Sing it with me:
When you're weary, feeling small
When tears are in your eyes,
I will dry them all.
I'm on your side
When times get rough
And friends just can't be found,
Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down
Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down.
(P. Simon, 1969)
I think Paul Simon’s song will come to mind often in the near future when troubled waters on the horizon swamp the fragile boat many have boarded by taking on a lifestyle bigger than their weekly pay cheque can afford.
Journalist and author Gwynne Dyer addresses actual water woes - linked to financial problems I touched on in PT 1 - that are building up behind a weakening dam in his most recent column ‘Food supply depends on water supply’ and we should all take note.
[Please click here to link to Dyer’s article.]
Financial problems will likely sink many families soon, but water and subsequent food troubles will sink whole countries.
Dyer mentions more than water and food bubbles that will one day burst. He says, “There is the Chinese real-estate bubble, the biggest in history, which may take the whole world economy down with it when it bursts.” But then he adds, ominously, “But nothing compares with the food bubble.”
Okay, my interest was piqued.
Some highlights follow:
the average world price of grain soared by 71% in the last year
it’s a catastrophe for poor countries, not a catastrophe for some in rich countries who spend 10% or less of income on food supplies
climate change and water constraints will eventually make the situation more serious
water and food bubbles envelop and will affect everyone and their wallets and purses negatively
Some readers may be old enough to recall a food price crisis in the early 1970s and that “the problem was quickly solved by the famous Green Revolution, which hugely increased yields of rice, wheat and corn.”
And today some might be lulled into thinking that for every problem there will be a technological solution, so why worry.
There are drawbacks to that kind of thinking.
About the earlier food price crisis Dyer says, “The only drawback was that the Green Revolution wasn’t really all that green. Higher-yielding strains of familiar crops played a part in the solution, certainly, but so did a vastly increased use of fertilizer: global fertilizer use tripled between 1960 and 1975.”
Dyer perhaps assumes we know that depending on vast amounts of fertilizer is very short-sighted so goes on to his main point - future water shortages and food crises. But many don’t think about fertilizer, especially when roast beef is on sale at $2.99 per pound.
Here are a few highlights about fertilizer from ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan:
“When humankind acquired the power to fix nitrogen (and thereby produce fertilizer), the basis of soil fertility shifted from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel.” (pg. 44)
“...synthetic fertilizer opens the way to monoculture, allowing the farmer to bring the factory’s economies of scale and efficiency to nature... fixing nitrogen allowed the food chain to turn from the logic of biology and embrace the logic of industry. Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.” (pg. 45)
“When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn (more than half of all synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn), you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it - or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are higher.)”
“Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food... ecologically this is a fabulously expensive way to produce food (especially for beef @ $2.99 per pound) - but ‘ecologically’ is no longer the operative standard. As long as fossil fuel energy is so cheap and available, it makes good economic sense to produce corn (and many other foods) this way.”
Fertilizer. Fossil fuels. Food. The interconnection in modern times is guaranteed. The cheap price of food is not. As long as we rely on factory scale farms where production is driven by oil, the price of oil will determine the price of food.
Today, with the price per barrel at $86.05 (a real deal when compared to the price of $105 just a few months ago), and nations around the world scrambling to find new sources in more hard to reach places, the price of food will only go up.
Then there’s Dyer’s water issues.
More to follow.
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Please click here to read PT 1 It’s “Another Saturday Night” and I ain’t got no money.
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