peak food

Another great article from Sharon Astyk. The empire is collpasing, civilisation as we know it, is coming to an end, and in this transition many people are going to find themselves unemployed and underemployed. Jobs as we know them are toast. Without cheap abundant energy most forms of business, commerce and slavery are over.
So, how about creating an income from helping your neighbours feed themselves?

It would be great if all of us had the luxury of putting our community’s food security needs at the top of our agendas, simply because we care. The problem, of course, is the need for us to meet other requirements – to make a living, get food on the table, tend our families, etc… One of the ways we can find more time for this project is to shift some of our income to local food security work. So what kind of jobs are there that allow you to improve your local food economy? How might you make a cottage industry niche for yourself that might simultaneously improve your family’s economic security in tough times, and also help your community maintain a food supply?

Now obviously if you and your partner already work two full time jobs, or you are a single Mom struggling to just get through the day, the last thing you need is a new business. But for the retired, underemployed, unemployed or for at-home parents who might need a little extra income, this offers the possibility of doing good and also keeping the wolf from the door.

So here are some jobs I can think of (I’m leaving out jobs as growers or raising livestock – I’ll do a post on growing and producing food for income next month during the Garden Design class) – I’m sure the rest of you can come up with others.

Let me be clear that anyone dealing with food is going to have to decide how they want to operate in relationship to food laws. Know your local food laws, and know how they are enforced. The recent Manna Storehouse raid suggests that we need to take care. I believe that many food safety policies do exist for a reason – but the fact that they so hugely prioritize the well being of rich corporations, who still can’t keep the food supply safe (witness the current peanut contamination and cyclical contaminations that show up every few months), that we’d be better off allowing more small scale food production. I personally don’t have a lot of problem circumventing the laws, or campaigning to overturn them, but I do want people to understand the risks.

1. Bulk food/local food sales. My friend Joy now operates a storefront that sells bulk foods, local dairy, cheese and eggs, and also makes homemade baked goods and sells sandwiches. Her place operates as a convenience store/sandwich shop and bulk goods store. That might be a little much of a project for beginners, but her example is timely because before she operated her storefront, she did bulk food sales out of her house, ordering bulk foods, repackaging them in smaller quantities for sale and recruiting customers. Her prices are a bit higher than my local coop, but I want her and her family to succeed. This is a great cottage industry for someone – or even for a couple of people at home.

2. Home baker – now food sanitation laws can make any kind of food production at home difficult – most states require certified kitchens, with equipment most of us don’t have. Some of us may have access to certified kitchens somewhere – we may be able to use them for a small fee or even barter for their use during times when they aren’t open, and then sell home-produced food. If you are going to work outside the law, the place where there are the fewest risks is in baking – it is genuinely challenging to poison people with bread. In addition, Amish communities routinely sell home baked goods outside the law, and are mostly ignored, setting a precedent that might be useful. So if you are going to try and set up as a food producer outside of a certified kitchen, I suggest baked goods. In fact, I’ve done this – when our CSA was in operation, we used to include Challah in our deliveries. At one point, we were baking 50 loaves of bread every Thursday, without legal approval. We were very clear with our customers – we were neither certified nor we were certified kosher, although we keep a kosher kitchen and take challah when baking. The bread was a gift, never mentioned in our literature, and not part of their purchase. We still could have gotten into trouble, but I mention this as a possibility.

3. Other cooking – basically, I think the “ratio of things likely to get you in serious trouble” runs this way baking is the lowest because illness from bread is unlikely. Homemade meals or “lunch bags”, delivered to neighbors or brought to a workplace are probably next lowest risk, particularly if you can simply have them pay you for “grocery shopping” enough to cover. I personally would not mess with selling dairy or home canned goods – just in case something goes wrong, but then again, I live in a state with draconian dairy laws. Find out what your local laws are and work with them – or know what you are risking working around them. If you have access to a certified kitchen, or can get some institution to certify a kitchen for the collective good, by all means explore these routes. We are going to need more people cooking – and this is a reasonable source of income.

4. Teaching food storage, preservation and food security. There are a couple of ways you could do this. One is through your local community college extension courses, another is privately. You might run classes out of your home or you might offer private lessons if the market will bear it – you go to their house and help them with their first canning attempts. You will probably need a fair bit of experience and some practice or credentials – my suggestion would be to teach the classes for free a few times through a local coop or health food store, as a volunteer, and then use that to leverage yourself into being able to charge. This will depend on the market and local interest – but it is worth a shot.

