[Scpg] Is food security the LAST thing we should worry about?

[LBUZZELL at aol.com]

"I suspect we focus on food in part because providing  it appears much more 
possible than, say, keeping the financial, health care, or  automotive 
industries running."
 
_http://www.patternliteracy.com/food.html_ 
(http://www.patternliteracy.com/food.html)  


Is Food the Last Thing to Worry About?
 
Our food system is woefully dependent on petroleum, as writers  such as 
Richard Heinberg (1) and Michael Pollan (2) have eloquently pointed out.  
Soaring food costs have led to riots in some countries, and in unstable nations,  
famines rage regularly. Fears of empty grocery shelves have made food 
security  the centerpiece of many a post-Peak Oil plan, and among those watching 
energy  descent, a common refrain is that the best way to guarantee your 
food supply is  to buy a piece of land and grow your own. 
Yet in the developed world, especially the breadbasket nations  such as the 
US, Canada, and other food-exporting countries, the food network may  be 
one of the last systems to fail during energy descent. In developing a wise  
post-Peak strategy, assessing relative risks is critical. Devoting large 
amounts  of time and resources to events that are less likely leaves us 
unprepared for  more probable difficulties. I don’t want to discourage anyone from 
growing  food—I’m a serious gardener myself and could list dozens of 
excellent reasons  for doing it. But I think there are many reasons not to be 
focusing primarily on  food as the system most likely to fail. This isn’t to say 
that industrial,  oil-based agriculture is invulnerable, let alone 
sustainable. And we may see  temporary shortages of specific foods. But there are 
many reasons why our fears  of a food collapse—particularly when they lead us 
to a go-it-alone,  grow-your-own response—may be distracting us from focusing 
on more immediate and  likely risks. 
First, two notes of clarification: This article is about net  
food-exporting nations such as the US, where I live. In the less-developed  world, where 
food growing has been abandoned for export crops that are sold for  cash to 
import commodity food, the food system is far more vulnerable. And by  “food 
collapse” I mean a prolonged inability to produce essential foods, not  
brief or local shortages of certain items, or high prices while supplies are  
ample. Volatile commodities markets, weather, and the other gyrations of our  
uncertain era mean that temporary or local shortages can always occur. 
Food gets a lot of attention in part because we need it to  survive, but 
also because one solution to a food crisis—growing your own—seems  doable. I 
suspect we focus on food in part because providing  it appears much more 
possible than, say, keeping the financial, health care, or  automotive 
industries running. 
Why would I argue that food collapse in breadbasket nations is not  likely, 
when today’s farming is so dependent on hydrocarbons? Our food system is  
complex—much more so than it needs to be—but many of our society’s other  
structures are far more complex, and thus more vulnerable. Joseph Tainter (3)  
and others point out that complex systems need increasing energy inputs, 
and  eventually reach a point of diminishing returns, so that the costs of 
complexity  eventually outrun its benefits. When inputs decline, the most 
complex systems  are often the first to fail, since they need vast resources to 
maintain them.  With that in mind, we can ask what is likely to fail first 
during energy  descent. That way, we’ll know what we should direct our 
energies toward  preparing for. 
Is it any wonder that one of the first complex systems to collapse  has 
been our financial system? The energy and complexity used in Byzantine  
financial instruments such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default  
swaps, and in moving trillions of dollars through millions of highly  
orchestrated transactions each day, is immensely greater than what it takes to  
grow, process, and ship food. Another system teetering near collapse is health  
care, and it, too, is a fantastically complicated system needing 
sophisticated,  expensive equipment and years of specialized training for 
practitioners, all  administered by an insurance system of equally staggering 
complexity. Thus the  most complex systems are already collapsing. When viewed through 
the lens of  complexity, the relative robustness of the developed world’s 
food system, even  as finance collapses and health care becomes increasingly 
unavailable, is less  mysterious. 
It would bolster my  argument to show quantitative measurements of these 
systems’ relative  complexity, and for these I’ll point to Howard T. Odum (4) 
and his concepts of  emergy (not energy, but embedded energy) and 
transformity. Emergy measures the  total solar energy used directly and indirectly to 
make a product or service.  Transformity builds on this, and means the 
emergy of one type required to  produce a unit of energy of another type. It 
describes conversion losses and  energy quality. For example, think of a food 
chain. A million calories of solar  energy can make a given quantity of 
algae. When plankton eat this, it might  yield 1000 calories of plankton. These 
plankton, when eaten, become one calorie  of fish. Thus the transformity of 
that one calorie of fish is one million  calories: the amount of sunlight 
used at the beginning of the food chain divided  by the one calorie of fish 
produced. The plankton, being lower on the food  chain, have a lower 
