Food and peak oil

[PainRack]

Well...... as we all know, our agriculture is now heavily based on oil. Ranging from machine tractors, petrochemical fertilisers, plastics for packaging and the transport network, oil forms a critical component of our world food supply.


So, assuming you have the power, how would you rennovate our world food supply to prepare for peak oil? While any such practice will be highly disruptive and probably economicall unprofitable, try to diminish any disruption your suggestion will have.

[Darth Wong]

Well...... as we all know, our agriculture is now heavily based on oil. Ranging from machine tractors, petrochemical fertilisers, plastics for packaging and the transport network, oil forms a critical component of our world food supply.

So, assuming you have the power, how would you rennovate our world food supply to prepare for peak oil? While any such practice will be highly disruptive and probably economicall unprofitable, try to diminish any disruption your suggestion will have.

Mexican immigrant manual labourers. If the economic situation gets bad, pampered white service-industry workers (these people would have to be "broken in", however, and would have a high drop-out rate until starvation becomes a real possibility).

[TithonusSyndrome]

What do I plan to do? Make myself too valuable via an education in nuclear power for the Powers That Be to steamroll over me or let me starve.

What can humanity at large do? Hell if I know. What will they do? Move for lebenstraum, like all desparate nations do. Again, I simply hope that my education makes me too valuable for the US Army to consider shelling anything too near to me, or for the Canadian Armed Forces to conscript me.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I don't see fertiliser as being that bad, supply-wise, given, so long as there is renewable energy somewhere, you can produce it via the Haber-Bosch process. No, what concerns me more is water and top-soil, not fertiliser and manpower.

The US is running dangerously close to using it's last few centimetres of top-soil for this ethanol boondoggle, which is highly lucrative when you consider gov't subsidies. This, in turn, is affecting crop yields for food (though not to the point of shortage concerns, just price) and also using far more water to produce such crops to such scales. This isn't helped by more investment in tar sands and the like which also require huge amounts of freshwater. The water can be replaced by desalination, but this is highly energy intensive and when energy is at a premium it will be tough. Look at Australia now, specifically the east coast. They could have solar desalination averting a record drought that could make the region uninhabitable. Talk is cheap, actions are much different. A crisis that requires no amazing new technology or thinking or industry and is readily affordable was still not picked up in time.

The affect climate change has cannot be understated either, with drought hitting most normally used areas of agriculture in the US and otherwise non-arable land coming into the zone of agricultural use, though with no eco-sphere beforehand to prepare it for arable use, it likely will be useless e.g. frozen tundra thawing.

[PainRack]

The problem with fertilisers isn't whether there is going to be enough. Its going to be the cost.

Increase the cost of fertilisers enough, and you have a problem where small farms can't exist. This becomes extremely problematic, when one considers how Peak Oil will lead to the decentralisation of society in nature.

That, or food prices are going to become highly inflated in communities with marginal arable soil. Which will bring along its own attendant problems.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Food prices are already going up leaps and bounds globally as it is, though this is down mainly to the bio-fuel boom and rising inflation with a collapsing dollar. Grain production has also been falling for years, though still healthy in supply for the meantime.

[PainRack]

Just out of interest.......... what does anyone think of silvaculture, the growth of trees to act as food and other resources? While forest plantations have a long investment period before they mature, and similarly require vast amount of transportation resources, they have multiple uses that would be beneficial. For example, they could easily serve as sources of paper or biofuel as well. lol....maybe GE can provide us with a tree that can have multiple economic uses as well as environmental.

[tim31]

Look at Australia now, specifically the east coast. They could have solar desalination averting a record drought that could make the region uninhabitable. Talk is cheap, actions are much different. A crisis that requires no amazing new technology or thinking or industry and is readily affordable was still not picked up in time.

In one of those painful meteorological whims, large areas north of Sydney are currently underwater following torrential rains, and a few people have been killed. It's still a drought, though.