Hungry for oil

The fact of dwindling finite fossil fuel reserves is simply non-negotiable – and the implications of it are enormous.

Petroleum has become the lifeblood of both industrialised and developing countries. It would be difficult to find a single product whose manufacture doesn’t directly or indirectly depend on oil or oil derivatives – and that includes the food we eat. As changes in agricultural methods and eating habits have driven the industrialisation of our food supply systems, so has our dependence on oil, for fertilisers, pesticides, packaging and transportation.
The dominance of the supermarkets in food retailing contributes massively to our vulnerability. Rising energy prices have an immediate impact on many of their common practises: “just-in-time delivery”, “warehousing on wheels”, plastic packaging and transportation of processed foods and raw material around the world. We caught a glimpse of how oil dependent the supply of even basic foods is during the fuel protests of September 2000, with supermarket bosses and government ministers warning the UK could be out of food “within days rather than weeks”. The increase in our dependence on imported food in recent decades has been phenomenal: half of all vegetables and 95% of all fruit consumed in the UK now come from overseas.

Future oil price rises will have a massive impact on food security. World grain stocks are at their lowest level in 34 years. In China, the most populous nation on earth, the grain harvest fell by 9% between 1998 and 2005, with the country now an ever-larger presence in global food markets as a result. Escalating food prices in this context are likely to lead to political instability on a global scale, as more people chase fewer food resources. Unless we address the problem now, we could face the prospect of food shortages in the UK – one of Europe’s largest food importers – and the possibility of starvation in some developing countries.

The problem is exacerbated by the growing trend for the large-scale cultivation of crops for conversion into bio-fuels, thus creating competition between food and energy for agricultural resources. This in turn will decrease the amount of land given over to food production as energy prices rise – causing global food shortages exactly when we should be boosting food production to maintain stable prices.

This competition between fuel and food for agricultural production capacity can only become more fierce as the price of fossil fuels rise: so it’s effectively a choice between energy security and food security. Either we use less energy – or we grow and eat less food. Food isn’t winning this competition. As Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute observes, supermarkets and service stations are now competing for the same commodities.

So what can we do about it?

Guardian