Peak Oil and Food

SPOG (Singapore Peak Oil Group) had an interesting meeting last Saturday. I (2nd from left) gave a briefing to the group on my Peak Oil presentation to MTI’s Energy Planning Division and we brainstormed on how to engage a wider audience on the subject. Choong Yong (dunpanic, first from left) felt we should approach it from a universal interest of Singaporeans, food. (3rd from left: Chardy, Toh Chye and Ee Mien)
Over the last couple of days, I managed to squeeze some time on this. Below are my findings.

1. Food is Energy

Most of you wouldn’t know but we are literally eating fossil fuels. In “The Tightening Conflict: Population, Energy Use and the Ecology of Agriculture“, Giampietro and Pimentel built on earlier research to derive how industrialized agriculture in the US uses 10kcal of energy (exosomatic, e.g. gas used in harvesters) to produce 1kcal of food.

More than 10 kcalories (kilogram-calories or “large calories”) of exosomatic energy are spent in the U.S. food system per kcalorie of food delivered to the consumer. Put another way, the food system consumes ten times more energy than it provides to society in food energy.

You might be skeptical about the high 10:1 ratio, but consider these uses of fossil fuels in your average commercial farm:

• pesticides are made from oil;
• commercial fertilizers are made from ammonia which is made from natural gas;
• tractors, harvesters and trailers are run on petroleum;
• food storage systems (refrigeration) run on electricity (which comes from coal, gas or oil) or gas;
• food processing is powered by electricity;
• the food distribution network is entirely dependent on oil;
• most food is delivered to you packaged in plastics, which comes from petroleum; and
• (in the US) the average piece of food is transported over 1,400 miles.

Once you agree on the amount of fossil fuel energy that goes into the food you eat, it’s easy to understand why increasing oil prices will result in increasing food prices.

2. The Oil>Food>Population (Vicious) Cycle

The 20th century saw the biggest jump in the world’s population in our entire history. And there’s a website that’s telling me the world’s population right now is around 6.58 billion. Now, you don’t have to read Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968) or Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972) to know this: we’ve roughly added the entire population of the US from 2000 to 2004 but not anywhere near the amount of resources (land, water, food, energy).

Historically, when agriculture was ‘powered’ by manual labour, population has been capped by-and-large by the limited amount of food available. Then, in 1945, the Green Revolution happened and farmers started using new techniques such as irrigation, chemical fertilizers & pesticides and mechanized harvesters to industrialize the agricultural sector. Interestingly, it was the Rockefeller Foundation that initially funded the program (yes, this is the Rockefeller of Standard Oil, the original oil conglomerate in the US).

So you see, the availability of oil created the abundance of food which lead to the boom in our population. I call this the Oil>Food>Population cycle.

It’s really all and well if there’s more oil to be made available. But, when the rate of oil production slows, food production will tumble and people will go hungry. That’s the vicious side of this cycle.

3. Food Sovereignty

The term “Food Sovereignty” was coined by Via Campesina in 1996:

Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self reliant; to restrict the dumping of products in their markets; and to provide local fisheries-based communities the priority in managing the use of and the rights to aquatic resources. Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production.

When food prices keep the pace of rising oil prices, it is the poor that will be hungry first. Against this background, food sovereignty takes on added importance because the presence of domestic agriculture production will:

• cushion the rate of increase in imported food prices;
• make avail alternative (local) sources of food; and
• enable the poor to feed themselves by working on the farms.

It is no wonder that more and more countries are taking action to re-structure their agriculture both at both government- (UK, Australia) and community-levels (Vermont, USA).

4. There’s Almost Zero Agriculture in Singapore

I did some number crunching on statistics reported on Singapore’s AVA website (www.ava.gov.sg). (Note: I didn’t use data on eggs because it was reported in numbers rather than weight. So, take note, we do produce some 2% of our own eggs)

As you can see from the chart above, we grow very little of our own food. There’s no pork, beef, mutton or duck. And, I’m not sure if rice imports comes under Vegetables or is that out of the picture as well.

Well, it’s kind of ok now because Singapore is a rich little nation and we focus on comparative advantages such bio-medical sciences, hi-tech manufacturing, banking, tourism, etc to bring in the big bucks. And right now, that kind of pays for all the food we want to get our hands on: air-flown Australian pork, Brazilian chicken and Swiss chocolates. And as our leaders have alluded of late: when prices go up, Singaporeans will turn on their creative gears and make more money to pay for [blank] (the example given was electricity).

My main concern with food is not with increasing prices, but with supply disruptions:

• What if the Australians and Brazilians decided to reconfigure their agricultural mix and that results in not producing enough pork and chicken to sell to us?
• What if a shortage of fertilizers results in a production collapse of rice in SE Asia?
• What if fishermen really did over-fish our seas?
• What if another Katrina hits an agriculture region?

Supply disruptions, by definition, means you don’t get the goods no matter how much money you have.

Conclusion

Overall, I think the Food approach to Peak Oil is an effective one. The subject matter is close to heart and the impact of oil on food prices is easy to understand.

And if you take this to the average man on the street, what would they say? I hope this will kindle some sense of ownership of the situation at hand. I would even go so far to expect people to ask what they can do today to address the situation. I’ve some answers here but let me hear from you first.