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UK Agriculture, Organic Farming and Relocalisation
Louise and Nick Rouse, The Oil Drum / UK
Among the recurrent issues surrounding peak-oil is food production. Wit the Organic Food Festival visiting my home city of Bristol recently I’ve been finding out that in the UK there are particular peak-oil related problems that farmers and consumers will need to address if they are to adapt to a change in energy supply.
The two key problems I’ve found are transportation of the food we eat and the fertilisers used in non-organic food production.
(19 Sept 2006)
Includes discussion of the cost of food transport modes in MJ/tonne-Km, and the monetary and energy cost of fertiliser. -LJ
Virtual Water Trade and Water Footprints
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
When we manufacture goods, we embed energy in them: that is, their existance means we have already spent a certain amount of energy, no matter what we then do with them.
In a similar way, when we grow crops we are in a sense embedding water within them. If a kilo of wheat takes a thousand liters of water to grow from sowing to harvest, we can, seen from a certain light, think of that kilo of wheat as containing 1,000 liters of water.
When we consider how much water is embedded in the food we transport around the planet, it turns out that there is a massive trade in virtual water. The wetter regions of the world every year ship vast amounts of embedded water to the drier parts of the planet. This has gigantic ecological and geopolitical consequences, and as climate change intensifies, could be a trend which produces great friction.
One helpful concept? Thinking of our water footprints, which, like ecological footprints or carbon footprints, allow us to measure the ways in which our actions echo in the world — in this case, how what we buy, use and eat influences the amount of water (both immediate and virtual) we consume.
(21 Sep 2006)
A fascinating application of the concept of embedded energy to other resources. -BA
On India’s Farms, a Plague of Suicide
Somini Sengupta, NY Times
BHADUMARI, India – Here in the center of India, on a gray Wednesday morning, a cotton farmer swallowed a bottle of pesticide and fell dead at the threshold of his small mud house.
The farmer, Anil Kondba Shende, 31, left behind a wife and two small sons, debts that his family knew about only vaguely and a soggy, ruined 3.5-acre patch of cotton plants that had been his only source of income.
Whether it was debt, shame or some other privation that drove Mr. Shende to kill himself rests with him alone. But his death was by no means an isolated one, and in it lay an alarming reminder of the crisis facing the Indian farmer.
Across the country in desperate pockets like this one, 17,107 farmers committed suicide in 2003, the most recent year for which government figures are available. Anecdotal reports suggest that the high rates are continuing.
Though the crisis has been building for years, it presents an increasingly thorny political challenge for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. High suicide rates and rural despair helped topple the previous government two years ago and put Mr. Singh in power.
Changes brought on by 15 years of economic reforms have opened Indian farmers to global competition and given them access to expensive and promising biotechnology, but not necessarily opened the way to higher prices, bank loans, irrigation or insurance against pests and rain.
Mr. Singh’s government, which has otherwise emerged as a strong ally of America, has become one of the loudest critics in the developing world of Washington’s $18 billion a year in subsidies to its own farmers, which have helped drive down the price of cotton for farmers like Mr. Shende.
At the same time, frustration is building in India with American multinational companies peddling costly, genetically modified seeds. They have made deep inroads in rural India – a vast and alluring market – bringing new opportunities but also new risks as Indian farmers pile up debt.
(19 Sept 2006)
