Nine meals from anarchy?

Richard Cornish meets the man known as the Al Gore of food security.

HE LOOKS more like a genial uncle than a harbinger of doom, but the UK Soil Association’s Patrick Holden visited Australia recently to deliver a sobering message.

Holden, the head of the Bristol-based charitable organisation that promotes organic farming, gave a series of public lectures in Sydney and met food industry figures at a private meal hosted by Kylie Kwong. Sometimes referred to as the Al Gore of food security, Holden warned that if the west doesn’t focus on shoring up food security it could leave itself open to a food crisis.


“Think of the global credit crises,” he says. “Well, in 10 to 15 years we could see something similar happen with food, a sort of global food crunch. This would have far worse consequences than this financial crises … In just a few generations we have burned almost all our reserves of fossil fuel and pumped the gas into the atmosphere.”

Holden refers to the fact that almost all the food in the Western world is grown using oil. Tractors and harvesters run on diesel, chemical pesticides are made from oil; fertilisers are either made directly from oil or mined from rapidly diminishing mineral reserves.

He also describes a global food production and distribution system that uses oil to transport food not only around the world but within national borders.

“We rely so much on oil for our food that if something were to disrupt that supply, such as a political incident like we saw recently when Russia cut off gas supplies to Europe this winter, terrorism or war, then our food stocks would run out.

“We must also consider that we have reached peak oil production and it’s just going to get more expensive from now on.”

The Age