But Won't We Prioritize Energy Resources for Agriculture?
Sharon May 18th, 2008
Quite a lot of people who are worried about peak energy aren’t very worried about the future of food, and see no reason to change our agriculture - they note that only 2.2 percent of oil goes to agricultural production, and they quite rationally observe that because agriculture isn’t a very large user of oil, it would only make sense to prioritize energy for agricultural production. And if that’s the case, why would we ever have shortages? So I thought it would be worth considering the question of whether and how we would allocate energy resources to agriculture, say, either because of a contraction in available supply or a sudden drastic price rise.
Now for some time, I’ve been answering this argument with historical examples about what actually has happened in places like Cuba, North Korea and the former Soviet Union. I point out that even though Cuba only lost 85% of its oil imports, and that the remaining 15% technically left plenty for agriculture, they entered into a food crisis almost immediately. The same is true with the Soviet Union. And since Cuba, with (for good and ill) a strong centralized government were not able to prioritize oil for agriculture, why do we imagine that we will be able to rapidly overturn our practices and do so?
The reason very small shortages or price rises can have such a shock in a system is that there is no rationing system in place – no way of sorting out between someone who grows potatoes and someone who makes Bratz dolls. They are both entitled to as much oil as they can get their hands on.
That’s not to say that the problem would be completely resolved, in the event of either a radical reduction in availability (the most likely problem here is diesel shortages) or ins a super-spike of energy prices. The problem is that there are so many highest priorities in any society – do you cut back on police protection? Medicines? Ambulances? Heat for the freezing? Public transport? The transport of relief supplies? Military engagements? In times of radical shortage, prioritizing becomes the struggle of competing priorities, political interests, black markets and a host of other factors, none of which ever quite get what they need. But I never felt like this answer quite got to the heart of things – and there’s a tendency for such discussions to lead back to discussions of communism vs. capitalism, which inevitably lead us away from anything useful.
And then recently Gail the Actuary, who is one of the clearest and most rational voices in the Peak Oil movement made a comment on a thread on The Oil Drum that helped me fully articulate that difficulty I’d had with the assumptions written into that question. She said,
“I’ve discovered when you say, “There may not be medications”, I get a lot of arguments that this is the highest use, so of course we would have medications, even if we had nothing else. Also, if I say there may not be plastics, someone believes that since they take such a small share of the petroleum, surely they will be spared. And so on.”
I was very much struck by how clearly and simply Gail articulated a concept that is so difficult for so many people. Taken in isolation, the idea that we’ll prioritize one thing or another does make a lot of intuitive sense - as long as we are talking about some discrete, neatly isolated thing “agriculture” or “medications.” So it is easy to think that the reprioritization of resources will be both logical and inevitable - but the problem is that intuitive responses aren’t always right. In actual working systems, there are a host of first priorities, all of them extremely difficult to triage.
The other difficulty, as I keep observing here, is that it is always difficult (not impossible, merely very difficult) to turn a big ship around. That is, we have a system for the allocation of resources – we call it “ability to pay.” We ration food, housing, energy and everything else based on income – if times are tight, we strip everything from the bottom (an ever expanding group), rather than taking a little away from everyone. It is almost certainly true that this system will probably be modified as fewer and fewer people are able to pay, but it is also the case that many powerful interests will have every reason to try and keep things going as they are.
And it won’t just be the people in power fighting it. Americans are so deeply attached to the notion that money tells you something about someone’s virtue and moral state that it will be tremendously difficult for even those just barely getting by to to accept that those who are already failing to get by should get a share of the remaining resources.
And, of course there’s the reality that the 2.2% of oil in agriculture doesn’t include processing, refrigeration or transport. The total essential use of oil in agriculture is probably much closer to 8-10% of usage. This is an estimate derived from Dale Pfeiffer’s definitive _Eating Fossil Fuels_ – I’ve lowered the energy costs in some places, but in others, they cannot be avoided – meat cannot be moved, for example, from midwestern feedlots without refrigeration in trucks or supermarkets. To refine our usage more than that would require massive dietary and infrastructure changes – and while these probably will happen, they may not happen much in advance of a crisis, if at all.
