“How can the world’s population be fed without the extensive use of fossil fuels in the production distribution and processing of food?”

At the heart of this question is the reality that we have become heavily dependent on oil and natural gas to feed the world. We can assume that the world’s population could never have risen from its pre-oil levels a century ago to present levels without relying on this convenient source of energy which is in fact highly concentrated sunshine stored over millions of years. To say that we are in fact eating oil is not an exaggeration given the obscene amounts of energy expended in getting food to our tables.

If it is such an essential part of providing fuel for our own bodies, why would we contemplate turning off this boost of fossil energy that we use to supplement the yearly allocation of energy from the sun that falls on our agricultural land?

The fact that we desperately need to reduce the greenhouse gas that we are emitting into our thin atmosphere forces us to look at dramatically transforming our food supply systems which are one of the greatest contributors of these climate changing gasses. If we could reduce the level of fossil fuels in our diet we could begin to mitigate against this most serious threat to the stability of our ecosystems. There is an ecological imperative to ask the question posed at the beginning of this article.

Looking in more detail at how we use fossil fuels we can begin to see that many of the problems caused by our food supply systems have their roots in the fact that they rely so heavily on oil and natural gas.

For example we have used oil to dramatically increase the distances between growers and eaters. Producing food in distant lands where labour is cheaper degrades the social fabric and economic viability of the farming communities within the developed north, forcing a heavy reliance on government handouts for survival and making it difficult to find young recruits to take over the farms of the many who are ready to retire.

At the same time the focus of agricultural systems of the majority world of the south are transformed from diverse self sufficiency (though sometimes at a basic subsistence level), to monocultural cash crops for export to the unforgiving markets of world trade. Wealthier farmers and landowners who can afford to import machinery and fertilisers increase their own productivity, driving down the prices and the value of their poorer neighbor’s crop. Stronger pumps are brought in to increase productivity in one area but have the effect of lowering the overall water table, drying wells that others have relied on for generations. Farming families are forced to abandon their farms and many end up migrating to the slums of cities and towns where they can become ‘the hungry’ in need of our aid.

Another example is the huge amounts of natural gas used as a raw material to produce nitrogen fertilisers. This is a cheap, convenient and energy intensive boost to the yields of industrial agriculture but the subsequent lush growth increases the susceptibility of crops to pests and disease, requiring greater use of poisonous chemicals. Repeated application of potent fertilisers can also lead to the depletion of other essential nutrients and burns the life-sustaining humus out of the soil, reducing our inheritance of fertile farmlands to lifeless dirt.

How many examples will it take before we really begin to question whether the benefits that we have gained from using more fossil energy are outweighed by the environmental, social and economic costs? If we concentrate on developing ways to limit the amounts of fossil fuels used by our food supply systems will many of these externalised problems be reduced or eliminated? Is it that simple? Could removing oil and gas from the world’s diet be the common focus of the considerable efforts of social, developmental and environmental activists?

However the most pressing reason for asking the question at the beginning of this article is not ecological, social or economic. It is geological. We are about to reach the peak in the amount of oil that can be extracted globally and the availability of natural gas will peak not long after that. After the economic and social shocks caused by the peaking of these fossil fuels (the beginning of which we are already experiencing) we will have to adapt to the inevitable decline of energy availability, even if all of our dreams of renewable energy come true. The increasing gap between our growing energy demands and the inevitable decline of our most potent source of energy cannot be filled by any combination of renewables - we do not have enough time! We must engage in a process to drastically reduce the amount of fossil fuels used by our food supply systems.