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by Peter A. Belmont / 2009-01-13
© 2009 Peter Belmont
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Although threats to world food supply include excessive (and still growing) population and (global warming induced) changes in climate, a big threat not widely discussed is the decline—and ultimate effective exhaustion—of petroleum supplies. Large-scale agriculture, today, is a process of manufacturing food from oil as a raw material. Fertilizer and pesticides are made from oil. We should not be sanguine about the emergence of yet-another ‘technological fix’ or ‘quick fix’ for the run-out of oil.
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An article mentions that, in the “densely inhabited regions of the equatorial belt, demand for food is already soaring because of a rapid growth in poplation” and warns that half “of the world’s population could face severe food shortages by the end of the century as rising temperatures take their toll on farmers’ crops, scientists have warned.”
But global warming is not the only threat to agricultural productivity.
The exhaustion of petroleum supplies may similarly and disastrously reduce agricultural output. Even as we pray for yet another “supply-side” “technological fix” (this time, seeking a replacement for petroleum), we might give thought to “demand-side” adjustments, namely, reduction of human populations and/or habits of consumption.
Because of population surges in the 1950’s-1960’s, there was an anticipated food shortage which was responded to by a “technological fix”, the so-called “Green Revolution”, a Faustian bargain whereby world-wide agricultural yields were substantially increased (thus staving off the then-anticipated food shortages) in return for a great intensification of the petroleum-basing of agriculture.
The “Green Revolution” was “Faustian” for two reasons.
First, the new-made ability to feed more people was not coupled to an effective practice of population-reduction. (Only China, among the world’s nations, even tried to slow population growth.) The ability to feed an excessive population might have “bought time” for a slow but steady reduction of human populations. Once warned that food shortages were a possibility, mankind might have set about reducing the size of the population.
Instead, of course, as we would expect with our instinct-driven and thought-impaired humanity, the possibility of feeding more people was seized upon as license to increase the population without apparent limit. People thought (as, it seems, they still think) that there will always be a “technological fix” and therefore there can never be a serious threat, e.g., to food production, which requires changing habits and life-styles. So, with starvation imminent in 1960, a “Green Revolution” made it possible for mankind to create a much larger population for which starvation will again be imminent in 2010 or 2020 or 2100.
Second, the fact that world-wide agriculture became petroleum-based meant that feeding the world’s people came to depend on greatly increased emission of greenhouse gases, speeding global warming on its way:
”Agriculture, including land-use changes for farming, is responsible for an estimated 17 to 32 percent of all human-induced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the report notes. And massive overuse of fertilizers is the biggest contributor to these emissions within the industry. More than half of all fertilizer applied to fields ends up in the atmosphere or local waterways, according to Greenpeace, and each year, the equivalent of 2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide in the form of nitrous oxide, a GHG some 300 times more potent, is emitted because of fertilizer use.” See Worldwatch report here.
Even if, in 1960, global warming had not yet become a “hot topic”, it was certainly known, in 1960, that the world’s supply of petroleum was finite and being exhausted quickly. The amount of recoverable oil was not known with precision but the fact that it was finite and that oil use was increasing exponentially was well known. And the consequence of exponential growth in the use of any non-renewable resource (examples include oil stored in underground oil reserves and water stored in underground water reserves called “aquifers”), namely, the fairly speedy exhaustion of that resource, was also well known, at least to those with mathematical training.
(The math lesson: A bank account with $1,000,000.00 in it today will require 10,000 years of withdrawals of $100/year to become exhausted. If, however, the annual amount withdrawn, initially $100, is increased by 10% each year, the account will be exhausted in about 73 years. THIS IS ASTONISHING! (THIS IS FRIGHTENING!) This is a useful way to think about the exhaustion of any non-renewable resource under exponentially growing depletion.)
The increases of population facilitated by the “Green Revolution” accelerated the draw-down of petroleum even as they increased the pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We would be right to worry about food production both because of global warming and because of the need, as matters stand, to use petroleum as a “feed stock” for food production. But while we contemplate these threats, we should also recognize that these “threats” are perfectly predictable consequences of human population growth.
Going to ‘green’ energy is of importance not only for transportation and home heating and operation of manufacturing industries—it is of importance also for production of food.
For the long-term future (known also as the steady-state), a non-fossil-fuel based agriculture, an agriculture which does not contribute to global warming, would depend on sunlight (or wind or tide or geothermal energy) not only to grow crops but also to produce any fertilizers or pesticides which might be used and to transport harvested crops to markets. ‘Harvesting’ that energy is a large project as yet scarcely begun.
The size of the human population cannot increase forever and must stabilize and even decrease at some point. The question is whether the mechanism for this will be voluntary, rational, cooperative, and peaceful, or whether it will come about as the consequence of calamities such as wars, plagues, starvation, and climate change. Our knowledge of these matters is not complete. But it is sufficient to show that “family planning” for the family of man is a project whose time has come.
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