transformity: 1000 calories, or a million calories of algae  divided by 1000 calories 
of plankton produced. 
Processes that have higher transformity don’t just need more  energy per 
output. They also contain more energy conversion steps, which bring  
efficiency losses and places for the system to fail. Also, high-transformity  systems 
usually need more complex technologies than processes of lower  
transformity. Plankton are simpler than fish. 
So how complex is our food system? Odum’s work tells us that food  
transformities in industrial cultures are on the order of 25,000 to 100,000  sej/J 
(solar emergy joules input per joule gained). This is low compared to  nearly 
all other familiar goods and services. Odum says that the production of  
paper has a transformity of 215,000 sej/J; electricity, 200,000 sej/J; cement, 
 750,000,000 sej/J; and complex transactions based on digital technologies, 
such  as investment banking, have transformities in the billions or higher. 
If  complexity, transformity, and stability are related—and I think they are
—then  activities of great complexity and high transformities, including 
office jobs,  electricity, communications, and nearly all social and economic 
services, will  be disrupted before food production will be. We’re seeing 
that process unwind  today. Training and supplying an investment banker or 
surgeon is more complex  than doing the same for a farmer. As complexity 
plummets due to energy descent,  jobs and products of lower transformity are more 
likely to remain. 
But even if the food system isn’t all that complex, you might  argue, we 
have paved over much of our farmland and use oil to make food. Let’s  look at 
the numbers. The US is a net exporter of food, and produces roughly 4000  
calories of food per person (5). To stock this larder, the US uses roughly 3  
million barrels per day of petroleum, or 15% of our total consumption (6). 
Thus  the US could cut the amount of oil used by the food system in half and 
still  provide a basic 2000-calorie diet. That requires 1.5 million barrels 
per day or  its equivalent, which should be available for some time. This 
means that neither  complexity nor oil are likely to be limiting factors on 
food production in  breadbasket nations until after the failure of other more 
complex,  energy-intensive elements of our lives. 
Cheap oil has freed us to pour staggering amounts of energy, both  human 
and fossil, into non-essentials, such as the entertainment, recreation,  
tourism, sports, media, and other fuel-gobbling industries. Inexpensive oil lets  
much of the developed world endlessly buzz around in inefficient cars and 
jets.  In other words, 85% of our fossil-fuel consumption is used for things 
other than  food, usually wastefully. As oil becomes expensive we will 
choose to redirect a  modest portion of that 85% away from long commutes, 
non-essential industries,  and other symptoms of cheap oil, in order to feed 
ourselves. It’s likely that as  we round Hubbert’s bend we’ll return to putting 
30-50% of our energy use toward  food production, as has been the case for 
most of human history (7). This  reordering of oil priorities can buy us the 
time needed to reconfigure our  grossly inefficient, hydrocarbon-based food 
system into something far more  localized and sustainable, if we’re smart. 
Another oft-cited argument for food collapse is that fossil-fuel  supplies 
are unreliable. What if foreign producers cut us off? The US currently  
produces about 5.2 million barrels of oil per day. Canada and Mexico are the top 
 two petroleum importers for the US, providing about 40% of our imports, or 
3.8  million bbl/day (8). Thus 9 million bbl/day are currently available 
from nearby  sources. That’s three times the oil used by our food system, and 
six times what  is needed for a basic diet. Natural gas, used to make 
nitrogen fertilizers, is a  critical agricultural resource that also comes from 
relatively stable sources.  Canada provides 95% of America’s natural-gas 
imports. The continent’s  intertwined economies and the realities of geopolitics 
make it probable that  hydrocarbons will flow long enough for the US to 
shift to a less oil-intensive  agriculture. Obviously, oil output will continue 
its decline, and there are  bound to be periodic crises, but the numbers 
suggest that starvation in the US  is far from a certainty. 
Food production is truly the oldest profession. We’re good at it,  we’ve 
been doing it for 10,000 years, and it is a relatively simple system to  run. 
It is at the base of a large cultural pyramid, which makes it fundamental,  
so although disrupting it would be catastrophic, it is also more elementary 
and  thus easier to keep running than all the systems above its level of 
complexity.  There are gardeners in over 71 million American households (9), 
so there is a  sizable knowledge base to help with the transition to more 
local food  production. 
Almost certainly, food  will shift from being a minor piece of the US 
economy to once again requiring  one-third to one-half of our labor and energy. 
The example of Cuba, which in a  few years retooled its agriculture system 
after a sudden and near-total cutoff  of oil, shows that food systems can be 
modified quickly. How long would it take  us to convert the nearest city 
park, or a soybean field that’s growing  feedstocks for newspaper ink and car 
lacquer, into food production if it were  urgent? One season. The recent 
substitution of ethanol corn for soybeans over  vast acreages in a single season 
shows how quickly farmers can respond to new  markets. And as food prices 