Nor does that statistic include the implications for natural gas, since we are already seeing fertilizer shortfalls and people priced out of fertilizer markets. As I’ve discussed in other posts, the combination of high input prices and high grain prices that aren’t keeping up is keeping farmers in many cases from responding to high grain prices. In some areas, agricultural foreclosures are rising again in the US, while in poor nations, agricultural land is simply going unplanted because of the lack of availability or high cost of fertilizers.
At $125ish a barrel oil, we are already seeing complex mixed signals in agriculture – while rising prices (driven by oil costs and biofuels growth in large part) and demand say “plant more,” rising prices for inputs and fertilizers are saying “plant less.” It is hard to say what the final result of this battle will be – neither food nor energy prices are headed down. But (and it is early days yet, so this is uncertain) it seems as though in the poorest parts of the poor world, rising energy prices are overwhelming even skyrocketing grain prices. If that pattern extends to the rich world, it is not out of the question to imagine, as was seen in the Great Depression, farmers shooting their cattle and leaving them to rot in the fields because they can’t afford feed for them and can’t transport them to market. At the same time, Chicagoans were rioting over the price of food, and Chicago schoolchildren posted malnutrition rates of 25%. Will it happen this year? Probably not, unless the price of oil truly skyrockets. But what is happening now to the world’s poor may happen to us as we become poorer, and it would be foolish to deny that
It is certainly possible that price stabilizations and subsidies to enable farmers to buy scarce or very expensive energy may well be put in place. It is almost certain that if they are, non-farmers will find ways to take advantage of them, and that problems of access and distribution will still remain. It is also hard not to imagine that any centralized infrastructure for obtaining and distributing these resources would itself be energy intensive, subject to corruption and intensely difficult to manage.
Over at Running on Empty 2, Roberg Waldrop some time ago calculated that the US has sufficient oil to run agricultural and food transport infrastructure for the whole populace for upwards of 100 years, relying only on the accessible oil in the ground in the lower 48 states. And this should be reassuring to all of us.
But in order to imagine a system in which oil was carefully and wisely used, we must imagine one or multiple central organizations who put personal greed and powerlust aside, and allocate energy with perfect equity. We must imagine that most of us would be willing to put our old system, and its equation of poverty and immorality aside, and create a more equitable strategy of rationing food and energy. We would have to imagine the rich being willing to do with a simpler, staple diet and fewer biofuels just as the poor do. We would have to imagine Americans giving up their fierce allegience to the idea that they are entitled to what they have earned, without consideration of everyone else. And that might be difficult, given how little we are finding we have in fact earned. And perhaps most importantly, we must imagine a world in which we are prepared to give up with minimal complaint a host of other things we now value enormously - in order to ensure that everyone has food.
While these things are within the realm of technical possibility, I think it is generally wiser to imagine smaller systems, relocalized economies and systems of distribution that rely minimally, if at all, on fossil fuels, and can readily dispense with them in their absence. My own take is that while it is possible to imagine us allocating energy wisely to agriculture it is best not to count on it.
Sharon
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Great post as usual Sharon. I’m not counting on any solutions that are much past my nose… so I’m prepared to walk if I need to get anywhere and eat what grows within that walking distance. That means a lot of potatoes, greens, and whatever I can grow myself and encourage my neighbors to grow more than likely. I guess I better get crackin’, I haven’t even planted the potatoes yet, nor much of anything else. I’ve been wallowing around in a dither about lack of “space” and such, but these “problems” are surmountable and as such need to be addressed asap. One of my prep challenges this week is to map all the wild blackberry patches I can find in a few miles radius. Where’s my tennis shoes?????
There are some problems with this analysis.
