Here is a great documentary about peak oil that I urge everyone to watch. I've been saying for awhile now that the issue of Peak Oil is probably going to pose a bigger threat to civilisation than global warming, at least in the very near future.

The documentary is called "A Crude Awakening" and you can watch it for free on Google: http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-703701197044020456

Also check out http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ for a great deal more research on the subject.

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Great vid Andy, thanks.

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Hi Andy,

Interesting and quality posting, thanks! There was a good link on that page, namely this, Will the End of Oil be the End of Food? There seems to be a large degree of concern these days about global warming and the collapsing economic circumstances of the industrialized west (give it a little time folks, it will hit hard before you can say "October 29th, 1929 all over"). Though there seems to be astoundingly little action to counter these issues. However, there is little discussion of the food crisis that appears to be heading our way, and indeed across the globe. And I don't think we'll have to wait for the oil to run low before it really starts to hit home.

Have a read of the above article folks,it's food for thought!

Om Shanti
Neil

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More along the same lines as the above, but taking place at the present.


Food crisis being felt around world
Market Chaos, Riots

Peter Goodspeed, National Post
Published: Tuesday, April 01, 2008


Sharply rising prices have triggered food riots in recent weeks in Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Guinea, Mauritania and Yemen, and aid agencies around the world worry they may be unable to feed the poorest of the poor.

In the Philippines, officials are raiding warehouses in Manila looking for unscrupulous traders hoarding rice, while in South Korea, panicked housewives recently stripped grocery-store shelves of food when the cost of ramen, an instant noodle made from wheat, suddenly rose.

The shadow of "a new hunger" that has made food too expensive for millions is the result of a sudden and dramatic surge in food prices around the world.

Rising prices for all the world's crucial cereal crops and growing fears of scarcity are careening through international markets, creating turmoil.

Last Thursday, as world rice prices soared by as much as 30% in one day, Egypt decided to suspend rice exports for six months to meet domestic demand and to try to limit price increases.

That was bad news for its main rice customers -- Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

Egypt's move was matched by Vietnam, the world's second-largest rice exporter after Thailand, which cut exports by 25% and ordered officials not to sign any more export contracts this year.

India and Cambodia also rushed to curb their exports in order to have enough supplies to feed their own people.

With crude oil soaring above US$100 a barrel, higher fuel prices have driven up the cost of production and increased transportation costs for all foods.

Pests in Southeast Asia, a 10-year drought in Australia and a 45-day cold snap in China have combined to aggravate the situation.

At the same time, millions of people in China and India have suddenly become relatively wealthy and are changing their eating habits, consuming more meat and chicken, which places a huge demand on cereal stocks.

In China, per-capita meat consumption has increased 150% since the 1980s. But producing more meat requires more feed to raise more animals.

"You simply feed less people on maize [corn] via cattle than you do in maize direct," said John Powell, the UN World Food Program's (WFP) deputy director of external programs in Rome.

Also influencing the food crisis is the move in North America and Europe to biofuel in an effort to ease global warming and reduce reliance on imported energy.

A surge in demand for biofuel has resulted in a sharp decline in agricultural land planted for food crops. About 16% of U.S. agricultural land formerly planted with soybeans and wheat is now growing corn for biofuel.

"For the first time in history, there is a clear link between the price of fuel and the price of food," Mr. Powell said.

"If there were a miraculous 20% increase in the quantity of food production, we would not know what would go toward increased food consumption and what would go to biofuels.

"Where it would go is where the prices are best."

Rice is a staple food for half the world's population. But the sudden surge in prices and restrictions on exports come at a time when stockpiles of rice are at their lowest level in decades.

At the moment, world rice inventories are said to stand at a mere 72 million metric tonnes -- about 17% of what the world consumes annually.

The low stockpiles create a market in which any supply disruption will result in radical price swings.

They also complicate delivering foreign aid to those most in need.

The WPF, which feeds 73 million of the world's most destitute each year, says its costs have increased 55% since June. Unless it gets US$500-million in emergency funding, it may soon have to reduce feeding programs.

Experts predict world food markets will be locked into an inflationary spiral for at least four years, but some say the crisis could linger for a decade or more.

"There is pretty much a sense that what we are seeing is a step change or a structural change and not a peak to be followed by a trough," Mr. Powell said.

"In other words, we are into an era of high food prices. It's not just volatility, it's a step increase."


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I have no idea why it has appeared three times! I only posted it once folks. But it is worth reading three times just to get your head around the implications.

Om Shanti
Neil

Note from admin: I've deleted the duplicate posts.
Andy

Last edited: 2-04-2008 12:08:52 PM

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Another related article for anyone interested....

P.S. I've added the italic emphasis.


The Coming Food Catastrophe

Gwynne Dyer
Canadian Dimension
April 5, 2008

“This is the new face of hunger,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN’s World Food Programme, launching an appeal for an extra $500 million so it could continue supplying food aid to 73 million hungry people this year. “People are simply being priced out of food markets. We have never before had a situation where aggressive rises in food prices keep pricing our operations out of our reach.”

