support with too few
resources and all too often, too little water.
Some towns are simply going to dry up and be entirely abandoned.
The city of Perth, Australia is facing this crisis right now.
Throughout many dry and desert areas of the U.S., there is almost no
chance future water supplies will be adequate to permit the feeding of
millions and millions. This will cause massive migration waves (and a
huge ‘homeland security problem’) as people flee their dried out towns
in hunger.
Someone else can chime in regarding the eastern U.S. states. But
the issues of population density, water, soils, climate and the all
important required “skills set” is the same everywhere, throughout the
world. There is a reason why countries face famine and it
ties directly into the available land and human resources, and often,
because of too many humans, who usually resort to extreme
violence (war) to horde or control what’s left.
Time Is Of The Essence
There’s little time left, realistically speaking. And we are now
100% certain that our esteemed leaders remain totally clueless of the
severity of this issue. No matter what we do, even if we start
immediately, we have serious life-threatening crisis on our hands for
the reasons stated above (arable land, too many people). Multiply this
in every nation throughout the world and you will begin to grasp the
dangerous situation we are all in. Unfortunately, it’s too late and
cannot be helped. The only thing that can be done is to honestly fess
up to the crisis and the situation we have placed ourselves in and
start dealing with it now, on our own, while we still can.
Learn everything you can about growing food. Work with others in
your community to bring about awareness and attention to this issue.
Start planting and raising your own garden and animals. Learn about
composting, greenhouse growing and water preservation techniques. There
are some technologies like aquaculture that will probably become huge
lifesavers (and big businesses) that have the potential to meet
community needs. This methodology has yet to be widely supported, which
makes little sense considering it’s incredible potential, but that will
hopefully change very soon.
Community cooperation will become absolutely essential. Finding
others within your community that you can work with is challenging
enough. Attend the local farmers markets and find out if there are
others who are at least aware of the issues. Attend community meetings
and speak up. Expect the usual condemnation and ridicule, since
business as usual is the only thing people seem to still understand. Go
prepared with facts regarding the oil and climate crisis and leave this
material with those who show an interest. It won’t be easy, but it will
ultimately be necessary.
Community leaders will bear the responsibility to enhance these
efforts, with tax breaks, zoning laws, designated land plots
(donations) and community support. Of course, this assumes the
community will remain relatively intact, of which I have some doubts.
There is a lot of uncertainty about the future we all face, but this
really doesn’t matter. It is a future largely of our own making.
Together, we may indeed live if we can learn to cooperate and
communicate the essential skills and knowledge that we will need and
take action while there is still time. Only time will tell which path
most of us will take.