5. Canning on shares – if you can find a certified kitchen, what about preserving other people’s food for them? They could pay you, or they could give you a portion of the preserved food as part of the deal – which, if it was canned in a certified kitchen, you could then sell.

6. Produce sales - you talk to local gardeners who grow enough extra to want a little cash, but not enough to be worth setting up a stand. Find 5-10 of these and ta da – you pay them for their extra strawberries and sweet corn and you sell it, either from an actual produce stand at the farmer’s market or through a stand at your house, and you keep the markup. You can do eggs this way too, and even local crafts, soap, etc…

7. Food access expansion. When Eric and I were caring for his grandparents, his grandmother wanted very much to buy local, fresh food. The difficulty was that at first, she was nervous about driving to unfamiliar areas, and later, unable to drive herself. It was easy enough for us to pick up extra produce when we went to our local farmstand. And gradually we noticed that other seniors in our rural area had the same problem – they missed the fresh raspberries and really “chickeny” chicken of their youth, but trips to the farmer’s market were hard – they were often tired or relied on other people to take them shopping. Extra stops and out of the way areas were simply too overwhelming. So, for a time, we’d stop by and pick up extra produce for them too. Now this was a not-for profit thing, but the seeds of a business are there – either shopping on comission for those too busy or unable to get out, or transporting people to farmer’s markets or farmstands in order to increase demand for local food.

8. Set up pantries. I suspect there are some people out there concerned with food storage who have more time than money – they want to build food storage, but don’t have time to clean out space, set up a pantry and stock it. So you be the “provident pantry” dude. You volunteer to come over, clear out the shelves, place and pick up the bulk order and put it into buckets. You might also offer menus and suggestions for using food storage. I should note that I generally shy away from strategies that mostly involve serving the affluent, but in this case, I actually think food security is one of those things that serves everyone – everyone in the community is better off when people have enough to eat.

9. Teach cooking classes – teaching people to cook bulk staple foods and to adapt their diets to food storage and local eating is important work. If you haven’t taught before, do it as a volunteer a few times. Consider seeing if you can get local grant money from any organization to cover your time, so that you can offer classes for free for those who may need them but can’t afford to pay – many towns have budgets that might locate a few hundred dollars to pay you to help low income folks be able to make better use of low cost foods. These classes can be taught anywhere, though – through churches, out of your home, to teenage homeschoolers and even through workplaces.

10. Combine items, but don’t ”cook” them – there are plenty of grey areas here that might allow you to sell home produced foods, but without getting into the legal mess of selling cooked items. You can mix teas, spice mixes, beans for soup mix, make flour mixes for gluten free or specialty baking, make herbal tinctures (don’t do this unless you know what you are doing and are familiar with the laws about making health claims for herbal medicines), and otherwise take other people’s products and mix them without doing anything that can get you in trouble.

Ok, other suggestions? The reality is that with almost 70,000 jobs gone in just one day yesterday, a lot of us are going to need ways to do good work and make a living.

Endgame 4, by Charles Hugh Smith, at his Of Two Minds blog.

The endgame isn’t limited to the global financial meltdown or the complete repudiation of existing debt, policies and financial structures; it includes the production of abundant food with cheap abundant energy and the resulting fertilizers and pesticides.

Knowledgeable reader Bart D. from Australia recently provided an eye-opening report on the endgame in agriculture. We all know highly productive agriculture depends (like everything else) on petroleum to move products and power equipment, but it’s not just transportation which is dependent on fossil fuels: it’s the fertilizer, too. And the same endgame applies to all other traditional resource extraction structures as well. Here are Bart’s comments:

It seems like a lot of observers who are following the financial problems are being insidiously distracted from the real ‘crisis’ looming large over the future.

The entire economic system seemingly requires abundant and cheap energy to enable the stupendous amounts of waste that a modern economy creates through its function.

It now likely that we can no longer look to the past to estimate the future. The key condition of abundant resources and spare capacity of the earth to provide for an expanding human population in probably no longer valid.

The very first time that people in developed countries experience a real shortage/ unavailability of fuel/food and discover what happens when a system gets compressed by a steadily sinking resource ‘ceiling’ … we need to expect severe ramifications.

