The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (24 page)
Read The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality Online
Authors: Richard Heinberg
Tags: #BUS072000
FIGURE 33.
World Nitrogen Fertilizer Consumption.
Source: UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
There have been some environmental improvements to agriculture in recent years: US farming is more energy efficient than it was a couple of decades ago, fertilizer use has declined somewhat, and more effort goes toward soil conservation. But in general, and especially on the global scene, as food production has grown, so have environmental impacts.
63
Now, further expansion of the food supply appears problematic. World grain production per capita peaked in 1984 at 342 kg annually. For many years production has not met demand, so the gap has been filled by dipping into carryover stocks; currently, less than two months’ supply remains as a buffer.
64
The challenges to increasing production come from several directions simultaneously: water scarcity (see above), topsoil erosion (we are “mining” topsoil with industrial agriculture at almost four times the rate we are mining coal — over 25 billion tons per year versus 7 billion tons), declining soil fertility, limits to arable land, declining seed diversity, increasing requirements for inputs (pests are developing resistance to common pesticides and herbicides, requiring larger doses), and, not least, increasing costs of fossil fuel inputs.
65
But as the energy required to run the food system becomes more costly, food is increasingly being used to make energy. Many governments now offer subsidies and other incentives for turning biomass — including food crops — into fuel. This inevitably drives up food prices. Even non-fuel crops such as wheat are affected, as farmers replace wheat fields with more profitable biofuel crops like maize, rapeseed, or soy.
Mineral depletion is also posing a limit to the human food supply. Phosphorus is often a limiting factor in natural ecosystems; that is, the supply of available phosphorus limits the possible size of populations in those environments. That’s because phosphorus is one of the three major nutrients required for plant growth (nitrogen and potassium are the other two). Most agricultural phosphorus is obtained from mining phosphate rock: organic farmers use crude phosphate, while conventional industrial farms use chemically treated forms such as superphosphate, triple super-phosphate, or ammonium phosphates. Fortunately, phosphorus can be recycled, as the Chinese did in their traditional food-agriculture systems, where human and animal wastes were returned to the soil. But today vast amounts of what might otherwise be valuable soil nutrients are flushed down waterways, and wind up being deposited at the mouths of rivers.
66
BOX 3.7
Food Crisis in 2011?
Floods in Australia and Brazil, drought in northern China, and high oil prices are conspiring to drive up food prices in 2011 to record levels. Stockpiling of grain in China and other industrializing countries on expectation of shortages is putting even more upward pressure on prices. As of February, wheat prices were already up nearly to the record levels seen in 2008, and rice orders in China were running at 2 to 4 times usual quantities.
University of Illinois agricultural economist Darrel Good estimated that US corn stocks at the end of the 2010–11 marketing year would total only 745 million bushels. “That projection represents 5.5 percent of projected marketing year consumption. Stocks as a percent of consumption would be the smallest since the record low 5 percent of 1995–96. And 5 percent is considered to be a minimal pipeline supply.” Good also noted that combined corn and soybean acreage would have to increase by 6.5 million acres in 2011 to meet anticipated immediate demand while also allowing for a modest rebuilding of inventories. Almost 5 billion bushels of corn will be used in ethanol production this year.72 Meanwhile, as Lester Brown, founder of Earth Policy Institute, pointed out in a prominent article (“The Great Food Crisis of 2011”),
“Two huge dust bowls are forming, one across northwest China, western Mongolia, and central Asia; the other in central Africa. Each of these dwarfs the US dust bowl of the 1930s. Satellite images show a steady flow of dust storms leaving these regions, each one typically carrying millions of tons of precious topsoil. In North China, some 24,000 rural villages have been abandoned or partly depopulated as grasslands have been destroyed by overgrazing and as croplands have been inundated by migrating sand dunes.”
73
High food prices were frequently cited as factors contributing to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt early in 2011.
In 2007, Canadian physicist and agricultural consultant Patrick Déry studied phosphorus production statistics worldwide using Hubbert lin-earization analysis (a technique used to forecast oil depletion rates) and concluded that the peak of phosphate production has been passed for both the United States (1988) and for the world as a whole (1989). Déry looked at data not only for phosphate that is currently commercially minable, but for reserves of rock phosphate of lower concentrations; he found — no surprise — that these would be more costly to exploit from economic, energetic, and environmental standpoints.
67
Déry’s conclusions are echoed in a recent report by Britain’s Soil Association (see Box 3.8 in this chapter, “Does Peak Phosphorus Mean Peak Food?”)
There are three main solutions to the problem of Peak Phosphate: composting of human wastes, including urine diversion; more efficient application of fertilizer; and farming in such a way as to make existing soil phosphorus more accessible to plants.
Food supply challenges extend from farms to the world’s oceans. Fish like cod, sardines, haddock, and flounder have been favorites for decades in Europe and North America, but many of these species are now endangered. Global marine seafood capture peaked in 1994. An international group of ecologists and economists warned in 2006 that the world will run out of wild seafood by 2048 if steep declines in marine species continue at current rates. They noted that as of 2003, 29 percent of all fished species had collapsed, meaning they were at least 90 percent below their historic maximum catch levels. The rate of population collapses continues to accelerate. The lead author of the group’s report, Boris Worm, was quoted as saying, “We really see the end of the line now. It’s within our lifetime. Our children will see a world without seafood if we don’t change things.”
