Nafeez Ahmed: Food Crisis & Peak Oil (Audio)

[chris]

Audio and slides from a talk by Nafeez Ahmed from a couple of days ago has been posted to Indymedia, The Food Crisis & Peak Oil, it's very good and has a positive message.

Well worth listening to also all the slides from the talk are attached to the article as photos.

[chris]

Nafeez Ahmed is hopefully going to be able to come to Sheffield sometime in the new year to speak at a Transition Sheffield public meeting about our multi-faceted civilizational crisis.

This is what the Energy Bulletin had to say about his Food Crisis & Peak Oil talk:

The section on peak oil begins about 40% into the talk. Nafeez Ahmed has done his homework - he cites Chris Skrebowski, Colin Campbell, Jeffrey Brown ("Explort Land Model"), the Energy Watch Group and the IEA's recent report. I hadn't heard Ahmed before and I was impressed by the wide-ranging nature of his talk.

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/47352

[steve]

Very interesting talk. His connecting of things such as our value system with external systems was interesting not to mention the overall view of the global food system which is about to become a disaster it seems.

Some things though I wasn't so sure about. He seemed to underplay the importance of population growth citing a study that predicts population would continue to grow until the end of the century at about 11 billion before naturally declining and he cites another that organic small scale agriculture could sustain this and produce more than the industrial agriculture. This seems to conflict with his views on climate change where he rightly says that climate shocks will get more severe and affect food production. It seems all very well working out the theoretical maximum population the earth can support under a static unchanging model. But the reality is likely to be big losses to agriculture through unpredictable climate events (floods, draughts etc). This already happening in this country. Farmer's have said continually wet weather for the past, erm, about 5 years have significantly reduced yields in some areas.

Also didn't touch on ecology or mass extinction. Traditionally seafood has been a substantial source of food for many people around the world and yet now we see life in the oceans is declining steeply. Ninety percent of large fish are now gone and a new report just out said zooplankton numbers have decreased by 73% since 1960, 50% since 1990!

Given that food production is, at best, likely to become more uncertain in the future it would seem clear that we should attempt to reduce our numbers asap to take account of these changes.

He also stated it took about 1000 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food which seemed very different from the more often quoted 10. I have seen some quotes suggesting more like 40 calories energy per unit of food for some more advanced countries.

Interesting was the claim that the Tar Sands use more energy than they produce which I hadn't heard before. The EROEI (energy return on energy invested) oft quoted is more like 5 to 1 or even 1.5 (two barrels of oil equivalent energy to get out 3 barrels). However just found an oil drum article suggesting possible negative EROEI:

What's worse, depending on a host of factors, the total Energy Return On Investment (the energy profit, if you will) for tar sands production is typically only around 5% to 10%. In fact, it has even been suggested that the EROI is negative in some cases. But with the current circumstances of stranded and otherwise useless natural gas, oil over $60, an extremely tight global oil supply situation, and a host of complicating factors like tax relief (which we'll get to in a moment), it still makes economic sense, if no other kind.

Another interesting article on tar sands ERORI.

Anyway well worth listening to nevertheless and it would be good if he comes to Sheffield.

[chris]

He seemed to underplay the importance of population growth citing a study that predicts population would continue to grow until the end of the century at about 11 billion before naturally declining and he cites another that organic small scale agriculture could sustain this and produce more than the industrial agriculture.

The last talk he did, The Hidden Holocaust - Our Civilizational Crisis did have a written-up version so it was easier to check his sources, on his blog he has said that he is working on a text version:

Apart from struggling to finish revising my PhD thesis, my main current project has been a major interdisciplinary analysis of global crises, expanding in a way on the articles and talks I've been doing lately on the 'hidden holocaust' theme. This will be a critical review of most of the crucial evidence on climate change, peak oil, economic recession, and the food crisis, aimed at developing a very clear understanding of what's going on, where it's likely to go, and the kind of thinking and practice that will be needed in the coming post-industrial world

http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2008/10/new- ... bsite.html

I did a quick search on "Can organic farming feed the world?" and came across this:

• 10 reasons why organic can feed the world
  Ed Hamer & Mark Anslow 01/03/2008

And last year Rob Hopkins blogged about the question, Can Britain Feed Itself?:

You can download the pdf of his report here, it may be the most fascinating and important piece of reading you take away with you for the Christmas break. His conclusion is similar to Mellanby; yes Britain can feed itself, but the key is the amount of meat we consume.