The WFP decided on a public appeal several weeks ago because the price of the food it buys to feed some of the world’s poorest people had risen by 55 percent since last June. By the time it actually launched the appeal on March 20, prices had risen a further 20 percent, so now it needs $700 million to bridge the gap between last year‚s budget and this year’s prices.

In Thailand, farmers are sleeping in their fields after reports that thieves are stealing the rice, now worth $600 a tonne, straight out of the fields. [note from Neil - the Financial Times yesterday, Sunday 6th, reported the price of rise had jumped another 10%] Four people have died in Egypt in clashes over subsidized flour that was being sold for profit on the black market. There have been food riots in Morocco, Senegal, and Cameroon.

Last year, it became clear that the era of cheap food was over: food costs worldwide rose by 23 percent between 2006 and 2007. This year, what is becoming clear is the impact of this change on ordinary people‚s lives.

For consumers in Japan, France, or the United States, the relentless price rises for food are an unwelcome extra pressure on an already stretched household budget. For less fortunate people in other places, they can mean less protein in the diet or choosing between feeding the kids breakfast and paying their school fees, or even, in the poorest communities, starvation. And the crisis is only getting started.

It is the “perfect storm”: everything is going wrong at once. To begin with, the world’s population has continued to grow while its food production has not. For the 50 years between 1945 and 1995, as the world’s population more than doubled, grain production kept pace–but then it stalled. In six of the past seven years, the human race consumed more grain than it grew. World grain reserves last year were only 57 days, down from 180 days a decade ago. [Note from Neil - so far this year reserves are down to either 42 or 40 days, I can't recall which it is, but either figure is the lowest ever]

To make matters worse, demand for food is growing faster than population. As incomes rise in China, India, and other countries with fast-growing economies, consumers include more and more meat in their diet: the average Chinese citizen now eats 50 kilograms of meat a year, up from 20 kilos in the mid-1980s. Producing meat consumes enormous quantities of grain.

Then there is global warming, which is probably already cutting into food production. Many people in Australia, formerly the world‚s second-largest wheat exporter, suspect that climate change is the real reason for the prolonged drought that is destroying the country‚s ability to export food.

But the worst damage is being done by the rage for “biofuels” that supposedly reduce carbon-dioxide emissions and fight climate change. (But they don’t, really–at least, not in their present form.) Thirty percent of this year’s U.S. grain harvest will go straight to an ethanol distillery, and the European Union is aiming to provide 10 percent of the fuel used for transport from biofuels by 2010. A huge amount of the world‚s farmland is being diverted to feed cars, not people.

Worse yet, rain forest is being cleared, especially in Brazil and Indonesia, to grow more biofuels. A recent study in the U.S. journal Science calculated that destroying natural ecosystems to grow corn or sugar cane for ethanol, or oil palms or soybeans for biodiesel, releases between 17 times and 420 times more carbon dioxide than is saved annually by burning the biofuel grown on that land instead of fossil fuel. It‚s all justified in the name of fighting climate change, but the numbers just don‚t add up.

This is the one element in the perfect storm that is completely under human control. Governments can simply stop creating artificial demand for the current generation of biofuels (and often directly subsidizing them). That land goes back to growing food instead, and prices fall. Climate change is a real threat, but we don‚t have to have this crisis now.

“If more and more land [is] diverted for industrial biofuels to keep cars running, we have two years before a food catastrophe breaks out worldwide,” said Vandana Shiva, director of the Indian-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy, in an interview recently. “It’ll be 20 years before climate catastrophe breaks out, but the false solutions to climate change are creating catastrophes that will be much more rapid than the climate change itself.”

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Last edited: 7-04-2008 03:08:26 PM

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Just like the other of today's postings, this is a food crisis article for anyone interested. The sections of this article on the world grain forecast and GMO's being pushed by Monsanto in response to the wheat virus are worth reading.

Om Shanti
Neil


Why Food Prices Will Go Through the Roof in Coming Months

F. William Engdahl
Online Journal
April 5, 2008

A deadly fungus, known as Ug99, which kills wheat, has likely spread to Pakistan from Africa, according to reports. If true, that threatens the vital Asian Bread Basket including the Punjab region.

The spread of the deadly virus, stem rust, against which an effective fungicide does not exist, comes as world grain stocks reach the lowest in four decades and government subsidized bio-ethanol production, especially in the USA, Brazil and EU are taking land out of food production at alarming rates. The deadly fungus is being used by Monsanto and the US Government to spread patented GMO seeds.

Stem rust is the worst of three rusts that afflict wheat plants. The fungus grows primarily in the stems, plugging the vascular system so carbohydrates can’t get from the leaves to the grain, which shrivels. Ug99 is a race of stem rust that blocks the vascular tissues in cereal grains including wheat, oats and barley. Unlike other rusts that may reduce crop yields, Ug99-infected plants may suffer up to 100 percent loss.

