http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/07/peak-soil-industrial-civilisation-eating-itself
Peak soil: industrial civilization is on the verge of eating itself
New research on land, oil, bees and climate change points to imminent global food crisis without urgent action
A new report says that the world will need to more than double food production over the next 40 years to feed an expanding global population. But as the world's food needs are rapidly increasing, the planet's capacity to produce food confronts increasing constraints from overlapping crises that, if left unchecked, could lead to billions facing hunger.
The UN projects that global population will grow from today's 7 billion to 9.3 billion by mid-century. According to the report released last week by the World Resources Institute (WRI), "available worldwide food calories will need to increase by about 60 percent from 2006 levels" to ensure an adequate diet for this larger population. At current rates of food loss and waste, by 2050 the gap between average daily dietary requirements and available food would approximate "more than 900 calories (kcal) per person per day."
The report identifies a complex, interconnected web of environmental factors at the root of this challenge - many of them generated by industrial agriculture itself. About 24% of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, encompassing methane from livestock, nitrous oxide from fertilisers, carbon dioxide from onsite machinery and fertiliser production, and land use change.
Industrial agriculture, the report finds, is a major contributor to climate change which, in turn is triggering more intense "heat waves, flooding and shifting precipitation patterns", with "adverse consequences for global crop yields."
Indeed, global agriculture is heavily water intensive, accounting for 70 per cent of all freshwater use. The nutrient run off from farm fields can create "dead zones" and "degrade coastal waters around the world", and as climate change contributes to increased water stress in crop-growing regions, food production will suffer further.
Other related factors will also kick in, warns the report: deforestation from regional drying and warming, the effect of rising sea levels on cropland productivity in coastal regions, and growing water demand from larger populations.
Yet the report points out that a fundamental problem is the impact of human activities on the land itself, estimating that:
"... land degradation affects approximately 20% of the world's cultivated areas".
Over the past 40 years, about 2 billion hectares of soil - equivalent to 15% of the Earth's land area (an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined) - have been degraded through human activities, and about 30% of the world's cropland have become unproductive. But it takes on average a whole century just to generate a single millimetre of topsoil lost to erosion.
Soil is therefore, effectively, a non-renewable but rapidly depleting resource.
We are running out of time. Within just 12 years, the report says, conservative estimates suggest that high water stress will afflict all the main food basket regions in North and South America, west and east Africa, central Europe and Russia, as well as the Middle East, south and south-east Asia.
Unfortunately, though, the report overlooks another critical factor - the inextricable link between oil and food. Over the last decade, food and fuel prices have been heavily correlated. This is no accident.
Last week, a new World Bank report examining five different food commodities - corn, wheat, rice, soybean, and palm oil - confirmed that oil prices are the biggest contributor to rising food prices. The report, based on a logarithm designed to determine the impact of any given factor through regression analysis, concluded that oil prices were even more significant than the ratio of available world food stocks relative to consumption levels, or commodity speculation. The Bank thus recommends controlling oil price movements as a key to tempering food price inflation.
The oil-food price link comes as no surprise. A University of Michigan study points out that every major point in the industrial food system - chemical fertilisers, pesticides, farm machinery, food processing, packaging and transportation - is dependent on high oil and gas inputs. Indeed, 19% of the fossil fuels that prop up the American economy go to the food system, second only to cars.
Back in 1940, for every calorie of fossil fuel energy used, 2.3 calories of food energy were produced. Now, the situation has reversed: it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce just one calorie of food energy. As food writer and campaigner Michael Pollan remarked in the New York Times:
"Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases."
But high oil prices are here to stay - and according to a UK Ministry of Defence assessment this year, could rise as high as $500 per barrel over the next 30 years.
All this points to a rapidly approaching convergence point between an increasingly self-defeating industrial food system, and an inexorably expanding global population.
But the point of convergence could come far sooner due to the wild card that is the catastrophic decline in honeybees.
Over the last 10 years, US and European beekeepers have reported annual hive losses of 30% or higher. Last winter, however, saw many US beekeepers experiencing losses of 40 to 50% more - with some reporting losses as high as 80 to 90%. Given that a third of food eaten worldwide depends on pollinators, particularly bees, the impact on global agriculture could be catastrophic. Studies have blamed factors integral to industrial methods - pesticides, parasitic mites, disease, nutrition, intensive farming, and urban development.