At this point I haven’t seen anyone predict whether the developed nations of the world can gradually decline to a more equitable standard of living …. Or if the demands for war to keep a greater share of the resources to ourselves gains traction and results in the re-conquest/colonisation of africa.

I just can’t see a way beyond 2020 that doesn’t involve a massive slide in wealth for people of developed economies or a very serious de-population event (ie military or socio-economic war) that brings the total global population back into balance with what the planet needs to provide us with to live our current lifestyle.

It seems like any investment that isn’t related to good agricultural land and the capacity to farm it and protect it …. Is not really a relevant investment for the future we are heading towards. Marc Faber has picked that idea correctly.

I work in Rural Business and I can see very grave challenges facing our ability to avoid the biggest killer of people throughout history: Famine. We need too many resources, that are now in serious supply decline, to keep going as we are.

Its not realistic to ‘go organic’ at our current population level and expect to feed everyone … and that’s without the growing problem of climate uncertainty adding to the mix. There IS NO ALTERNATIVE food production system that can sustain us. Only when population levels fall to pre 1860′s levels (ie before the age of mineral fertilisers) will things stabilise again.

I believe, from a historic perspective, a breakdown in agricultural systems/ productivity and the resulting famine has been responsble for more civilisations /societies collapsing than any other factor. It’s THE thing that no one is seeing coming right now (whilst they worry about how to ride the stock market gyrations and argue the pro’s and Cons of owning gold or government bonds) and that’s why it will be such a massive event. I suspect that some time before 2020 an ounce of silver will equal the value of a bucket of wheat in some parts of the world. (ownership of gold probably having been restricted to a small military/social elite class).

I feel sorry for the people of Africa. As the weakest continent, with a lot of resources we (and China) want, they can expect the fate of the Native Americans. They’ve got what we want and they’ll be ‘eased’ out of the way. It will be the 1800′s revisited.

At this point I asked Bart about the prospects for alternative energy in the farm-economy, such as wind-generated electricity being used to power tractors.

We have some very expensive new wind farms my region. They barely supply enough electricity to power the basics for our regional population of about 15 thousand people. We still use a lot of power from a coal fired plant 300km away. I can’t imagine having enough generating capacity to run a fleet of farming vehicles.

I also can’t imagine where all the important metals used in battery/electric motor production are going to come from. I believe (according to others) we are on a downwad slope for mining and refining metal ores in that the ore grades are getting consistently lower and therefore requiring increasing amounts of energy to mine and process them into useful things.

The really major problem with Ag production at the moment though is the amount of Natural Gas used to make the nitrogen fertilisers and ag chemicals. We suffered a price rise in nitro fertilisers here of 300% in two years. Ag chemicals to control pests and diseases also had big rises. When inputs get as high as they are now, (and we HAVE to use them to get target yields and quality standards that make farming viable), when you have a dry year and fail to harvest you go broke in a serious way.

That is, the dollar loss of a crop failure now are up to 3 times higer than two years ago. That means 1 bad year now actually puts you back 3 years in dollar terms. Climate variability here has resulted in 3 failed spring rains in a row and many farmers who have been on the land for 4 or 5 generations are walking away bankrupt because they suffered the financial equivalent of 9 years of drought. Also bear in mind that our regional grain output is dropping as a result of bad seasons so we have less to export.

In other parts of our country Multi-million dollar rice mills sit idle now as there is no water in the rivers systems to irrigate. Our government is paying small block fruit growers to walk off the land and bulldoze their orchards. Why? We need the remaining water to supply cities with a combined population of about 1.2 million. Fresh food prices have doubled over last two years because irrigators are short on water and big farms are buying the water from small farms at unheard of prices to keep things functioning.

Last year, water allocations on our Murray river (biggest system in Australia) were at less than 10% of ‘normal.’

America is fortunate that it still has an abundance of good agricultural land with good rainfall compared to your population size. You should invest in low energy ways to make it work well. You, along with Russia and Eastern Europe and New Zealand should be able to feed yourselves and others in a low energy world. I think Australia is OK for food as well, but countries with a high people to ag. land ratio are heading for trouble in a world with restricted access to mineral fertilisers to make the land fertile enough to yield the required food.

All we need now is a war to use up a large portion of available world nitrate production capacity and the problem of ‘peak food productivity’ will become apparent very rapidy.

