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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] "Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply"-Richard Heinberg transcript
  • Date: Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:35:47 -0700


"Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply"-Richard Heinberg transcript
Media"Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply"-Richard Heinberg
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/456

Richard Heinberg: I'm actually gonna cover some of the same territory as
Richard has already explored here, hopefully from a little different
perspective, add a few helpful facts and figures along the way.

Food is energy and it takes energy to get food. These two facts, when we take
them together, have always established the biological limits to the human
population and they will always continue to do so. The same is and has been
true for every other species as well. Food must yield more energy to the
eater than is needed to acquire the food. Woe to the fox who expends more
energy chasing rabbits than he can get from eating the rabbits he catches. If
this energy balance remains negative for too long, death results. For the
species in general the outcome is extinction.
We humans have become champions at developing new strategies for increasing
our share of energy captured from the environment. Harnessing of fire,
domestication of plants and animals, adoption of ards***[1:14] and plows, the
deployment of irrigation schemes and the harnessing of traction animals.
Developments that occurred over tens of thousands of years all served this
end. The process was gradual and time-consuming. Over centuries small
inventions and tiny modifications of existing tools from ***[1:38] to
horse-collars enabled human and animal muscle-power to be leveraged ever more
slightly more effectively. This exercise took place within a network of
natural limits. The yearly capture of solar radiation by the green biosphere
was immense relative to human needs, but finite nevertheless and the vast
majority of that solar radiation served functions that indirectly supported
human existence. Giving rise to air-currents by warming the surface of the
planet and maintaining life in the oceans and on land. The amount of human
muscle-power was limited by the number of humans, who of course had to be fed
by draft-animals who also entailed energy costs as they likewise needed to
eat, also had to be cared for in various ways. Therefore, even with clever
refinements in tools and techniques, in crop development and animal breeding,
it was clear that we humans would inevitably reach a point of diminishing
returns in our ability to continue increasing our energy harvest and
therefore our population.

By the 19th century these limits were beginning to become apparent. Famine
and hunger, as we have already heard, had always been common throughout even
the wealthiest regions of the planet. But migration to other nations, crop
rotation, and the application of manures and composts were gradually making
those events less frequent and severe. European farmers, realizing the need
for a nitrogen source in order to continue feeding their burgeoning and
increasingly urbanized populations, began employing guano (bird excrement)
imported from the cliffs of islands off Chile and Argentina. One can only
imagine what it must have been like working on those ships. The results were
gratifying. However, after only a few decades those guano deposits were being
depleted. By this time, in the late 1890's, the worlds population was nearly
twice what it had been at the beginning of the 19th century. A crisis was
again in view, but again crisis was narrowly averted due to fossil fuels.

In 1909 two german chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a
process to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen in
fossil fuels. The process, the Haber-Bosch process, initially used coal as a
feed-stock though later it was adapted to use natural gas which is currently
the feed-stock of choice. After the end of the great war nation after nation
began building Haber-Bosch plants. Today the process produces 150 million
tons of ammonia per year, equaling the total amount of available nitrogen
produced from all natural sources combined. I think this is a very important
point to keep in mind. The Haber-Bosch process has effectively doubled the
amount of available nitrogen in the biosphere and concentrated it
specifically for the purpose of growing crops for human beings. Fossil fuels
went on to offer still other ways of extending natural limits to the human
carrying capacity of the planet. Early steam driven tractors came in to
limited use in the 19'th century but after WWI the size and effectiveness of
powered farm machinery expanded dramatically and the scale of use of farm
machinery exploded, especially in North America, Europe and Australia during
the 1920's, 30's, 40's and 50's.

In the 1890's one quarter of US cropland had to be set aside for the growing
of grain to feed horses, most of which worked on farms. The internal
combustion engine provided a new kind of horse-power of course and also
increased the amount of arable land available to feed humans. Chemical
pesticides and herbicides developed mostly after WWII used knowledge
pioneered in the laboratories that had worked to perfect explosives and other
chemical warfare agents. Pesticides not only increased crop-yields in, again,
Europe, North America and Australia but also reduced the prevalence of
insect-born deceases like malaria. The world began to enjoy the benefits of
better living through chemistry. Though the environmental costs in terms of
water and soil pollution and damage to vulnerable species would only later
become widely apparent.

