The empire of cheap food is crumbling
You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food. Need this be spelled out any more plainly? It is time to consider that the stage has been set for petroleum-induced famine.
We have “innocently” accommodated rising population with greater and greater food production via technology and the profit motive. But now we have run out of room to grow, as biotechnology, for example, has severe limitations — major ones being petroleum dependence and topsoil loss. The biggest wild card for our existence is climate change, as we see with floods and other extreme weather affecting our food supply.
Jan Lundberg, on culturechange.org, spells it out for any of you who still don’t get it. This is the endgame of empire, the crash is happening, civilisation is coming to its inevitable catastrophic endgame.
Three days is our average food supply around the modernized world, i.e., for cities and their supermarkets. Long-term food stocks have plummeted: “Cereal stocks that are at their lowest level in 30 years,” according to Worldwatch institute in its most recent Vital Signs. This is exacerbated by increasingly weirder weather, compounded by the oil price/supply pressure on food. What can interfere with the three-day situation are truckers on strike (as in Europe), extended/repeated power outages, and the inability of the work force to commute to work.
Too many people, relying on faceless corporations to supply their needs. Too much damage to the environment (including the climate) in the name of short term profits for shareholders (and as Derrick Jensen points out in Strangely Like War, much of those so-called profits are subsidies funded by taxpayers, without which many industries would not be economically viable. Derrick talks about deforestation, but the same is true of many if not most big business). Too much power in the hands of too few people, while the rest are encouraged to passively consume the garbage churned out as ‘stuff you need’, and to tolerate the decimation of their communities, enviornment, air and water quality, quality of life…. how bad does it need to get?
the way fleeing (potential) victims of Hurricane Rita did in 2005. Will survivors be the ones who had the fullest gas tanks? Will these survivors also require guns to obtain food outside the city, whether by hunting or sticking up some hapless or well-armed locals?
Culture Change’s reports do not intend to add to hysteria. Indeed, if only there were no reason to be alarmed. But looking at our collective situation, it is difficult to see how wrenching shortages are avoidable. The consequence of reactions to these shortages will not be pretty. Without facing this, and taking action to prevent it, our Ship of Fools is on a course to hit the rocks.
Whether you are relatively “set” — with local food supply, not just money — or you are living from paycheck to paycheck and thus depend on the trucks coming into the supermarket without a hitch, you will not be immune to some interruption or limitation on the food you have probably taken for granted. As petroleum is in fast-dwindling supply and is relied upon for mass producing our food, shipping it (on average 1,500 miles for North Americans), packaging it and preparing it, we are up against a petroleum-induced famine of our own making. What evil-doer will we blame instead of ourselves?
Who indeed? Who sets government policy supporting big agribusiness and making life hard for small farmers, with taxes and regulations that are impossible for anyone smaller than a multinational agri-corporation? Who paid foreign governments to encourage cash crops and discourage food production for local markets or subsistence? Who decided that humans should eat corn and soya in industrial food, thinly disguised as different brands, foods, when in fact its all the same chemical laden crap? Who decided that the corn should go to feed cars, now that the people are dependant on it and diversity has disappeared in the marketplace.
Most of us were born into this world, and actually do not realise that things could be different, after all as children we were continually told that ‘this is just how the world is’. Some of us have spent our lives searching for alternatives, but even the ‘alternative’ and ‘green’ movements seem to have more interest in human rights, than human resposnisibility. As we have said before, we dont have the answers, aren’t really sure what a different and better world looks like (although ideas from indigenous peoples around the world figure large). But, this civilisation, we know, has to come down, either voluntarily with people moving to a better healthier, more natural and sane way of life, or nature and the consequences of our actions will bring it down. Either way there will be pain, suffering, loss, change. If we choose to make the big changes that are required if humans want to continue living on this planet, the transition will be easier for most. If not, well….
Unfortunately, our socioeconomic problems are too deeply rooted in disastrous treatment of Mother Nature, for even radical changes in federal spending priorities to get us out of this. So, the big one is coming. Looking at the fundamentals of our society and how it has changed from The Great Depression of the 1930s, we are in for something much worse than those days when the family farms were intact. What is implied for the big one on the horizon, according to optimistic activists such as Joanna Macy and David Korten, is “the great turning.” Doesn’t sound too scary, so I hope they’re right. They will be right, but they seem to skip the unpleasant bit about collapse.
The empire is crumbling, but first we must go through end-stages as the Romans and others had to: increasing debt, falling agricultural output, over-extended military, growing urban population without much productive purpose, etc. But we’re the good guys! — we call our empire’s philosophy “Democracy,” and we are so clever with science. Really, though, we’ve simply done better at distracting the populace and giving them the carrot more often than the stick, apparently. This translates to consumer freedom through more goods. The Big Gulp drink in disposable plastic — who could ask for more? We have had none other than The Empire of Cheap Food. Cheap in the sense that cancer can be had at lower prices than previous generations had to pay. Also, subsidized petroleum (to this day as well) jacked up the food supply and the human numbers.
It’s amazing how really intelligent people can be in dreamland over the possibility of positive change coming to the rescue. It’s not just limited to the technofix. It’s the general idea that people “are becoming more aware,” or “there are more and more people getting into organic gardening, CSA’s (Community Supported Agriculture), permaculture” and the like.
The changes we need are indeed more far reaching then most of us realise. Too few people are taking any of it really seriously. Government and big business refuse to do anything, business as usual, too many misplaced vested interests cutting down the forests, poisoning the seas and soil, encouraging us to be stupid.
Meanwhile, with a 100-year flood on the Iowa corn fields — where erosion on monocropped, depleted soil killed by petroleum pesticides and fertilizer and mechanical tilling — we are in for a hell of a summer. Is your food secure? Are you gardening, saving seeds, and protecting precious land and water?
The food price increases have something to do with oil prices that have doubled in a year. And the oil prices have something to do with peak oil. And peak oil has something to do with wasting the Earth headlong into deprivation and ecological destruction. And it’s about civilization as a runaway train. If you don’t agree with the metaphor, just try getting off. Crash must come, and come it will, and soon. I hope I’m wrong that: You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food.
That would be our concern when the price of oil can skyrocket (which it is already doing) — if we were prudent. The price of oil is far too low when there are still countless people driving cars unnecessarily. Apparently these drivers don’t find global warming to be as a big deal as “the economy.” Because it’s money, and only money, that can change some people — until they find they cannot eat their money.
Where I sit, the plants are crying out: It’s near 100 degrees Fahrenheit two days in a row in bone-dry San Francisco. It’s the wild deviations from the averages that are deadly to life.