rise, people thrown out of work by energy descent  will find jobs growing 
food, as Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton have suggested in  their book, A Nation 
of Farmers. 
As cheap shipping disappears, can we feed ourselves locally? To  gauge 
this, we need to know if there is enough farmland near cities to feed  their 
populations. Researchers at Cornell University found that the basic  calories 
to feed Rochester, New York’s population of 225,000 could be grown on  
existing cropland within 16.5 miles (26.6 km) of the city limits and would cover  
36,000 hectares (90,000 acres) (10). This admittedly simplistic analysis 
looks  only at caloric needs, not overall nutrition. To provide a balanced and 
diverse  diet might require a larger area, so let’s say we’d need twice as 
much land, or  180,000 acres. That area is still within 25 miles of the 
city, close enough to  easily bring goods to market. This could save much of the 
fuel used today to  transport the infamous 1500-mile salad. Plus, the 
Cornell analysis assumes  wasteful conventional agriculture techniques, not 
high-intensity ones that use  local nutrient sources such as composted waste and 
animal and human manure, as  well as other resource-saving methods that 
people dependent on local food would  readily use. And though the largest cities 
might be unable to feed themselves  locally, but it is likely that for them 
we will set fuel priorities to ship food  from more distant farms. 
And it is the reordering of fuel priorities that leads us to one  of the 
most powerful reasons that food supplies are less likely to run out than  
almost any other resource. Politicians understand that hungry people topple  
governments. We’re deeply imbued with cultural lore reflecting this. Most 
people  know little else about Marie Antoinette other than her apocryphal taunt 
to  starving peasants that ensured her rendezvous with the guillotine, “Let 
them eat  cake.” Trotsky noted that every society is only three meals away 
from a  revolution. History shows that any functional state short of a 
kleptocracy will  allow almost every other service—health care, banking, 
sanitation, schools,  transportation, even empire-building—to languish before it 
allows its people to  go hungry. Preserving the flow of at least 1.5 million 
barrels of oil per day  for food will be a critical priority of the US 
government. 
Let me be the first to admit that there’s still some chance of  food 
collapse. Perhaps stupid or corrupt leaders will choose to direct energy  
resources not toward food but to the military or the rich. Or it’s possible that  
the link between the financial sector and food, via the futures and 
commodities  markets, may play havoc with food supplies. And it’s certain that 
adjusting from  today’s food consuming 10% of the average family budget to the 
historical norm  of 30% to 50% will be disruptive. 
Whatever your chosen post-Peak scenario, it’s smart to keep  emergency food 
and water on hand, as much as makes you feel comfortable. But  focusing on 
surviving a food-system collapse reminds me of the story of the  fellow 
searching for his keys under the streetlight. He didn’t lose them there,  but 
that was the only place where the light was bright enough to see. In crisis,  
we often default to doing what we know even if it’s not the wisest action. 
We  can’t individually fix the economy or health care, yet we certainly can 
grow  some food, and that may be why it is central to many post-Peak plans. 
And I  agree: growing food is simple. It’s an ancient skill that is at the 
heart of  human culture, and even in its industrial manifestation, it is a 
robust system  that is less complex and energy-intensive than most of society’s 
other  activities. That’s why I suspect the food system will last longer 
than much of  the rest of the oil society. Although brief disruptions are 
certainly possible,  in breadbasket nations food is more likely than many other 
aspects of our  culture to make it through the transition. 
But for a thousand other reasons, plant a garden anyway. 
References 
1. Heinberg, Richard. “What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?”  
http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/188 
2. Pollan, Michael. “Farmer in Chief,” New York Times Magazine,  October 
8, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html 
3. Tainter,  Joseph. The Collapse  of Complex Societies. 
4. Odum, Howard  T. A Prosperous Way Down. 
5. Putnam, J, J Allshouse, L. S. Kantor. U.S. Per Capita Food  Supply  
Trends
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/FoodReview/DEC2002/frvol25i3a.pdf 
6. I’m taking the middle of estimates that vary from 19%, (see  Michael 
Pollan, above), to 10% (see Martin C. Heller and Gregory A. Keoleian;  Life 
Cycle-Based Sustainability Indicators for Assessment of the U.S. Food  System. 
http://css.snre.umich.edu/css_doc/CSS00-04.pdf 
7. Braudel,  Fernand. The Structures of Everyday Life. 
8. Energy Information Administration. Crude Oil and Total  Petroleum 
Imports, Top 15 Countries.  
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html 
9. National Gardening Association, 2005. Environmental Lawn and  Garden 
Survey. 
10. Peters, Christian J., Arthur J. Lembo, and Gary W.  Fick, 2005. A Tale 
of Two Foodsheds: Mapping Local Food Production Capacity  Relative to Local 
Food Requirements.  
http://crops.confex.com/crops/viewHandout.cgi?uploadid=226 
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Thanks to George Vye for sharing this with  us
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