68
According to a more recent study, many types of fish have great difficulty recovering even if over-fishing stops. After 15 years of conservation efforts, many stocks had barely increased in numbers. Cod, for example, failed to recover at all (see Box 3.13 in this chapter, “Atlantic Cod: A Story of Renewable Resource Depletion”).
69
BOX 3.8
Does Peak Phosphorus Equal Peak Food?
A recent report from the Soil Association of Britain concludes that supplies of phosphate rock are running out faster than previously thought and that declining supplies and higher prices of phosphate are a new threat to global food security. A Rock and a Hard Place: Peak Phosphorus and the Threat to Our Food Security highlights the urgent need for farming to become less reliant on phosphate rock-based fertilizer.
74
Intensive agriculture depends on phosphate to maintain soil fertility. Globally, 158 million metric ton of phosphate rock is mined each year, but the mineral is non-renewable and supplies are finite. Recent analysis suggests that the world may hit “peak phosphate” as early as 2033; production in the US is already declining. As with Peak Oil, supplies will become increasingly scarce and expensive even before production declines, as mining companies are forced to move to lower-quality deposits.
75
This critical issue is currently missing from the global food policy agenda. Without fertilization from phosphorus, wheat yields could plummet by half in coming decades. Current prices for phosphate rock are about twice the level in 2006. The Soil Association report notes that, “When demand for phosphate fertilizer outstripped supply in 2007/08, the price of rock phosphate rose 800 percent.” Phosphate is essential and non-substitutable; therefore demand is inelastic.
In 2009, 67 percent of rock phosphate was mined in just three countries — China (35 percent), the US (17 percent), and Morocco and Western Sahara (15 percent). China has now restricted exports, and the US has stopped exporting the mineral.
76
Here, then is the overall picture: Demand for food is slowly outstripping supply. Food producers’ ability to meet growing needs is increasingly being strained by rising human populations, falling freshwater supplies, the rise of biofuels industries, expanding markets within industrializing nations for more resource-intensive meat and fish-based diets; dwindling wild fisheries; and climate instability. The result will almost inevitably be a worldwide food crisis sometime in the next two or three decades.
70
FIGURE 34.
World Phosphorus Production, History, and Projection.
Source: Cordell et al, 2009, “The Story of Phosphorus: Global Food Security and Food For Thought,”
Global Environmental Change 19:292–305.
The challenges to increasing global food production or even maintaining current rates are linked not only with the other problems discussed in this chapter (changing climate, energy resource depletion, water scarcity, and mineral depletion) but also with the problems discussed in Chapter 2: Modern agriculture requires a system of credit and debt. Unless farmers can obtain credit, they cannot afford increasingly expensive inputs. Food processors and wholesalers likewise require access to credit. Thus a prolonged credit crisis could devastate the world’s food supply as dramatically as could any imaginable weather event.
The solution often proposed to these daunting food system challenges is genetic engineering. If we can splice genes to make more productive crop varieties, more nutritious foods, plants that can grow in saltwater, fish that grow faster, or grains that can fix atmospheric nitrogen the way legumes do, then we could reduce the need for freshwater irrigation, nitrogen fertilizers, and overfishing while growing more food and nourishing people better. It sounds too good to be true — and probably is. In reality, most currently patented plant genes merely confer resistance to insect pests or proprietary herbicides; the promise of more nutrient-rich crops and of nitrogen-fixing grains is still years from realization. Meanwhile, the designer-gene seed industry continues to depend on energy-intensive technologies (such as chemical fertilizers and herbicides), as well as centralized production and distribution systems, along with financial systems based on credit and debt. So far, gene splicing in food plants has succeeded mostly in generating enormous profits for an increasingly centralized corporate seed industry, and more debt for farmers. As for gene-altered fish, ecologists warn that while these are meant to be raised in enclosed areas, if even a few accidentally escaped into the wild they could quickly displace remaining related wild populations and upend fragile and already compromised ecosystems.
71
It’s worth noting that for the past few decades a vocal minority of farmers, agricultural scientists, and food system theorists including Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Vandana Shiva, Robert Rodale, and Michael Pollan, has argued against centralization, industrialization, and globalization of agriculture, and for an ecological agriculture with minimal fossil fuel inputs. Where their ideas have taken root, the adaptation to Peak Oil and the end of growth will be easier. Unfortunately, their recommendations have not become mainstream, because industrialized, globalized agriculture have proved capable of producing larger short-term profits for banks and agribusiness cartels. Even more unfortunately, the available time for a large-scale, proactive food system transition
before
the impacts of Peak Oil and economic contraction arrive is gone. We’ve run out the clock.
Metals and Other Minerals
Without metals and a host of other non-renewable minerals, industrial economies could not function. Metals are essential for energy production; for making factory tools, transportation vehicles, and agricultural machinery; and for building the infrastructure of highways, pipes, and power lines that enables modern civilization to function. Hi-tech electronics industries rely on a host of rare metallic and non-metallic minerals ranging from antimony to zinc. All are depleting, and some are already at economically worrisome levels of scarcity.
In principle, there is no sustainable rate of extraction for non-renewable resources: every instance of extraction represents a step toward “running out.” During the twentieth century, though, new mining technologies enabled commercially available supplies of most minerals to increase substantially. Ore qualities gradually declined as the low-hanging fruit disappeared, but this trend was countered by the investment of increasing amounts of cheap energy in mining and refining. Globalization also helped, as users of non-renewable resources gained access to virgin deposits in countries where labor costs for mining were minimal. Resource substitution and recycling likewise played their parts in keeping mineral and metal prices low and generally declining.
77