In the 1960's industrial chemical agricultural practices began to be
exported, as we've heard, to what by that time was being called the third
world. This was glowingly dubbed The Green Revolution and it enabled a
tripling of food-production during the past half century. At the same time
the scale and speed of distribution of food increased. This also constituted
a means of increasing carrying capacity, though in a more subtle way. The
trading of food items goes back to paleolithic times but with advances in
transport the quantities and distances involved gradually increased. Here
again fossil fuels were responsible for a dramatic discontinuity in the slow
pace of growth. First by rail and steam ship, then by truck and airplane,
immense amounts of grain and ever larger quantities of meats, vegetables and
specialty foods began to flow from countryside to city, from region to region
and from continent to continent. William Catton in his classic book Overshoot
terms the trade of essential life-support commodities as "scope expansion".
Carrying capacity is always limited by whatever necessity is in least supply
as Justus von Liebig realized nearly a century and a half ago. If one region
has water but no good topsoil it's carrying capacity is limited by the lack
of topsoil. Another region may have good soil but insufficient rainfall.
There the carrying capacity is limited by water. If a way can be found of
making up for local scarcity by taking advantage of distant abundance as by
diverting water from region A to water crops in region B the total carrying
capacity of the two regions combined can be increased substantially. We can
put this in the form of a formula, carrying capacity of A+B > carrying
capacity of A + carrying capacity of B. >From the ecological point of view
this is why people trade but trade has historically been limited by the
amount of energy that could be supplied or applied to the transport of
materials. Fossil fuels have temporarily erased that limit. The end result of
chemical fertilizers plus powered farm machinery plus the increased scope of
transportation and trade was not just a threefold leap in crop-yields but a
similar explosion of human population which has grown fivefold since the dawn
of the industrial revolution.

All of this would be well and good if it were sustainable. But if it proves
not to be then a temporary exuberance of the human species would have been
purchased by an enormous unprecedented human tragedy. Well, where are we now
in this?

Arable crop land until recently was increasing because of clearing of
forests, putting new lands into production and through irrigation. Now the
arable cropland globally is decreasing because of salinization of soil,
because of urban growth, erosion. Topsoil created over tens of thousands and
millions of years is decreasing. In the US great plains about half of the
original topsoil is gone, much of it washed down the Mississippi river into
the gulf of Mexico. The nutritional quality of our food is actually
decreasing on a yearly basis due to the gradual demineralization of the soil
and this has been actually documented through measurements taken by the US
department of agriculture since the 1940's. The number of farmers as a
percentage of the population is of course decreasing. In the US at the turn
of the last century something like 70% of the population were directly
involved in food production. Today that number is more like 1-2% of the
population. The number of domesticated crop-varieties is decreasing
dramatically due to the consolidation of the seed industry. Not that many
years ago in Bali there were 200 varieties of rice, each adapted to a
different microclimate of that small island. Now there are only four rice
varieties being grown in Bali. Of course the global population, as we've
seen, is still growing. We're adding about 80 million people per year
currently. We reached 6 billion just back in 1998 and since 1998 we've added
another nearly half billion, roughly the total size of the population of
North America just since 1998 or 1999 . As we've already seen again, grain
production per capita globally decreasing now. A total of 2,000 million tons
produced in 2004 which was a record in absolute numbers but for the past
decade and a half population growth has outstripped grain production so
there's actually less available on a per-head basis. And according to World
Watch Institute we may be within sight of a decline in total production
figures, in other words absolute production figures in food and especially
grain.

Meanwhile the global climate is of course increasingly destabilized resulting
in relatively minor problems for farmers now but these are problems that are
likely to grow to catastrophic proportions just within the next decade or two.

Meanwhile available fresh water is decreasing. In the US 85% of fresh water
use goes toward agricultural production requiring the drawing down of ancient
aquifers at far above their recharge rates. Globally, as water tables fall,
ever more powerful pumps must be used to lift irrigation water and of course
those pumps require ever more energy usage. By 2020 according to World Watch
Institute and the UN virtually every country in the world will face shortages
of fresh water.

