The Cartography of Oil - Part 2: Food

The systems that produce the world's food supply are heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Vast amounts of oil and gas are used as raw materials and energy in the manufacture of fertilisers and pesticides, and as cheap and readily available energy at all stages of food production: from planting, irrigation, feeding and harvesting, through to processing, distribution and packaging. In addition, fossil fuels are essential in the construction and the repair of equipment and infrastructure needed to facilitate this industry, including farm machinery, processing facilities, storage, ships, trucks and roads. The industrial food supply system is one of the biggest consumers of fossil fuels and one of the greatest producers of greenhouse gases.

Only 21 percent of overall food system energy is used in agricultural production, 14 percent goes to food transport, 16 percent to processing, 7 percent to packaging, 4 percent to food retailing, 7 percent to restaurants and caterers, and 32 percent to home refrigeration and preparation.

Oil fuels our food from fertilizer to pesticides. It fuels the tractors on the farm and the trucks that take it to market. The markets are everything from your local grocer to the huge food processing plants. Oil fuels the food processing plant, the food packing plant and the truck that hauls its remains away to the landfill. Since the 1950s, crop production has relied on fertilizers to replace soil nutrients. Nitrogen fertilizer production relies heavily on natural gas to synthesize atmospheric nitrogen. Oil is needed as well to mine, manufacture, and transport these fertilizers around the world. China is now the top consumer of fertilizer with use rising beyond 40 million tons in 2004.

World grain production has tripled over the last century. New grain demand has been met primarily by raising land productivity through higher-yielding crop varieties in conjunction with more oil-intensive mechanization, irrigation, and fertilizer use, rather than by expanding cropland.

Processed foods now make up three-fourths of total world food sales. A two pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its baking. Processing breakfast cereals uses about five times as much energy as is contained in the cereal by itself. All together the food-processing industry in the North America uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

However, all this is about to change. Many experts suggest that oil output is expected to peak in the next few years and steadily decline thereafter. We have a very poor understanding of how the extreme fluctuations in the availability and cost of both oil and natural gas will affect the global food supply systems, and how they will be able to adapt to the decreasing availability of energy. In the near future, environmental threats will combine with energy scarcity to cause significant food shortages and sharp increases in prices - at the very least. We are about to enter an era where we will have to once again feed the world with limited use of fossil fuels. But do we have enough time, knowledge, money, energy and political power to make this massive transformation to our food systems when they are already threatened by significant environmental stresses and increasing corporate control?

from Harper's Magazine:

The Oil We Eat: Following the Food Chain Back to Iraq
By Richard Manning

"The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly." - Balzac

The journalist's rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We'll follow the energy.

We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don't get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

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