Anyone thinking they can grow enough food to survive in a suburban back yard in a energy scarce world is deluding themselves. Take a calorie counter, a pocket calculator and a crop maturity/agronomy guide and do the maths. It won’t add up to the daily calorie requirements of the 2-4 people living in an average house with an average garden, especially if your bankrupt government can”t afford to keep maintaining the water distribution network. (see Zimbabwe)

Whilst the majority wring their hands over what impact the financial crisis will have on their retirement plans or employment future … bigger things are happening more worthy of angst and multri-trillion investments.

I don’t understand why Americans are not decending on washington en-masse to stop the rot your congress and federal reserve are pumping out. You need to direct those trillions into re structuring your transport and agriculture sector. Stop the government subsidies that corrupt your farming system. The world won’t want your worthless dollars and financial instruments in the future … but a hungry person sitting in his shimmering desert or the tower blocks of Dubai will give you all the oil you want for some good American food.

Warning of world phosphate shortage.

The problem they don’t mention is that ‘extractable reserves’ will now shrink even without any actual extraction … because of the dwindling supply of cheap energy needed to mine and process what are now ‘low grade’ ores.

From: Limits to Exploitation of Nonrenewable Resources (eoearth.org):

Effects of technology and cheap energy

To some, the history of nonrenewable resource exploitation seems to contradict the idea of an energetic limit short of mining common rock and “burning” seawater [10]. During the past 150 years large increases in the earth-resource base of industrialized society have been attained. By increasing the efficiencies of discovery, recovery, processing, and application of such resources, we have been able to find and exploit leaner, deeper, and more remote deposits. By discovering and developing new methods of utilizing previously worthless materials we have created resources where none existed.

Important in this rapid technologic advance has been a progressive lowering of the cost of energy per unit of work or useful heat obtained. Cheaper energy, along with technological ingenuity and discovery, has greatly extended the availability of nonenergy resources. In 1900 the lowest grade of copper ore economically minable was about 3 percent; today the economic cutoff has fallen to about 0.35 percent; at that grade each ton of refined copper produced requires the breaking, transport, and milling of almost 300 tons of rock and, in addition, the removal of perhaps an equal amount of waste or barren rock.

A great deal of energy-about 26,000 kilowatt-hours [11], the equivalent of the energy in about 4 metric tons of Wyoming coal-is required to produce a metric ton of copper today.

This scenario equally applies to all the inputs (especially fertilisers and transport fuels) used to produce food.

On the upside, a lot more people will be needed in future to grow food. This means fewer lawers, bankers, accountants and other drains on society, who will be now required to work fields and collect human waste to fertilise them.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for this huge economic re-structure to play out. At nearly 10% depletion of oil this coming year (IEA) conversion will presumably be forced onto us in under 10 years. We will then be living in an economic system like Cuba, who lost their energy supplies when Soviet system collapsed.

Chris Martenson (see his website) defined money as a claim on future human labour. I like that.

In order for there to be future human labour, do we need banks?

No.

Do we need Cars, superannuation funds and the stock market.

No.

Do we need food and a means to get it to where it is needed to fuel the humans who do the labour?

Yes. Of course.

Let’s just say that money is a claim on food and water FIRST. Everything else is really only parsley on the plate making the world look good.

We can pressure government to make planning and spending for sustainable food production number 1 priority now … or we can wait for Mr. Market to demonstrate that ‘corrections’ also happen to markets where individual people are the units of accounting.

We also need to ask ourselves if the average billionare really expects to be able to claim THAT MUCH future human labour. What would an average billionare DO with a claim on 100 million man hours (at $10 per hour)? Build Pyramids like an Egyptian pharaoh? Conquer the world like Alexander the great? Can a billionare realistically claim those hours? Either the price of labour has to rise dramatically or a lot of dollars have to vanish to moderate this apparent imbalance. Dollars are vanishing pretty fast now, I wonder if that mean inflation in wages will also kick in soon to bridge the gap?

I wonder what the historic average is for how many man hours per year the top 1% of wealthy men commanded? Maybe a dollar should be re-badged the “Manhour”. Maybe these ‘manhours’ should come with an expiry date to prevent people hoarding them and doing stupid things like making them into derivatives, etc?

Thank you, Bart, for this excellent analysis. There is much sobering “food for thought” in contemplating the endgame depletion of soil, mineral fertilizer and cheap fossil fuels. Clearly, the obsession with “cleaning up the financial sector” so everyonce can start borrowing more than they can afford again is not just misplaced–it’s near-suicidal.