The effectiveness of pesticides and herbicides is also decreasing. In the US
over the past two decades pesticide use has increased 33-fold yet each year a
greater amount of crops is lost to pests which are evolving immunities to
pesticides faster than chemists can invent new poisons. And then of course
oil production is peaking as we talked about it in some length last night.
That of course makes machinery more expensive to operate as oil prices goes
up. It makes fertilizers more expensive to produce and it also makes
transportation of food more expensive. And this, I believe, may be the single
factor that brings all of these other problems that are like simmering crises
to a full boil. The state of dependency on fossil fuels has become enormous.
In the US agriculture is responsible for well over 10% of all national energy
consumption. Over 400 gallons of oil equivalent are expended to feed each
American each year. About a third of that amount goes toward fertilizer
production. About 20% to operate farm machinery, about 16% for transportation
of food, 13% for irrigation, 8% for livestock raising not including the
livestock feed and about 5% for pesticide production. Now this doesn't even
include the energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to
retailers or cooking. Trucks move most of the worlds food although trucking
is ten times more energy intensive than moving food by train or barge.
Refrigerated jets moves a small but growing proportion of food almost
entirely, of course, to wealthy industrial nations at 60 times the energy
cost of sea transport. Processed foods make up three quarters of global food
sales by price though not by quantity. This adds dramatically to energy
costs. For example a one pound box of breakfast cereal may require over 7,000
kcal of energy while the cereal itself provide only 1,100 kcal of food
energy. All of this is fairly apparent to anyone who bothers to study the
modern food system with an eye to it's sustainability. There is therefore
already widespread concern over this subject and debate over the problem of
how to avoid an agricultural Armageddon. Within this debate two viewpoints
have emerged. The first advocates further intensification of industrial food
production primarily via the genetic engineering of new crop and animal
varieties. The second advocates ecological agriculture in it's various forms:
organic; bio-dynamic; permaculture; bio-intensive and other methods.
Critiques of the latter course contends that traditional chemical-free forms
of agriculture are incapable of feeding the burgeoning human population. Here
is a passage by John Emsley of University of Cambridge from his review of
Vaclav Smils book "Enriching the earth, Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the
Transformation of World Food".

Here is the passage: "If crops are rotated and the soil is fertilized with
compost and sewage, thereby returning as much fixed nitrogen as possible to
the soil it is just possible for a hectare of land to feed ten people
provided they accept a mainly vegetarian diet. Although such farming is
almost sustainable it falls short of the productivity of land that is
fertilized with artificial nitrogen. This can easily support forty people and
on a varied diet."

Okay. But given the fact that fossil fuels are non-renewable, limited in
extent, it will be increasingly difficult to continue supplying chemical
fertilizers in present quantities. Nitrogen can be synthesized using hydrogen
produced from electrolysis of water with solar or wind-power as a source of
electricity but currently no ammonia is being commercially produced this way
because of the uncompetitive cost of doing so. To introduce and scale up that
process would require many years and considerable capital investment. The
bio-engineering of crop and animal varieties does little or nothing to solve
this problem. It is possible to fantasize about mays or other crops modified
to fix nitrogen in the way that legumes do but so far efforts in that
direction have failed. Meanwhile the genetic engineering of complex
life-forms appears to pose unprecedented environmental and human health
hazards as has been amply documented by Dr Mae-Wan Ho among many others. The
bio-engineering industry itself consumes fossil fuels and assumes the
continued availability of oil for tractors, transportation, chemical
production and so on. That's one side of the argument. Those arguing in favor
of small scale ecological agriculture tend to be very optimistic about it's
ability to support large populations. For example the 2002 Greenpeace study
"The Real Green Revolution, organic and agro-ecological farming in the
south", while acknowledging the lack of comparative research on the subject
nevertheless states: "In general it's thought that organic and
agro-ecological farming can bring significant increases in yields in
comparison to conventional farming practices. Compared to green revolution
farming systems OAA is thought to be neutral in terms of yields although it
brings other benefits such as reducing the need for external inputs.
Eco-agricultural advocates contend that there is plenty of food in the world.
Existing instances of hunger are due nearly to bad policy and poor
distribution. With better policy and better distribution all could easily be
fed well into the future. Thus given the universally admitted harmful
environmental consequences of conventional chemical farming the choice should
be simple. Some eco-agricultural proponents are even more sanguine and
suggest that permaculture, bio-intensive or bio-dynamic methods can produce
far higher yields than can mechanized chemical-based agriculture and
experiments have indeed shown that small scale bio-diverse gardening can be
more productive on a per-hectare basis than mono-crop megafarms and in some
cases by far. However, some of these studies tend to ignore the energy and
land productivity costs of manures and composts imported onto the studied
plots. In any case, and there's no controversy on this point, permaculture
and bio-intensive forms of agriculture 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. 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.
According to widely accepted calculations humans are presently appropriating
about 40% of earths primary biological productivity. It seems unlikely that
we, as a single species after all, can do much more than that. Given the fact
that fossil fuels are limited in quantity and we're already in view of the
global oil production peak the debate over the potential productivity of
chemical genetically engineered agriculture versus that of organic and
agro-ecological farming maybe relatively pointless.