The UK can feed itself organically, he argues, but the weak point is the production of meat. In the scenario he sets out which is of most relevance to Transition work, which he calls the “Permaculture approach”, he allocates land for meat (83 grams of red meat per person per day, the equivalent of a family roast on a Sunday, and about half what people eat now, as well as some pigs, chickens, fish and sheep), for intensive horticulture and fruit, for wheat (both for grain and for thatching), for textiles, firewood and for biomass, and argues that this can all be done organically, with 2.8 million hectares left over to play with.

If the entire nation were to become vegan, we could have 8.8 million hectares left, but it doesn’t feel to me to be at all likely that that is ever going to happen, although it does strengthen the case for the vegan diet. The key issue here is that the more people we put on the land, the more productive it will become, but as Richard Heinberg has argued, if the UK is to model itself on Cuba, we would need 8 million people to support a post-oil agriculture, at the moment we only have half a million.

Fairlie’s report is thorough and it poses some important questions. What it does very powerfully is to set out a tangible alternative to cornucopian techno-fantasists like James Lovelock’s vision of a nuclear powered future where, as Fairlie puts it, “a third of the land is given over to wilderness, and a third to agribusiness, while the majority of the population is crammed into the remaining third and fed on junk food”. This is the beginnings of really setting out how our countryside could become more diverse, more resilient and sustainable in the truest sense of the word, as in able to function, in a low to zero carbon way beyond the availability of cheap fossil fuels. This brilliant piece of work is the perfect riposte to those who argue that organics can’t feed the world, and is essential Christmas reading!

I also posted a copy to the wiki: https://wiki.transitionsheffield.org.uk ... ritain.pdf

And from The Guardian:

The authors of the 2,500-page International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development [IAASTD] say the world produces enough food for everyone, yet more than 800 million people go hungry.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... d.biofuels

And finally lots of info from The Soil Association:

On 17 November, the Soil Association published 'An inconvenient truth about food', a report on Britain's food security. This report was based on 'Rethinking Britain's Food Security' - a research report for the Soil Association, written by David Barling, Rosalind Sharpe and Tim Lang of City University London.

http://www.soilassociation.org/foodsecurity

[steve]

Yeah my concern was not about doubts of organic food. I think the UK government should be subsidizing organic food right now so we've got some land to grow on should we encounter a sudden drop in oil. Nafeez Ahmed notes that after about 5 or 10 years after peaking in oil production a country will likely stop exporting and keep it's remaining oil for domestic use. So we could find ourselves without oil very suddenly. Well it can take 3 to 5 years to convert land to organic (Cuba film), and I presume that assumes one has the compost material to add - which we don't.

It was more that any such models for food production tend to be static based on the way things are now rather than taking into account the uncertainties of climate change - which of course they can't do since they are uncertain. Given that (and ecosystem damage, mass extinction etc.) I think we should reduce population.

[chris]

There is a new article on Nafeez's blog, The End of Capitalism? Not quite, but nearly...., it concludes:

Civilizational Renewal?

The urgent need for a global alternative is therefore not up for debate. But we should hold no illusions. Things will get far, far worse, before they get better. This is not yet the end of capitalism. On the contrary, the biggest financial players, like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and others, have used their power over states to secure massive bailouts using public funds, allowing them to prevail while hundreds of other financial institutions have fallen like dominos. As the collapse of the financial system pulls down the real economy, shares in giant corporations which actually produce tangible goods and services have plummeted as consumers are clinging to their increasingly empty wallets. Taking advantage of their supreme position, financiers have moved in fast, buying up the cheaper shares and consolidating ownership of production. We are witnessing an unprecedented re-structuring and centralization of economic and financial power.

Yet the system has perhaps another 10-15 years before irreversible collapse as the impact of peak oil kicks in. In this time-frame, as working people are increasingly upset, confused and angry about the acceleration of socio-economic injustice, activists and researchers have unprecedented opportunity to work harder than ever to develop a vision for the future that is just, inclusive and holistic. The time to prove that there are meaningful alternatives is now.