But the evidence specifically fingering widely used pesticides has long been overwhelming. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), for instance, has highlighted the role of neonicotinoids - much to the British government's chagrin - justifying the EU's partial ban of three common pesticides.
Now in its latest scientific warning put out last week, the EFSA highlights how another pesticide, fipronil, poses a "high acute risk" for honeybees. The study also noted large information gaps in scientific studies preventing a comprehensive assessment of risks to pollinators.
In short, the global food predicament faces a perfect storm of intimately related crises that are already hitting us now, and will worsen over coming years without urgent action.
It is not that we lack answers. Last year, the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change chaired by former chief government scientist Prof Sir John Beddington - who previously warned of a perfect storm of food, water and energy shortages within 17 years - set out seven concrete, evidence-based recommendations to generate a shift toward more sustainable agriculture.
So far, however, governments have largely ignored such warnings even as new evidence has emerged that Beddington's timeline is too optimistic. A recent University of Leeds-led study found that severe climate-driven droughts in Asia - especially in China, India, Pakistan and Turkey - within the next 10 years would dramatically undermine maize and wheat production, triggering a global food crisis.
When we factor into this picture soil erosion, land degradation, oil prices, bee colony collapse, and population growth, the implications are stark: industrial civilisation is on the verge of eating itself - if we don't change course, this decade will go down in history as the beginning of the global food apocalypse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SsWw6S68EQ#t=16m18s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiteNPECEME#t=1m56s
Edited by Dusz ()
Dusz posted:Homo Rapiens
wasted posted:speculation on famine futures
at My Job there are some sort of inspirational poster things on the wall about large global things & how we milk money out of them. basically. one is something like "The United States had its entire transportation infrastructure graded 'D' recently by the US Corps of Engineers. By moving large amounts of capital into the large construction industries in that country, the Firm is poised to make incredible amounts of money from the necessary and inevitable revitalization of a country's broken foundations." blah blah blah. paraphrased obviously. but not much
looking forward to the ones about the global food situation
drwhat posted:gonna be a good time
wasted posted:speculation on famine futures
Superabound posted:nothing tastes as good as global food insecurity feels
the story of goldman sachs
swampman posted:anyone have any thoughts about how to not starve to death?
Dragon Ball Z - ROck the Dragon.mp3 is playing as I put on a leather bomber jacket
What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.
In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.
The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.”
In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. CSI doesn’t claim that any breach of 210 immediately leads to riots, obviously; just that the probability that riots will erupt grows much greater. For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses (for rich-world people like you and I, it’s like 15%). When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if you can’t eat—or worse, your family can’t eat—you fight.
But how accurate is the model? An anecdote the researchers outline in the report offers us an idea. They write that “on December 13, 2010, we submitted a government report analyzing the repercussions of the global financial crises, and directly identifying the risk of social unrest and political instability due to food prices.” Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire as an act of protest in Tunisia. And we all know what happened after that.
oday, the food price index is hovering around 213, where it has stayed for months—just beyond the tip of the identified threshold. Low corn yield in the U.S., the world’s most important producer, has helped keep prices high.
“Recent droughts in the mid-western United States threaten to cause global catastrophe,” Yaneer Bar-Yam, one of the authors of the report, recently told Al Jazeera. “When people are unable to feed themselves and their families, widespread social disruption occurs. We are on the verge of another crisis, the third in five years, and likely to be the worst yet, capable of causing new food riots and turmoil on a par with the Arab Spring.”
Yet the cost of food hasn’t quite yet risen to the catastrophic levels reached last year. Around the time of the riots cum-revolutions, we saw the food price index soar through 220 points and even push 240. This year, we’ve pretty consistently hovered in the 210-216 range—right along the cusp of danger. But CSI expects a perilous trend in rising food prices to continue. Even before the extreme weather scrambled food prices this year, their 2011 report predicted that the next great breach would occur in August 2013, and that the risk of more worldwide rioting would follow. So, if trends hold, these complex systems theorists say we’re less than one year and counting from a fireball of global unrest.
But the reality is that such predictions are now all but impossible to make. In a world well-warmed by climate change, unpredictable, extreme weather events like the drought that has consumed 60% of the United States and the record heat that has killed its cattle are now the norm. Just two years ago, heat waves in Russia crippled its grain yield and dealt a devastating blow to global food markets—the true, unheralded father of the Arab Spring was global warming, some say.