I know many observers believe genetically modified seeds which manufacture their own pesticides and additional nutrition via extra proteins, etc. may provide the answer, but even GM seeds need undepleted soil, water and transport to market. And the history of mono-crops (i.e. losing diversity of the genome via using only one variation) is not exactly encouraging.

Thus GM is easily raised from “potentially useful on the margins” (akin to shale oil) to “technological savior”–that is, a technology “fix” will keep the status quo chugging along with virtually no disruption in present production and price.

Unfortunately we’re dealing with complex, dynamically interacting systems, not a single issue. Thus “magic bullets” like GM grain seeds (patented and owned by corporations, by the way) are doomed to merely marginal effects on a planetary scale.

Although cities have efficiency benefits, and cultural benefits, we believe that most citizens are well advised to move back to the country if they can. Cities are likely to be dangerous places, and we need a lot more farmers.

GM crops will not help. They are prodcts of huge corporations who exist to make their shareholders profits, and as such are likely to fold. All large organisations are likely to fold in the not too distant future, as they need cheap abundant energy. GM isn’t proven safe anyway. Something is killing bees, it may well be GM. And the concentration of such power over the world food system as a handful of US corporation hold now is just plain wrong.

Perennial, drought tolerant vegetables could help. But people need to be moving, and starting to plant orchards and perennial plantations NOW (in fact, before now), but most people are still totally tied up in the growth system to ‘make a living’.

Charles previous endgame articles:

Endgame 3: The End of (Paying) Work
(January 21, 2009)

Endgame 2: The Injury Analogy
(January 20, 2009)

Endgame 1: Chess and Taxes
(January 19, 2009)

Investing in a new food system should be part of the economic-spending package
By Tom Philpott, at Grist.

President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress can’t afford to turn their attention to reforming the food system.

We’ve got two wars to fight, the Middle East conflict is raging again, the financial system is in chaos, and layoffs are mounting. And don’t forget the likelihood of trillion-dollar annual budget deficits for years to come. Food, it’s clear, is just too banal when matched up against those challenges.

That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway.

Even some veteran food-reform advocates accept the “food-must-wait” logic. “I think it’s somewhere between naïve and fairy tale to think [Obama's] No. 1 focus is going to be on food,” Ann Cooper recently told The New York Times. Cooper is the “renegade lunch lady” who’s made a mission of turning public-school cafeterias into places where people actually cook nutritious food. When someone as bold as she preaches patience, it’s time to sit up and take note.

But while food can’t be the nation’s No. 1 priority, we can no longer afford to keep it on the back burner, either. As Michael Pollan made clear in his widely read open letter to the next president last fall, our food system contributes mightily to problems that have been bedeviling our society for decades and show no sign of letting up: dependence on greenhouse gas-spewing petroleum, violent entanglements in the regions where that resource is concentrated, and a flailing, unjust health care system.

Pollan deftly defined the food system as a prime leverage point. Reform it, he argued, and you create opportunities to really treat these on-the-verge-of-metastasizing maladies. Ignore it, he warned, and we lurch ever closer to climate and public-health catastrophes.

Spice Up the Stimulus Package

So the conventional wisdom is wrong; food-system reform can’t wait. But how do we elevate it on the national agenda when the political class is focused on other things? I have an idea that wouldn’t require a radically new program or a major expenditure of political capital.

Obama has already argued that a comprehensive “stimulus package” — a mammoth government expenditure, fiscal deficit be damned — is necessary to revive the economy as it stumbles into the worst recession in at least a generation. The president-elect reckons that the package — a combination of new spending and tax cuts — will cost between $775 million and $1.2 trillion.

This represents a stunningly large claim on the nation’s resources. The new administration and Congress are obligated to spend it in ways that don’t just create immediate jobs, but that also generate positive ripple effects for decades to come. At this point, the great bulk of expenditures seems destined to flow toward repairing the nation’s creaking road-and-bridge infrastructure.

But a better use would be to dedicate a large portion of the stimulus to infrastructure that bolsters local and regional food systems. Despite the dramatic recent success of farmers markets, CSAs, and other initiatives, the great bulk of the food consumed in this country is grown in chemical-intensive monocrops, processed until it’s unrecognizable, and hauled vast distances in highway-chewing, greenhouse gas-spewing trucks. As I’ve argued so many times, that’s because our nation has spent decades building a food infrastructure geared to industrial production.