We must return to a food-system that is less fossil fuel reliant even if it
does prove to be less productive. How we might do that is suggested by
perhaps the best resent historical example of a society in a fossil fuel
famine. Here I want to talk a little bit about the instance of Cuba in recent
years and I know there's gonna be a presentation on this subject later on but
I hope to just set the stage for that. I'm looking forward to seeing it
myself.

Of course Cuba, back in the 1980's, was more reliant on fossil fuels for
agricultural production than even the United States. Cuban farmers were using
more fossil fuels per acre than American farmers. So the collapse of the
Soviet union at the end of the 1980's was a catastrophe for Cuba. Their oil
use was reduced by over 50%. At that time the Soviet union, which was the
worlds first or second foremost oil producing nation at that time, was
exporting oil to Cuba at such a discount that the Cubans was actually
re-exporting some of that oil for a profit to earn foreign-exchange income.
So that simply went away at the end of the 1980's. Oil use was reduced by
over 50%. Per capita energy use in Cuba fell to 1/15'th to 1/20'th of US
usage. Since that time Cuba has been in the process of changing from an
industrial society to an agrarian society and they have emphasized biological
solutions to their various energy and social challenges. They found that
their focus is to build human resources through education and of course Cuba
produces more doctors per capita than virtually any other nation in the world.

Here's what happened. In 1991 Soviet personnel left Cuba and economic
subsidies which had amounted to something like 6 billion dollars a year
vanished. The GDP collapsed by 85% in the first two years. As a result of all
of this the Cuban people suffered. They lost weight, on average 20 pounds per
person. A 30% per capita decline in calorie consumption from food. There were
some recorded cases of blindness from malnutrition but probably the full
scope of the effects of malnutrition in that society will not be known. A
whole generation of Cuban children grew up malnourished. There was of course
a major decrease in the material standard of living. So what did Cuba do
during what they came to call the Special Period? Well, at that time there
had been already some Cuban organic agronomists who had been advocating for
the adoption of more organic agricultural methods within Cuba and for the
most part their advice had been falling on deaf ears. But once the fossil
fuels became much more expensive, weren't available, these agronomists were
called in and basically given free reign to redesign Cuba's agricultural
system. They abandoned the Soviet industrial model of agriculture. They broke
up the large state-owned farms into smaller private plots and co-op farms.
They basically went organic because they had to, because they didn't have the
chemical fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides. Meanwhile they maintained
their free decentralized medical system and used their limited oil resources
to generate electricity because to them electricity was actually more
important. That was providing the absolute necessities of their minimally
industrialized way of life. So they had to save fossil fuels wherever they
could so they deemphasized the private automobile and they began moving
people around by ox-cart and these giant vehicles that they call a camel
which is basically a tractor trailer-rig in which they cram about 300 people
in the trailer. They also found a new use for traffic-cops. Traffic-cops now
would stop any car on the road that had empty seats and make it wait until
enough hitchhikers showed up to fill up the car. As a result of all of this
the Cuban society did survive. The economy, as of 2005, is growing again
steadily but at a very slow rate. Food production is up to about 90% of the
pre-crises period but at nowhere near the pre-crises level of energy inputs.
There's been very little new housing, mostly remodeling of existing housing
structures. That fact is mostly due to the high energy cost of cement which
is very short supply. Transportation is still very much an ad hoc improvised
basis. Everybody shares every vehicle on the road. Cubans adopted a mostly
vegetarian diet but they did so involuntarily. This wasn't for any sort of
ethical reasons, it's just that there wasn't much meat to go around because
meat production required more energy. Meat eating went from twice a day to
twice a week. Of course therefore they needed to supplement their diets with
more vegetable sources of protein. They decreased their consumption of wheat
and rice because they simply weren't appropriate to food production on the
island. With less transportation they had to move producers and consumers
closer together, so this meant more urban gardening. Encouraging the growth
of gardens all throughout the cities like Havana. Any kind of empty land was
immediately put into agricultural production and rooftop gardening was
adopted. Rural areas improved their education for farmers. Many people moved
from Havana to the country. In order for this to happen they had to raise
salaries for farmers above the salaries being offered for office workers in
the cities. So this encouraged people to move from the cities to the
countryside to participate in agricultural production. As a result of all of
this of course their is very little obesity now in Cuba due to the healthier
diet and more physical work. So let's look at some pictures.

Much of this information or all of these pictures are from my colleagues Pat
Murphy and Faith Morgan of the organization Community Service in Yellow
Springs Ohio who've made a number of trips to Cuba specifically to study the
Cuban response to energy famine and how this may offer us lessons for how to
deal with the coming energy famine in the rest of the industrialized world.