And it’s only going to get worse and worse and worse. Because of climate change-exacerbated disasters like these, “the average price of staple foods such as maize could more than double in the next 20 years compared with 2010 trend prices,” a new report from Oxfam reveals. That report details how the poor will be even more vulnerable to climate change-induced food price shocks than previously thought. After all, we’ve “loaded the climate dice,” as NASA’s James Hansen likes to say, and the chances of such disasters rolling out are greater than ever.
This all goes to say that as long as climate change continues to advance—it seems that nothing can stop that now—and we maintain a global food system perennially subject to volatile price spikes and exploitation from speculators, without reform, our world will be an increasingly restive one. Hunger is coming, and so are the riots.
Back in 1940, for every calorie of fossil fuel energy used, 2.3 calories of food energy were produced. Now, the situation has reversed: it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce just one calorie of food energy. As food writer and campaigner Michael Pollan remarked in the New York Times:
I'm not sure this is a correct extrapolation, a lot of modern agriculture is extremely wasteful meat and dairy product production.
So far, however, governments have largely ignored such warnings even as new evidence has emerged that Beddington's timeline is too optimistic. A recent University of Leeds-led study found that severe climate-driven droughts in Asia - especially in China, India, Pakistan and Turkey - within the next 10 years would dramatically undermine maize and wheat production, triggering a global food crisis.
There's a difference between local food prices and global ones. The latter are what matter because the really desolate countries are already net food importers.
The UN expects food prices to double by 2050, more if cap and trade remains in place, which would put food prices about where they were in the 1920s. Although there's been substantial income growth since then of course.
A lot of energy price forecasts assume economic growth. If economic growth ceases, then energy demand growth slows and so does inflation. So even under no growth it's probably not going to make a difference.
Complex Systems Theorists Say
Those are even worse than liberal arts majors.
Edited by mustang ()
http://pdf.wri.org/great_balancing_act.pdf
Their recommended consumption is 2300 kcal/day. That's a fatso diet. They're admonishing us that people won't be able to be fat in the future.
Food prices are behind riots, sure, but at least Third World Peoples have actual reasons to protest, rather than taking to the streets every time student loans get cut.
mustang posted:buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
swampman posted:anyone have any thoughts about how to not starve to death?
eat pussy
drwhat posted:
1 – Despite President Barack Obama’s public announcement that he’s swearing off his addiction to drone strikes, The Drone Ranger has authorised a new drone base in the African nation of Niger.
2 – In May 2010, Obama sent Congress a bill to purchase body armour and landmine-proof vehicles for our troops in Afghanistan. Hidden in the quickly-passed emergency measure: a $9 billion (£5.9 billion) loan guarantee for constructing nuclear power plants in Texas, Georgia, Maryland and South Carolina.
3 – Last week, two suicide attacks killed at least 30 at mine sites in Niger. The attacks were claimed by the Islamist group Those Who Sign with Blood, joined by the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
Niger doesn’t seem much like a place worth fighting over. Its people are so poor they can’t afford a coastline, just desert surrounded by more desert. They survive on 2,300 calories a day, though not for very long – most don’t live to 55.
From the air (I’ve only flown over it), it looks like Death Valley on a bad day – a sand-blasted wasteland, fried and desertified.
But it’s what’s beneath the desert, invisible from the sky, that makes Niger the nation – if not its people – very rich indeed. Niger is the world’s fourth largest producer of uranium, the irradiating mineral at the heart of every nuclear power plant.
Last week’s attacks on the French-owned uranium mines were portrayed in the New York Times as spillover from the conflicts in Mali and Libya.
Merde de taureau! If anything, it is the war over Niger’s uranium that spilled over to Mali. In September 2010, long before the Islamist attacks in Mali and a year before Libya blew up, al-Qaeda attacked the mines, kidnapping a French engineer and his wife. The hunt for their captors and France’s need to protect its mines and resource reserves is what set off the Franco-Qaeda war in the Sahel.
Obama is backing the French resource occupation army. Note that his decision to base US drones in Niger – there are many base options in the giant region – came before this last attack.
Obama knows: if the US wants hot rocks, he has to send in the hot rockets.
Get used to it. If you liked blood-for-oil wars, you won’t have to wait long for the sequel: blood for uranium.
