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Lessons From the Oil Patch
Why “the end of cheap food” isn’t automatically a good thing
Tom Philpott, Gristmill
A decade ago, a barrel of oil fetched little more than $10. While the bargain-priced oil gushed, SUVs roared out of dealer lots and carbon emissions rose steadily. To a lot of people concerned about climate change, the time seemed ripe for a steep jump in oil prices.
The end of cheap oil would usher in a new era in which people learned to value energy, understand the ecological costs of burning it, and conserve. Pricy oil would send a “market signal,” teaching us profligate Americans to consume less, and more thoughtfully.
Or so a lot of greens thought.
For years now, similar thinking has centered on food. Food prices dropped steadily in the post-World War II years, and today Americans spend less (as a percentage of income) feeding themselves than any other people on earth. And cheap food is not merely an American phenomenon. As The Economist recently reported, global food prices, adjusted for inflation, fell by three-quarters between 1975 and 2004.
But to a multitude of people — including writers Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and Barbara Kingsolver — the triumph of cheap food amounts to a Pyrrhic victory.
Their argument — one I have made myself — goes like this: to remain profitable while churning out astonishing amounts of cut-rate fare, the food industry has to shrug off the costs of (in economists’ terms, “externalize”) all sorts of environmental and social damage. In other words, cheap food requires companies that can exploit labor, animals, and natural resources ruthlessly.
Natural resources being finite, such exploitation is, by definition, unsustainable. Then, of course, there’s the problem of quality. By making cheapness the main goal of food production, we court the maladies of overconsumption: diabetes, heart trouble, and all the other ills that have surged in the past generation.
Well, we critics of cheap food will have to find something new to carp about: Food prices are on the rise for the first time since the early 1970s.
Grist contributing writer Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
(20 December 2007)
Does Less Energy Mean More Farmers ?
Jason Bradford, The Oil Drum
Among the cadre of folks who think about food systems and sustainability in the U.S., there’s a concern about the number of farmers and their age. Only about two percent (5,802,000/295,410,000 in 2004) of the U.S. population is part of a farm family, and the average age of principal owners of farms is about 60 years. Since mechanization and the fuels that power machines are what enable such a small agricultural labor force, is it reasonable to assume that a decline in fossil fuels will require more farmers?
Others, such as peak oil educators Richard Heinberg and Sharon Astyk, have suggested this will indeed be the case, even going so far as to put a rough number on the future farmers of America. Their estimates are based on looking at the proportion of farmers in an early to pre-industrial economic system in the United States, when about a third of the population engaged in agriculture. They then adjust for current population size to arrive at the admittedly tentative figure of 50 to 100 million farmers (or members of farming families) needed to feed a population of 300 million.
As these authors point out, not only is the absolute number very large compared to today, but given the age of the current crop of farmers it implies that a rapid education of youth will be required to keep bread on the table. Given the importance of this topic, I feel that more diverse and sophisticated forms of analyses are needed. Just as we use multiple lines of evidence to understand the evolution of life, oil depletion, and climate change, we need to look for confirmation from many angles. Furthermore, better knowledge potentially gets us closer to grasping the scale and rate of change required to cope with the problem in the same way that depletion rates in existing fields and net exports analyses do in the oil situation, or the timing and consequences of melting ice sheets and release of methane from warming permafrost do in the climate system.
Perhaps we can validate or refute this scenario by further use of the comparative method. The comparative method is what Heinberg and Astyx used in their analyses-comparing a future scenario to a potentially analogous historic past. In the analysis presented here, I take as a given that the United States (and other high energy consuming industrial countries) will have less energy available in the future, at least of the type currently used in mechanized agriculture.
…Conclusions
While I would appreciate more work towards the questions posed here (and contact me if you have ideas and skills to help), I also caution against analysis paralysis. There are multiple reasons why agriculture needs to undergo a profound shift and spending too much time trying to circumscribe the problem may delay us moving towards appropriate responses. I believe the broad vision of what needs to be done already exists-food that is more local, organic, produced, processed and distributed by renewable energy systems, and using cultivation methods that put the soil health first. Making that argument to those who are reluctant or suspicious, however, could use some better research that connects the dots credibly between energy depletion, climate change, food security, and demographics.
… Jason Bradford has written previously on “Relocalization: A Strategic Response to Peak Oil and Climate Change”. Jason has a Phd in Biology and has written/published on the topics of relocalization and ecological economics. He is the founder of Willits Economic Localization (WELL) and runs a CSA in Willits, CA.
(21 December 2007)
The post got a good response with over 180 comments posted at The Oil Drum. Related from TOD: POLL: TOD readers and food growing..
Resisting the Globalization of Food
The Return of the Bread Riot
Ashley Dawson, CounterPunch
On September 13th, 2007, Italian shoppers, led by a confederation of consumer organizations, staged one of the country’s first pasta strikes. In the elegant but rather grimy deindustrialized city of Turin where I’m currently living, erstwhile home to the FIAT auto factories, there were few signs of consumer anger boiling over. No pickets of irate housewives dressed up in inflatable spaghetti costumes outside local groceries, no sign-wavers at the local farmers’ market. Was this simply another risible example of the famous Italian proclivity to strike over virtually everything?
Italian consumers were encouraged to boycott pasta for the day in order to protest against price rises of up to 27% over the last year. Pasta was, however, simply a symbolic target. The consumer organizations that masterminded the strike asked shoppers to stay away from markets in general in order to protest against price run-ups in everything from gasoline to rent to the cost of a cup of espresso in the local café. Carlo Rienzi, head of one of these organizations, called on the Italian government to pass a decree opening markets on Sundays for special direct sales of food by farmers to consumers, which, he argued, would help lower prices in general.
Italy is not the only country experiencing growing political turbulence over the cost of staple foods.
…Where are such apparently isolated protests leading? It might be useful to get some historical perspective by considering one of the world’s most famous bread riots. On the morning of October 5th, 1789, a small girl began banging a drum and chanting a protest in one of Paris’s markets. According to the historian George Rudé, this protest quickly drew a large crowd of sympathetic women, who set out together on a march to make their complaint heard to the royal household in Versailles. Their numbers grew quickly to six or seven thousand; as they marched, the town guards were disarmed and their weapons were handed to men who followed the crowd of enraged women through the streets. We all know where this protest led ultimately.
Yet the march on Versailles, like the storming of the Bastille earlier that year, was motivated not by anger over the conspicuous consumption of royals like Marie Antoinette, but rather by the far more immediate issue of the cost of bread.
Ashley Dawson is the author of Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Post-Colonial Britain and co-author with Malini Johar Schueller of “Exceptional State: Contemporary US Culture and the New Imperialism”.
(20 December 2007)