Think Locally, Act Infrastructurally

As the food industry consolidated over the past half century — aided by the federal government through generous subsidies to commodity farmers and lax antitrust enforcement — local and regional-scale slaughterhouses, canneries, and dairy-processing plants were the economic victims. Reviving that infrastructure would significantly lower costs for the sort of pasture-based, sustainable meat farmers who are now badly undercut on price by large-scale, environmentally ruinous producers. The legendary Virginia farmer Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm reckons that having to haul his cows to a distant slaughterhouse adds a dollar a pound to the price of his grass-fed beef. Why not make federal grants to rebuild the missing facilities that sustainable-minded farmers need to thrive?

Here’s another idea: reinvest in school-cafeteria kitchens. Starting in the Reagan era, the federal government stopped funding school kitchen equipment. From that time on, cafeterias had to finance themselves through sales of food. As a result, schools began to turn kitchens into reheating centers for stuff like pre-fab chicken nuggets. Once staffed by trained cooks, cafeterias became the domain of button-pushing clerks. A generation of school children was thus exposed to flavorless, nutritionally empty food.

Let’s use the stimulus package as the occasion for a new, major investment in school kitchens. And to help staff the newly outfitted kitchens and teach the clerks to cook, the government should launch a Teach for America-style program to lure in newly minted cooking school graduates. (After all, new chefs may have trouble finding work at fancy restaurants over the next few years.)

These are just a few ideas for how the stimulus could be used to bolster local and regional food networks. The truth is that any effective effort to do this will vary widely by region and be accompanied by serious on-the-ground consultation with alternative food-system actors across the country.

Obama has so far shown little appetite for taking on the vested interests that control our food, as evidenced by his choice of a corn-belt politician with agribusiness ties to be the next USDA chief. But maybe he needn’t confront those forces directly. As the design innovator Buckminster Fuller wrote, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

The stimulus gives the new president and Congress the opportunity to give a decisive boost to ongoing efforts to create a new food system. I hope they take it while it’s hot.

By Peter Goodchild at Countercurrents.org

Around the beginning of the twenty-first century, there began a clash of two gigantic forces: overpopulation and oil depletion. The event went unnoticed by all but a few people, but it was quite real. As a result of that clash, the number of human beings on Earth must one day decline in order to match the decline in oil production.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to get those two giant forces into equilibrium in any gentle fashion, because in every year that has gone by for the last few thousand years — and every year that will arrive — the human population of Earth is automatically adjusted so that it is roughly equal to the planet’s carrying capacity. Like so many other animals, human beings always push themselves to the limits of that carrying capacity. The Age of Petroleum made us no wiser in that respect, and in fact dependence on fossil fuels has led us to a crisis far greater than any in the past.

For the average human being, life has always been a matter of bare survival, and the same is true now. Population growth is soaring, whereas oil production is declining. If, at the start of any year, the world’s population is greater than its carrying capacity, only basic arithmetic is needed to see that the difference between the two numbers means that mortality will be above the normal by the end of that year. In fact, a simple calculation shows that before the year 2050 there will be about 3 billion deaths above normal, with a grand total of about 4 billion by the end of the century. Whether there are any partial solutions to that crisis is something to be considered at the end of this argument.

Depletion of oil and other fossil fuels will greatly affect food production. In terms of its effects on daily human life, in fact, the most significant aspect of oil depletion will be the lack of food. “Peak oil” is basically “peak food.” There will be severe problems with transportation (e.g., shortages of diesel fuel and asphalt) and communication (e.g., sources of electrical power), as well as with more immediate aspects of getting crops to grow (e.g., the use of fertilizer and pesticides, and the availability of irrigation). Crop yield-per-hectare is far lower in societies that do not have fossil fuels or modern machinery. Maize production, for example, declines by about 80 percent in the absence of modern technology, as David Pimentel notes in “Food and Energy Resources.” We should have no illusions that several billion humans can be fed by “organic gardening” or anything else of that nature.

Over the next few decades, therefore, there will be famine on a scale several times larger than ever before in human history. Let us refer to those above-normal deaths as “famine deaths.” There will, of course, be famines for other reasons during those years. It is also true that warfare and plague will take their toll to a large extent before famine claims those same humans as its victims.