Firstly, as I’ve noted before and as Sharon has agreed, about half of all food production in the world is done with no fossil fuel inputs at all. A good part is done with very little – things like an Indian farmer using a gallon or two of diesel a month to power an irrigation water pump. And the products are transported about without fossil fuels, too, on carts and so on.
Most of the fossil fuel inputs into agriculture, direct or indirect, occur in the developed West. And the extra production we get from that goes largely to livestock. Even before the biofuels nonsense, 60% of US maize went to livestock, and only 19% to export. And if you look at the history of grain production and consumption in the West, that’s what you find – as production went up, most of the extra went to animals, not humans.
If people grow enough wheat to eat a loaf of bread a day and then grow twice as much, they don’t eat two loaves of bread a day, they give half the wheat to a cow or pig and then eat that later. So our fossil fuel inputs are not really used to make more grain, but to make more meat. Which frankly we can live with a lot less of.
And overall, around the world we produce twice as much food as we need, though we throw about a quarter of it away in the West. Why are there hungry people, then? Well, we have 800 million hungry, and 1,000 million overweight people. Hmmm…
So, half the food is grown without any fossil fuel inputs at all, and half with it. Let us imagine that the world fossil fuel supply dries up overnight, and let us imagine that all the land now used with fossil fuel inputs will be abandoned, not used at all… food production halves. So instead of twice as much as we need, we have exactly what we need. Would we still have some hungry and some overweight people? Undoubtedly. But the problem still wouldn’t be that we didn’t produce enough, but that we distribute it unfairly.
The idea that if only world food production were high enough there’d be no more hungry people is like the idea that if only we grow the GDP another few percent there’ll be no more poor people in our countries. Again, the problem is not how much is produced, but how it’s shared out.
Cuba did not lose 85% of its oil imports. As I’ve described, Cuba’s oil consumption fell from 224,800bbl/day in 1989 to 180,000bbl/day in 1992, that is a drop of about 20%. It’s now about 203,000bbl/day, thus a drop of only about 5%. But natural gas consumption went from just 1.1 billion cubic feet in 1989 to 26.4 in 1997 and is now 14.126 billion cubic feet annually. And coal consumption went from 254,000t in 1989 to 41,000t today.
Overall, total Cuban fossil fuel energy use went from a high of 0.51 quadrillion BTU in 1989 to 0.458 today, a drop of 10%. This is rather less dramatic than implied here.
Cubans did not go hungry because oil imports dropped, but because food imports dropped. In Soviet days, Cuba used their agricultural land for sugar production, and so had to import most of their food. The hungry period they had was when they changed over from collectivised to private agriculture, and from relying on cash crops to producing more of their own food, plus a year or two of looking for new trading partners.
Thus the lesson of Cuba’s experience is not that if you don’t have much oil you go hungry, but that if you rely on other countries to feed you then you may go hungry. Cuba’s experience shows us the importance of self-reliance, at least nationally.
Cuba in fact did prioritise oil use. They put agriculture first, electricity generation next (about 2/3 of Cuba’s oil use in 1989 and today is for electricity), industry next, and personal transport last. But the fossil fuel inputs in Cuban agriculture never went to staple food growing, they went to sugar, tobacco and so on – cash crops for export.
The difference between the US and Cuba is that as the Cubans are commies, they have government-imposed rationing – they did in 1989 before the collapse of the USSR, they did in 1991-2 in the worst of their times, and they do today. Everyone gets a basic diet of food, a bare minimum which they can supplement in the market. This ration got a bit slim in the early 1990s, but the point is it was there already so wasn’t a shock to Cubans.
Whereas the US as capitalists, as Sharon notes, have rationing by price. So that makes things difficult for the US if you want to ensure everyone gets a fair share and no-one goes hungry. But it’s worth remembering that our Western experience of cheap food is not universal. As you can see here, even in the EU it varies a lot, with the British paying about 8% of household income for food, and the Litvaks almost 30%. Housing has absorbed most of the 18% difference, though consumer goods have taken a bit, too.