In the 1950s, the last major outbreak destroyed 40 percent of the spring wheat crop in North America. At that time governments started a major effort to breed resistant wheat plants, led by Norman Borlaug of the Rockefeller Foundation. That was the misnamed Green Revolution. The result today is far fewer varieties of wheat that might resist such a new fungus outbreak.

The first strains of Ug99 were detected in 1999 in Uganda. It spread to Kenya by 2001, to Ethiopia by 2003 and to Yemen when the cyclone Gonu spread its spores in 2007. Now the deadly fungus has been found in Iran and according to British scientists may already be as far as Pakistan.

Pakistan and India account for 20 percent of the annual world wheat production. It is possible as the fungus spreads that large movements could take place almost overnight if certain wind conditions prevail at the right time. In 2007, a three-day wind event recorded by Mexico’s CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), had strong wind currents moving from Yemen, where Ug99 is present, across Pakistan and India, going all the way to China. CIMMYT estimates that from two-thirds to three-quarters of the wheat now planted in India and Pakistan are highly susceptible to this new strain of stem rust. One billion people live in this region and they are highly dependent on wheat for their food supply.

These are all areas where the agricultural infrastructure to contain such problems is either extremely weak or non-existent. It threatens to spread into other wheat producing regions of Asia and eventually the entire world if not checked.

FAO world grain forecast

The 2007 World Agriculture Forecast of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome projects an alarming trend in world food supply even in the absence of any devastation from Ug99. The report states, “Countries in the non-OECD region are expected to continue to experience a much stronger increase in consumption of agricultural products than countries in the OECD area. This trend is driven by population and, above all, income growth — underpinned by rural migration to higher income urban areas . . . OECD countries as a group are projected to lose production and export shares in many commodities . . . Growth in the use of agricultural commodities as feedstock to a rapidly increasing biofuel industry is one of the main drivers in the outlook and one of the reasons for international commodity prices to attain a significantly higher plateau over the outlook period than has been reported in the previous reports.” [my emphasis — w.e.]

The FAO warns that the explosive growth in acreage used to grow fuels and not food in the past three years is dramatically changing the outlook for food supply globally and forcing food prices sharply higher for all foods, from cereals to sugar to meat and dairy products. The use of cereals, sugar, oilseeds and vegetable oils to satisfy the needs of a rapidly increasing biofuel industry, is one of the main drivers, most especially the large volumes of maize in the US, wheat and rapeseed in the EU and sugar in Brazil for ethanol and bio-diesel production. This is already causing dramatically higher crop prices, higher feed costs and sharply higher prices for livestock products.

Ironically, the current bio-ethanol industry is being driven by US government subsidies and a scientifically false argument in the EU and USA that bio-ethanol is less harmful to the environment than petroleum fuels and can reduce C02 emissions. The arguments have been demonstrated in every respect to be false. The huge expansion of global acreage now planted to produce biofuels is creating ecological problems and demanding use of far heavier pesticide spraying while use of biofuels in autos releases even deadlier emissions than imagined. The political effect, however, has been a catastrophic shift down in world grain stocks at the same time the EU and USA have enacted policies which drastically cut traditional emergency grain reserves. In short, it is a scenario preprogrammed for catastrophe, one which has been clear to policymakers in the EU and USA for several years. That can only suggest that such a dramatic crisis in global food supply is intentional.

A plan to spread GMO?

One of the consequences of the spread of Ug99 is a campaign by Monsanto Corporation and other major producers of genetically manipulated plant seeds to promote wholesale introduction of GMO wheat varieties said to be resistant to the Ug99 fungus. Biologists at Monsanto and at the various GMO laboratories around the world are working to patent such strains.

Norman Borlaug, the former Rockefeller Foundation head of the Green Revolution, is active in funding the research to develop a fungus resistant variety against Ug99, working with his former center in Mexico, the CIMMYT and ICARDA in Kenya, where the pathogen is now endemic. So far, about 90 percent of the 12,000 lines tested are susceptible to Ug99. That includes all the major wheat cultivars of the Middle East and west Asia. At least 80 percent of the 200 varieties sent from the United States can’t cope with infection. The situation is even more dire for Egypt, Iran, and other countries in immediate peril.

Even if a new resistant variety were ready to be released today, it would take two or three years’ seed increase in order to have just enough wheat seed for 20 percent of the acres planted to wheat in the world.

Work is also being done by the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the same agency which co-developed Monsanto’s Terminator seed technology. In my book, Seeds of Destruction, I document the insidious role of Borlaug and the Rockefeller Foundation in promoting the misnamed Green Revolution, as well as patents on food seeds to ultimately control food supplies as a potential political lever. The spreading alarm over the Ug99 fungus is being used by Monsanto and other GMO agribusiness companies to demand that the current ban on GMO wheat be lifted to allow spread of GMO patented wheat seeds on the argument they are Ug99 stem rust resistant.

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Last edited: 7-04-2008 07:23:50 AM

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