The Niger mines’ principal owner, Areva, may have a French accent, but the Obama administration would know Areva as the US nuclear power industry’s number one supplier. Moreover, Areva obtained one of the four coveted loan guarantees from Obama’s “emergency” Afghan war chest. While Areva’s license for that reactor, sited in Maryland, is on hold until it finds a US-based partner, Areva remains a crucial source of the uranium fuel rods needed by the operators of all US plants. The US government also relies on Areva to fabricate MOX fuel. Areva’s MOX is made from uranium ore products mixed with plutonium from Soviet warheads purchased by the US.
Obama knows, but will never say, what I’m telling you now: Without a US military force in Niger, there will be no nuclear plant in Maryland, no MOX mix to burn up those old Russkie nukes.
The nuclear industry’s frontmen tell us that nuclear power will end our dependence on Mideast oil. If John McCain, the Senator from Arizona, gets his way, the US will build 200 new nuclear reactors at a cost of ten trillion dollars. The result would replace our dependence on OPEC… with dependence on Russia, Kazakhstan and Niger.
What’s wrong with that? After all, President George W Bush said he “looked in the eye found him to be very … trustworthy”.
I admit, I’ve never looked into Putin’s eyes – I wouldn’t dare. But to make the lights of Baltimore dependent on Vlad the Impaler of Chechens seems, well, ill-advised.
And Kazakhstan? That’s worth a story by itself. (Watch this space.)
That leaves Areva’s Niger supply, if we’re willing to kill for it.
Niger’s capital, by the way, is Niamey. I thought I’d give you a head start on most Americans and Britons who don’t learn the names of a nation’s capital until the arrival of the 101st Airborne and the 1st Regiment Royal Horse Artillery. (Think Saigon, Mogadishu, Kabul.)
But war for uranium might well be worth the blood if you listen to ersatz environmentalists, such as James Lovelock, who tell us nuclear energy is “green”, unlike, say, natural gas.
I would invite Dr Lovelock or any other greenie lovesick for radioactive energy to the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico this coming week when these Native Americans who once supplied our uranium will be tested for the cancers and other illnesses that mining the ore brought them.
In 2008, for BBC Newsnight, I went to the pueblo following the indictment of local white politicians charged with stealing hundreds of Native ballots. Tribal Councillor David Vallo explained that the pueblo was attempting to vote down the reopening of the nearby uranium mine. The mine, he asserted, did as good a job as Custer in wiping out Indians. “We lost a lot of good people on account of their health.” He then added, “You know, that's irradiation – uranium is irradiation.”
Yes, I do know that uranium means irradiation – but it’s green irradiation.
Vallo noted that uranium contaminated their water supply and the mine run-off killed their crops. And that’s good, because if something grew, you wouldn’t want to eat it.
To white environmentalists, those sculpted nuclear cooling towers do look quite clean. But to the black, Asian and Indigenous peoples who dig the ore, nuclear power’s low carbon footprint comes from heavy jackboots. For one example: France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy has backed Niger’s President Mamadou Tandja, despite desolving the nation’s constitution, after the de facto dictator agreed to open a new mine site to Areva. France’s Canal 24 reports that Tuareg tribesmen – the group that would form the backbone of the insurgency in Niger and Mali – were cleansed from the mining area.
Here’s a photo of Areva’s mine in Niger. Not a lot of green there. Greenpeace has reported abysmal working conditions at the mines, as well as contamination of the surrounding towns.
The chorus of Peggy Seeger’s song "Springfield Mine Disaster" goes, "Bone and blood is the price of coal."
The theme song of “green” nuclear energy should be, "Drones and blood is the price of uranium."
read up on Idriss Déby and the Aouzou Strip
France's need for access to African uranium is a big, big, big factor in world politics
MadMedico posted:
Sounds like progress to me.
littlegreenpills posted:for the price of a few billion dead poopskins who were only going to have lives of ugliness and anonymity....we can have literally hundreds of millions more beautiful, limpid-eyed and lithe skinny people across the developed world. aesthetics
swirlsofhistory posted:energy needs
mustang posted:Their recommended consumption is 2300 kcal/day. That's a fatso diet. They're admonishing us that people won't be able to be fat in the future.
lol look at this guy, who obviously doesnt even lift
MadMedico posted:The attacks were claimed by the Islamist group Those Who Sign with Blood
AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW YEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Lykourgos posted:It's alright everyone, I've started growing radishes in my garden. Just brought in a bucketful today. Going to pickle some and eat the rest over the course of this week. Food crisis averted.
this is unbecoming of a man of quality fyi