Throughout most of history food took up 25-50% of household income, and housing only 10% or so. Fossil fuel inputs let us reverse that ratio. But neither in the past nor today did anyone go hungry because there wasn’t enough food in the world to feed them.
The point is that the most important limits here aren’t physical. We’re more than capable of feeding the world, with or without fossil fuel inputs. The real thing that makes people go hungry is politics, the sort of society they choose to have. And that happens in every country however much or little fossil fuels they use.
What’s needed, then, is not panic about fossil fuel depletion, for adaptation to that is well within our means, but panic about the kind of society we choose to have. 800 million hungry people, 1,000 million overweight people. We’ve chosen that.
I’ve been working on local food security for coming on five years now, and it can be slow going. But I’ve managed to find a group of local farmers willing to start a farmers’ market, and keep with it, even though it’s pretty thankless, inconvienent, and tiring (there are good days too, of course). But I did something this weekend that I think many folks could do in some form, and it worked pretty well, so I’ll put it out there for public consumption. This weekend, I set up a table at our local farmers’ market but instead of selling lettuce and plants, I decided to have an informational booth on vegetable gardening. As an inducement, I gave away free tomato seedlings, an heirloom variety, Pruden’s Purple. The combination of FREE plus a slightly unusual variety was just the ticket. All sorts of people stopped by to get these tiny little things, and lingered to talk, and I found out that lots of people are interested in gardening in our little, rustbelt town (we’re north of Detroit about 30 miles, so if anyone is hunkered down just behind the front lines of peak oil, it’s these people). There are lots of people gardening that I’d expect to see gardening (Italian and Mexican immigrants in their fifties and sixties are legendary gardeners around these parts), but there were also tattooed and pierced young kids in their late teens, and middle-aged women telling me that they usually just grow flowers, but they’ve been thinking they’d like to put in a little garden this year. So I didn’t mention peak oil, but we did talk seed saving, and self-sufficiency, and ideas for staking and pruning tomatoes. Anyhow, I gave away maybe 130 seedlings, to maybe a 100 different families. That’s lots of garden talkin’. I felt less like I was shouting into the wind than I usually do.
What beats better mileage?
Let me put it this way. Before your kid starves, before you lose your job because you can’t afford the gas to get to work – relocate near work.
I see articles picking the ‘greenest’ vehicles. It seems that driving a fuel-efficient h…
Excellent post. I have often been bothered by these reassuring thought exercises, when history shows how often ordinary people suffer to keep industry or economies rolling along. People fear a collapse might come in the future- you only have to look at the decline across multiple measures of living standard in the USA to see that it has already been happening for a couple of decades, little by little. We might be in for a dramatic bump in the slide, or not, but the trend is definitely down.
Shane
IAMB – I’m not sure I do recommend people move closer to their jobs. Generally speaking, I would if your job is quite secure – if you have tenure at a university, are the child of an owner of an economically stable business, are the owner of a stable business or something similar. Otherwise, I think it is probably wrong to make your housing decisions based on an arrangement that may not be long term – yes, all things being equal, if you can live near family and shopping and in a place that is otherwise good, great, pick the one nearer the job. But following the job means following the next job and the job after that. And that may not be economically feasible – every time you sell a house or move a rental, you lose money on transporting your possessions, lose community ties, etc… Transport to work can be managed in a host of ways – bicycling for commutes under 15 miles, carpooling (put four people in a honda civic and you’ve got great per person mileage).
Sharon
Kyle, I appreciate the correction and clarification. I should have specified, btw, that I was speaking primarily of the US when I said “we.” As you note, worldwide, agriculture works just fine without fossil inputs in many places. But even very small farms in the US tend to rely heavily on gas powered transport and inputs transported long distances.
Thanks for the clarification on Cuba.