They found usefulness for raised-beds which help with hand labor.
These raised-beds can be built over existing pavement as on parking lots and
even city streets.
The modernized agrarian; this man earns more than an engineer.
Immediately they began breeding more oxen in Cuba because they realized that
oxen would be necessary and of course horses tend to compete with people for
grain because horses need to eat grain, oxen don't.
So they decided oxen would be a better way to go than horses and they
immediately began breeding oxen for traction animals.
I mentioned rooftop gardening.
Very widespread throughout Havana and the other cities but also rooftop
raising of food animals like chickens, hamsters and rabbits.
This is a picture of downtown Havana and you can see a really considerable
amount of food production right there within the city.
The transition to a non-fossil fuel system will take time.
The Cubans took fifteen years to arrive at where they are now.

We have to emphasize here that we are discussing a systemic transition. We
can't just remove oil in the forms of agro-chemicals from the current food
system and assume that it will go on more or less as it is. Every aspect of
the process by which we feed ourselves has to be rethought. Given the
likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur
at a rapid pace backed by the full resources of national governments. Without
cheap transportation fuels we will have to reduce the amount of food
transportation that occurs and make necessary transportation much more
efficient. This implies increased local food self-sufficiency. It also
implies problems for large cities that have been built in arid regions that
are capable of supporting only small populations on the regional resource
base.

Think of places like Las Vegas, Nevada or even Los Angeles, California. How
much food can be grown in those places? We will need to grow more food in and
around cities certainly. Currently Oakland, California is debating a food
policy initiative that would mandate the growing of 40% of the vegetables
consumed in the city within 50 miles of city center by 2015. If the example
of Cuba were followed rooftop gardens would result as well as rooftop raising
of food animals as we saw. Localization of the food process means moving
producers and consumers of food closer together but it also means relying on
the local manufacturing and regeneration of all the elements of the
production process from seeds to tools and farm machinery. This would appear
to rule out agricultural bio-engineering which favors the centralized
production of patented seed varieties and discourages the free saving of
seeds from year to year by farmers. Clearly we must minimize chemical inputs
to agriculture both direct and indirect such as those introduced in
processing of foods. We will need to introduce draft animals in agricultural
production and as the Cubans found, oxen may in many instances be preferable
to horses because of the need of horses for grain their tendency therefore to
compete for humans for carrying capacity. Governments must also provide
incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. I think it would be
a mistake simply to think in terms of the need for a larger agricultural
work-force. Traditional agriculture requires social networks;
intergenerational trust and bonding and knowledge sharing. We need not just
more workers but a rural culture that makes agricultural work rewarding.
Farming requires knowledge and experience so we will need education for a new
generation of farmers but only some of this education can be generic. Much of
it must be of necessity locally appropriate. It would be necessary as well to
break up the corporate megafarms that produce so much of todays cheap grain.
Industrial agriculture implies an economy of scale that is utterly
inappropriate and unworkable for post-industrial food systems. Thus
land-reform will be required in order to enable small holders and farming
co-ops to own their own plots. In order for all of this to happen governments
must end subsidies to industrial agriculture and begin subsidizing
post-industrial agricultural efforts. There are many ways in which this could
be done. The present regime of subsidies is so harmful that merely stopping
it in it's tracks and doing nothing else would itself be advantageous. But
given the fact that rapid transition is essential, the offering of subsidies
for education, low-interest loans for land purchase and support during the
transition from chemical to organic production would be essential. Finally,
given the carrying capacity limits that we've been discussing, food policy
must include population policy. We must encourage smaller families by means
of economic incentives and we must improve the economic and educational
status of women in poorer countries around the world. All of this sounds like
a very tall order but the alternatives: doing nothing or attempting to solve
the problem simply by applying more technological intensification will
certainly result in dire consequences. In that case existing farmers would
fail because of fuel and chemical prices. All of the worries of existing
trends mentioned earlier would intensify to the point that the human carrying
capacity of earth would be degraded significantly and perhaps to a very large
degree permanently. In some, the transition to a fossil fuel free food system
doesn't constitute a utopian proposal; it is an immense challenge and will
call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society but in
the end it is the only rational option for averting human tragedy on a scale
never before seen. Thank you very much.

© 2009 Post Carbon Institute





  • [Livingontheland] "Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply"-Richard Heinberg transcript, Tradingpost, 12/04/2009

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