They Can't Feed Us Oil Forever

by Natasha Chart · 2009-04-08 08:58:00 UTC
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At some point, we're going to have to face up to life after oil. It would be nice if we were prepared, if there were an orderly transition plan for all our population centers.

Our current farming system is putting ever more of our food supply in the hands of a few multinational corporations whose 'high-yielding' varieties are supposed to be the salvation of us all. Yet without reliable irrigation and high inputs of fossil-fuel derived fertilizers, their genetically modified crops are ruinously unreliable performers that destroy rural economies.

Fossil fuels are cheap right now because the economic downturn is artificially destroying demand. Drought conditions are expanding across the world and steady water supplies are becoming a thing of the past in many places. What are we going to eat 50 or 100 years from now when the seed conglomerates have destroyed the natural variety of crops that didn't need artificial fertilizer to produce in a drought, for example?

The people of the Post Carbon Institute have put together a document describing the urgent necessity of sustainably transitioning food and farming (pdf) for a future where we're not likely to have the resources we do now. They note:

... From an energy perspective, industrialization presents a paradoxical reversal. Before the industrial revolution, farming and forestry were society’s primary net producers of energy. Today the food system is a net user of energy in virtually every nation; this is especially so in industrial countries, where each calorie of food energy produced and brought to the table represents an average investment of about 7.3 calories of energy inputs ...

The large seed companies and their friends in Congress keep putting biotechnology and industrial agriculture forward as the solution to all our problems. They know that the fuel supply maintaining the engines of the food system is dwindling, but refuse to acknowledge it. What they need to be asked, every time they make that case is this: what's your plan for feeding us when the oil gets scarce and the weeds are resistant to your chemicals?

They might dismiss the question, but they won't have an answer.

Start planning your community's transition soon.

Natasha Chart
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