The increase in the world’s population has followed a simple curve: from about 1.6 billion in 1900 to about 6.1 billion in 2000 A quick glance at a chart of world population growth, on a broader time scale, shows a line that runs almost horizontally for thousands of years, and then makes an almost vertical ascent as it approaches the year 2000. Of all the humans who have ever lived on the Earth, most were born in the last 50 years. That is not just an amusing curiosity. It is a shocking fact that should have awakened humanity to the realization that something is dreadfully wrong.

Mankind is always prey to its own “exuberance,” to use William R. Catton’s term in “Overshoot.” That has certainly been true of population growth. “Do you have any children?” or, “How many children do you have?” is a form of greeting or civility almost equivalent to “How do you do?” or, “Nice to meet you.” World population growth, nevertheless, has always been ecologically hazardous. The destruction of the environment reaches back into the invisible past, and the ruination of land, sea, and sky has been well described if not well heeded. But what is even less frequently noted is that with every increase in human numbers we are only barely able to keep up with the demand: providing all those people with food and water has not been easy. We are always pushing ourselves to the limits of Earth’s carrying capacity.

Even that is an understatement. In the late twentieth century it could be said that we actually went beyond the carrying capacity. No matter how much environmental degradation we created, there was always the sense that we could somehow “get by.” But in the late twentieth century we stopped getting by. It is important to differentiate between production in an “absolute” sense and production “per person.” Although oil production, in “absolute” numbers, kept climbing — only to decline around 2000 or 2010 — what was ignored was that although that “absolute” production was climbing, the production “per person” was not. In the year 1990 there were 4.5 barrels of oil per person per year. By the year 2000 there were only about 4.3. As the FAO has discovered, the same sort of problem was occurring with world grain supplies: although government sources cheerfully tell us that grain production in absolute terms is still increasing every year, what they are not telling us is that because of overpopulation the amount of grain per person is actually declining. There is more grain, but there are more mouths to feed. The same problem of resources “per person” can be seen in the world’s fish catches. We were always scraping the edges of the earth’s carrying capacity, but we are now entering a far more dangerous era. The main point to keep in mind, however, is that, throughout the twentieth century, oil production and human population were so closely integrated that every barrel of oil had an effect on human numbers.

While population has been going up, so has oil production: from about 0.1 billion barrels in 1900 to about 4.2 in 1950, to about 27.0 in 2000. (The data are readily available in many publications, such as BP’s annual “Global Statistical Review of World Energy,” and John Gever et al., “Beyond Oil,” is still valuable.) According to most estimates, the peak was (or will be) around the year 2010. The rest is a steep drop: 20 billion barrels in 2020, 15 in 2030, 9 in 2040, 5 in 2050.

The relation between population and oil production is one of cause and effect. The skyrocketing of population is not merely coincident with the skyrocketing of oil production. It is the latter that actually causes the former: that is to say, oil is the main source of energy within industrial society. With abundant oil, a large population is possible — ignoring, of course, the many other things that might wipe out human numbers anyway. Without that abundant oil, on the other hand, a large population is not possible. It was industrialization, improved agriculture, improved medicine, the expansion of humanity into the Americas, and so on, that began the upward climb, but it was oil that allowed human numbers to triple in less than 100 years. Yes, there are other sources of energy, but these range from the inefficient to the irrational.

Incidentally, carrying capacity does not increase in direct proportion to the number of barrels of oil per person, because as the population goes up there is more strain on the environment. As a result, we were comfortable enough with 1 barrel per person in 1940, but less comfortable with 4 barrels per person in 1990.

Because oil production is the determining factor in population growth, we now have a useful set of numbers: the “existing population” for any given year in the past is roughly the same thing as the “carrying capacity” for that year. We can thereby deduce another useful set of numbers: the “existing population” at the start of any given year in the future must decrease to become the “carrying capacity” for that year. “For any industrial society, fossil-fuel production determines carrying capacity”: that is an immutable law.

Human population will collapse in any year in which there is a difference between the initial population and the carrying capacity. The equation is not complex: (A) the previous year’s population (in billions) can be subtracted from (B) the carrying capacity (in billions) to give us (C) the number of deaths (in billions) by famine. The data for the carrying capacity of any future year can be inserted by looking at similar data for oil production and population in the years 1900 to 2000. Some samples of future years are as follows.

