Peak Food

Comments from Kevin Hester -

"Improved health care and nutrition are two of the reasons for our critical population overshoot literally fueled by industrial civilisation it has exploded in the last 20 years. We are way past the carrying capacity of our planet and our leaders show no commitment to either resolving ( there is no solution except a mass die off) or discussing this impending disaster. 

"Those of us who believe in near term human extinction due to climate change and the collapse of our bio-sphere like Guy McPherson who is mentioned in this scary article, are either ridiculed or treated like we are exaggerating. 

"Remember it was the flat-earthers and climate change deniers that were the dominant paradigm not long ago. Now the new climate change denier pretends that things aren't as bad as we say, at exactly the same time that the 6th Great Extinction gains momentum. 

"We will all be mainstream in a matter of months is my prediction."

AND NOW, PEAK FOOD

Brooklyn Culture Jammers

1 February, 2015

It was a quiet Sunday morning and I was looking at the FaceBook while trying to decide whether I wanted to tune into CBS Sunday Morning and listen to Vocal Fry. One of my pals had posted thisIndependent article. Per a study in Ecology and Society, the world has reached peak of food production on several different staples. 

““People often talk of substitution. If we run out of one substance we just substitute another. But if multiple resources are running out, we’ve got a problem. Mankind needs to accept that renewable raw materials are reaching their yield limits worldwide,” said Jianguo “Jack” Liu, of Michigan State University….

 ““Just nine or 10 plants species feed the world. But we found there’s a peak for all these resources. Even renewable resources won’t last forever,” said Ralf Seppelt, of the Helmholtz Centre.”

This is not a story solely reported by the Independent. Over a year ago, The Guardian also picked up on the story, with the angle about industrial agriculture being at fault. This was based on a study published by Nature Communications at the end of 2013:

“… we found widespread deceleration in the relative rate of increase of average yields of the major cereal crops during the 1990–2010 period in countries with greatest production of these crops, and strong evidence of yield plateaus or an abrupt drop in rate of yield gain in 44% of the cases, which, together, account for 31% of total global rice, wheat and maize production.”

And a July 2014 article in Reuters also pointed out a related problem–peak soil. Per their reporting, some 25% of agricultural soil is ‘severely degraded’ with another 8% partially degraded. Industrial agriculture largely to blame for monocultures that don’t rotate crops (as in longtime agricultural practices) in order to revive soil.

(By the way, these articles are all based on (and all cite) scholarly studies in peer reviewed journals.There is a wave of anti-intellectualism going through this country, but the people who’ve done the requisite work to acquire a PhD have identified more than one ‘show stopper’ for the smart ape. And they’re suffering for it, in many cases losing tenure and having threats to their lives. Also, please note that all of the media outlets that went with this story are in Europe).

This is not the first time the world has faced this challenge. At the end of the 19th century, there was a serious issue about agriculture not being able to keep up with growing population because of endemic shortages in nitrogen (and ammonia) needed to make fertilizer. Countries had gone to war over substances like bat guano, which were vital to creating fertilizer. Fritz Haber won the 1919 Nobel Prizefor developing a process to pull ammonia out of the atmosphere in order to create artificial fertilizer. It was his discovery that lead to growing crop output and population overshoot such as what we’re experiencing now. But our problem now is in fundamental ways worse than those that Haber faced. Thanks to climate degradation as a result of global warming, the earth may be losing cropland. There’s more about the odyssey of Fritz Haber here. who was a German Jew–suffice to say that he was also the person who developed poison gas used on the Western Front in WWI (an act that many considered a war crime). After the war, he developed insecticides and his insecticide Zyklon B was used in The Holocaust. IJS. In any case, one of the strategies being contemplated is the genetic re-engineering of vital food plants to allow them to better survive hot climates. Apparently the hopeful have never heard of the law of unintended consequences.

As those of you who’ve read my recent posts must know by now, I’m not particularly optimistic about Homo Sapiens‘ prospects in the short term. And I’m not a late-comer to the whole issue of peak everything. About five years ago I had blogged on Daily Kos about the convergence of various peak issues (peak oil, peak economy, peak uranium, and peak metal). These various problems (I’ll put below link info below the line for those interested) all weigh heavily on the future of us on this planet. And there’s always the information provided to us by Dr. Guy McPherson regarding Near Term Human Extinction brought about by (among other things)  the greenhouse gases c02 and methane converging to heat the planet past inhabitability.

But peak food?

One of the stories that has circulated about global warming is how it might kill off environmental niches vital to certain food types we all love.  Are we going to lose chocolate? Will coffee become a thing of the past? Neither plant makes the chart above, but I think we’d all miss them. Should we just wait for the hunger to start? 

Because you know what they say…