the critical few words which disguise the real issue - why are world food prices rising so quickly and dramatically when our technologies are so advanced.....the fact is that they are not advanced, our technologies are not sustainable because they are totally reliant on oil and natural gas. The entire agricultural system is designed to eradicate the natural characteristics of our soils at the same time the industrialisation of agriculture has meant that we are almost totally disconnected from food growing. When the internal memo from van de Veer (CEO of Shell) was leaked it was, to my knowledge, the first time the commercial sector admitted where we are with oil and natural gas....he said that the world will not be able to meet the demands for oil and natural gas beyond 2015, we had a paper to the Board of Natural England that came from the Government and gave a worse picture for oil....2014 but a better one for gas. The fact is that technology for finding oil has advanced hugely over a period when new finds are in free fall.
So where are we, world food reserves are at there lowest driven by three factors, failing world crops because of climate change, India and China eating more meat ( 8 tons of corn to produce 1 ton of meat ) and America providing subsidies thinking that they can grow the contents of fuel tanks ( to grow bio fuels enough to sustain the current road transport would require a change from the 70% of land currently growing food ). The political focus is on the economy, energy security and, just about, on climate change. The real crisis for the world, more serious for the UK, is that our entire food supply systems are not sustainable. Look at the signs - nitrate cost rose from £130 per ton to £320 a ton in a year ( made from natural gas ) and Triple Super Phosphate from £180 a ton to £600 in the same period. Food growing is the second largest consumer of oil to transport and all the technological emphasis is on finding alternatives for energy and transport....comparatively nothing is being done on the scale that is needed to find alternative forms of growing food. Our fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, cultivation, transportation, processing, storage and all the other processes in agriculture will become increasingly more difficult. The situation is about to become very serious but we can do something about it, we need to harness both the green and wet mantle that covers the earth, 'relying on today's sunshine and give up on relying on yesterdays' ( who said that?).
No comments:
Post a Comment