Sharon
Speaking of farmer’s markets (and their cousins, the garage sales), I have always wondered why these markets and sales are usually held during “banker’s hours” and not while those of us who work can shop them.
So often you see the open times as “8am to 2pm” for farmer’s markets and yard sales go from 9am to 5pm. If they were really serious about selling their wares, why wouldn’t they make it more convenient for those of us who work 8-5?
Our local farmer’s market closes at 5:00pm, just minutes before a 5,000- employee company a block away lets out. Does this make sense?
Jill, I forgot to say what a great idea that is! I’m going to suggest that to our local FM!
Sharon
of course we’ll prioritize. unfortunately, the high priorities will be the military and nascar.
Excellent and interesting article at the BBC on the failure of farming in fertile Zambia. The farmers are still begging for seeds and fertiliser. How many of us are ready now to supply all our own seed stocks? Or will be soon in coming years? And can any of us grow food effectively without importing fertiliser of some sort?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4678592.stm
Zambia: Fertile but hungry
By Peter Biles
BBC southern Africa correspondent
Zambia has had good rains this season
As you drive around the Zambian countryside, to the north and south of the capital, Lusaka, it is sometimes difficult to understand why there is a food crisis in this country.
The fields are green, fertile and full of maize. There is also an abundance of water. It has been raining heavily.
These are promising signs for the forthcoming harvest.
However, the food shortages that Zambians are experiencing at present, with more than 1.2m people in need of food assistance this year, stem from the drought in 2004-5.
Like many other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, this is about far more than just poor rainfall.
There are deeper, long-term problems that cause hunger.
My husband works for a major harvesting equipment manufacturer. And their priorities for their next generation machines are mainly more horsepower with nary a thought to efficiency. Ag may only use 2% of fuels, but farmers will still have to pay the same amount for a gallon of diesel as the truckers, excluding taxes. I think we may one day find that these house-sized combines will be rusting in fields because no one can afford to run them. But for now they are selling faster than they can be built. Forethought is not aplenty.
Sharon argues that there is a potential organized centralized response to a lack of petrol-inputs for agricultural production – but it is unlikely to be achieved given the bottom-up cacophony of competing priorities demanding what available oil there is. Kiashu argues the real issue is not a lack of petrol but a fundamental lack of equitable distribution of food (and all forms of wealth). Both analyses assume we have chosen our present condition and can choose our future one – an assumption that we are fundamentally an intelligent species.
We as a species are currently exhibiting the biological phenomenon of ‘population overshoot’ – a term used by ecologists to describe a species whose numbers exceed the ecological carrying capacity of the place where it lives. I, personally, have never met a member of an intelligent species – but I can imagine what one is like. And one thing I can imagine an intelligent species not doing is exceeding its carrying capacity which results in a painful collapse of population numbers and an overall degradation of its environment.
Its fun to wax philosophical about who we are and what we should do – what is right and just (and even beautiful). It’s another thing to face the facts – we are a very capable species of primate that has utilized its unique capability to control exothermic reactions (fire) to increase its population numbers far, far, far beyond what the planet can carry.
The ability to control fire does not make us fundamentally different than any other animal – nor does our appreciation of beauty, our language, our social behavior, our tool-making, our opposable thumbs, or our humor. Our ability to control fire simply makes us, in the present epoch, capable of outstripping all other species in resource utilization and population growth. But, like all species, our overshoot will collapse. It may not be from a lack of resources – it will likely be from a climatic shift brought about by our use of fire, breaking hydrogen and carbon bonds. But overshoot is still overshoot whether it results from outstripping resources or from activities that fundamentally alter the environmental paradigm (the stable Holocene climate) which provides support.
Forget about intelligent responses – and start thinking about how to best prepare your children for the future. That’s the smart thing to do. Leave “intelligence” to the science-fiction movies of aliens bending space and time in flying saucers. If you’re lucky, your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be waxing philosophical around the campfires of the future.
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