2031 (oil 13.8G bbl): (A) 3.5000 minus (B) 3.4465 equals (C) 0.0535

2032 (oil 13.2G bbl): (A) 3.4465 minus (B) 3.3937 equals (C) 0.0527

2033 (oil 12.6G bbl): (A) 3.3937 minus (B) 3.3418 equals (C) 0.0519

The “normal,” non-famine-related, birth and death rates are not included in those 50 million annual deaths, since for most of pre-industrial human history the sum of the two — i.e. the “growth rate” — has been nearly zero. And there is no question that the future will mean a return to the “pre-industrial.”

Of course, it will often be hard to separate “famine deaths” from “normal deaths.” War, disease, global warming, topsoil deterioration, and other factors will have unforeseeable effects of their own. It is probably safe to say, however, that an unusually large decline in the population of a country will be the most significant indicator of famine.

These equations obliterate all previous estimates of future population growth. Instead of a steady rise over the course of this century (as generally predicted), there will be a clash of the two giant forces of overpopulation and oil depletion, followed by a precipitous ride into the unknown future.

The term “carrying capacity,” as used here, incidentally, is not entirely synonymous with the term as used by William R. Catton. A more-appropriate but lengthier and clumsier term might be something like “temporary feeding capacity.” For the last 50 years or so, human population has always expanded to press against the very limits of what is possible for the oil-production level of any particular year — although in recent years even that tight correspondence has started to collapse.

The figures in the above list can only be approximate, of course, and even the most elaborate mathematics will not entirely help us to deal with the great number of interacting factors. We need to swing toward a more pessimistic figure for humanity’s future if we include the effects of war, disease, and so on.

The most serious pessimistic factor will be largely sociological: To what extent can the oil industry maintain the advanced technology required for drilling ever-deeper wells in ever-more-remote places, when that industry will be struggling to survive in a milieu of social chaos? The future will be anarchy. Intricate division of labor, large-scale government, and high-level education will no longer exist.

If the above figures are correct, we are ill-prepared for the next few years. The problem of oil depletion turns out to be something other than a bit of macabre speculation for people of the distant future to deal with, but rather a sudden catastrophe that will only be studied dispassionately long after the event itself has occurred. Doomsday will probably be upon us before we have time to look at it carefully.

The world has certainly known some terrible famines in the past, of course. In recent centuries, one of the worst was that of North China in 1876-79, when between 9 and 13 million died, but India had a famine at the same time, with perhaps 5 million deaths. The Soviet Union had famine deaths of about 5 million in 1932-34, purely because of misguided political policies. The worst famine in history was that of China’s Great Leap Forward, 1958-61, when at least 20 million died, but probably far more than that.

A closer analogy to “petroleum famine” may be Ireland’s potato famine of the 1840s, since — like petroleum — it was a single commodity that caused such devastation. Cecil Woodham-Smith describes the Irish tragedy in “The Great Hunger.” The response of the British government at the time can be summarized as a jumble of incompetence, frustration, and indecision.

On the other hand, there are elements of optimism that may need to be plugged in. For one thing, there is what might be called the “inertia factor”: the planet Earth is so big that even the most catastrophic events take time for their ripples to finish spreading. An asteroid fragment 10 kilometers wide hit eastern Mexico 65 million years ago, but we are alive today to tell the story.

Somewhat related, among optimistic factors, is the sheer tenacity of the human species: we are intelligent social creatures living at the top of the food chain, in the manner of wolves, yet we outnumber wolves worldwide by about a million to one; we are as populous as rats or mice. We can outrace a horse over long distances. Even with Stone-Age technology, we can inhabit almost every environment on Earth, although most of the required survival skills have been forgotten.

Specifically, we must consider the fact that neither geography nor population is homogeneous. All over the world, there are forgotten pockets of habitable land, much of it abandoned for the ironic reason that urbanites regarded rural life as too difficult, as they traded their peasant smocks for factory overalls. There are still areas of the planet’s surface that are sparsely occupied although they are habitable or could be made so, to the extent that some rural areas have had a decline in population that is absolute, i.e. not merely relative to another place or time. By careful calculation, therefore, there will be survivors. Over the next few years, human ingenuity must be devoted to refining our understanding of these geographic and demographic matters, so that at least a few can escape the tribulation. Neither the present nor future generations should have to say, “We were never warned.”