Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply
Page 2: The Example of Cuba

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How we might do that is suggested by perhaps the best recent historical example of a society experiencing a fossil-fuel famine. In the late 1980s, farmers in Cuba were highly reliant on cheap fuels and petrochemicals imported from the Soviet Union, using more agrochemicals per acre than their American counterparts. In 1990, as the Soviet empire collapsed, Cuba lost those imports and faced an agricultural crisis. The population lost 20 pounds on average and malnutrition was nearly universal, especially among young children. The Cuban GDP fell by 85 percent and inhabitants of the island nation experienced a substantial decline in their material standard of living.

Cuban authorities responded by breaking up large state-owned farms, offering land to farming families, and encouraging the formation of small agricultural co-ops. Cuban farmers began employing oxen as a replacement for the tractors they could no longer afford to fuel. Cuban scientists began investigating biological methods of pest control and soil fertility enhancement. The government sponsored widespread education in organic food production, and the Cuban people adopted a mostly vegetarian diet out of necessity. Salaries for agricultural workers were raised, in many cases to above the levels of urban office workers. Urban gardens were encouraged in parking lots and on public lands, and thousands of rooftop gardens appeared. Small food animals such as chickens and rabbits began to be raised on rooftops as well.

As a result of these efforts, Cuba was able to avoid what might otherwise have been a severe famine. Today the nation is changing from an industrial to an agrarian society. While energy use in Cuba is now one-twentieth of that in the US, the economy is growing at a slow but steady rate. Food production has returned to 90 percent of its pre-crisis levels.[10]

The Way Ahead

The transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take time. And it must be emphasized that we are discussing a systemic transformation - we cannot just remove oil in the forms of agrochemicals from the current food system and assume that it will go on more or less as it is. Every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned. And, given the likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur at a rapid pace, backed by the full resources of national governments.

Without cheap transportation fuels we will have to reduce the amount of food transportation that occurs, and make necessary transportation more efficient. This implies increased local food self-sufficiency. It also implies problems for large cities that have been built in arid regions capable of supporting only small populations on their regional resource base. One has only to contemplate the local productivity of a place like Nevada, to appreciate the enormous challenge of continuing to feed people in such a city such as Las Vegas without easy transportation.

We will need to grow more food in and around cities. Currently, Oakland California is debating a food policy initiative that would mandate by 2015 the growing within a fifty-mile radius of city center of 40 percent of the vegetables consumed in the city.[11] If the example of Cuba were followed, rooftop gardens would result, as well as rooftop raising of food animals like chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs.

Localization of the food process means moving producers and consumers of food closer together, but it also means relying on the local manufacture and regeneration of all of the elements of the production process - from seeds to tools and machinery. This would appear to rule out agricultural bioengineering, which favors the centralized production of patented seed varieties, and discourages the free saving of seeds from year to year by farmers.

Clearly, we must minimize chemical inputs to agriculture (direct and indirect - such as those introduced in packaging and processing).

We will need to re-introduce draft animals in agricultural production. Oxen may be preferable to horses in many instances, because the former can eat straw and stubble, while the latter would compete with humans for grains.

Governments must also provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. It would be a mistake simply to think of this simply in terms of the need for a larger agricultural work force. Successful traditional agriculture requires social networks, and intergenerational sharing of skills and knowledge. We need not just more agricultural workers, but a rural culture that makes agricultural work rewarding.

Farming requires knowledge and experience, and so we will need education for a new generation of farmers; but only some of this education can be generic - much of it must of necessity be locally appropriate.

It will be necessary as well to break up the corporate mega-farms that produce so much of today's cheap grain. Industrial agriculture implies an economy of scale that will be utterly inappropriate and unworkable for post-industrial food systems. Thus land reform will be required in order to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots.

In order for all of this to happen, governments must end subsidies to industrial agriculture and begin subsidizing post-industrial agricultural efforts. There are many ways in which this could be done. The present regime of subsidies is so harmful that merely stopping it in its tracks might in itself be advantageous; but, given the fact that a rapid transition is essential, offering subsidies for education, no-interest loans for land purchase, and technical support during the transition from chemical to organic production would be essential.

Finally, given carrying-capacity limits, food policy must include population policy. We must encourage smaller families by means of economic incentives and improve the economic and educational status of women in poorer countries.

All of this constitutes a gargantuan task, but the alternatives - doing nothing or attempting to solve our food-production problems simply by applying more technological intensification - will almost certainly result in dire consequences. In that case, existing farmers would fail because of fuel and chemical prices. All of the worrisome existing trends mentioned earlier would intensify to the point that the human carrying capacity of Earth would be degraded significantly, and perhaps to a large degree permanently.

In sum, the transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a utopian proposal. It is an immense challenge and will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society. But in the end it is the only rational option for averting human calamity on a scale never before seen.


Notes:

8. See, for example, www.growbiointensive.org/biointensive/brocolli.html

9. P. M. Vitousek, et al., "Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis," Bioscience 36 (1986)

10. See, for example, Bill McKibben, "What Will You Be Eating when the Revolution Comes?", Harper's, April 2005. See also Dale Allen Pfeiffer, "Drawing Lessons from Experience,"

11. Conversation with Randy Hayes, Sustainability Director of the City of Oakland, June 2005.

[No. 159 - July 2005 from a paper presented at the FEASTA Conference, "What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?", June 23-25, 2005, Dublin Ireland]

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Reprinted with the kind permission of Richard Heinberg. All photos are clip art with the exception of the photo of the author.

Richard Heinberg, Futurist

Richard Heinberg is the author of six books including "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies" (New Society, 2003, 2005), and "Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World" (New Society, 2004). He is a journalist, educator, editor, lecturer, and a Core Faculty member of New College of California, where he teaches a program on "Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community." His monthly MuseLetter was nominated in 1994 for an Alternative Press Award and has been included in "Utne Magazine's" annual list of Best Alternative Newsletters. His essays and articles have appeared in many journals including "The Ecologist", "Z Magazine", "The Futurist", "Earth Island Journal", "Yes!", "Wild Matters", "Alternative Press Review", and "The Sun"; and on web sites including Counterpunch.com, EnergyBulletin.net, and ProjectCensored.com.  You can reach Richard at rheinberg@igc.org

Read more of Richard's articles at Satya Center in the Richard Heinberg Archive.