Funnily enough, when the USSR collapsed, so too did the supply of oil to Cuba, by two thirds. In the ensuing period the average Cuban lost 22 pounds (lbs) in weight.

Add to that the embargo on Cuba by the USA – enforced by banning ships who had been to Cuba from enterting any harbour of port in the USA – and you could see why they went on a forced diet.

In fact it was several Australians who went to Cuba and taught them Permaculture practices (from Bill Mollison from Tassie) that helped create a largely self-sufficient food producing country it now is.

Now it appears that the shoe is on the other foot; with Americans suggested as the most obese nation, the global financial crisis worm – instigated by the Americans – has come back to visit them, with the significant increase in requests for food stamps.

The number of Americans receiving food stamps rose to a record 40 plus million in May this year, as the jobless rate hovers near a 27-year high.

Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 19 % from a year earlier and increased 0.9% from April this year (3 months ago), the US Department of Agriculture said in a statement on its website that pparticipation has set records for 18 straight months.

Over an eighth of the American population will get food stamps each month in the year that began Oct. 1 2009 and according to White House estimates, the figure is projected to rise to 43.3 million in 2011.

In spite of prolonged droughts and ensuing water shortages and subsequent billion $ investments in water infrastructure, what remaining arable food growing areas are destined to be sold off in one way or another. The Mary River dam would have done more than damage a fragile eco-system, it would have covered arable land and caused much ecological damage and now, Queensland Labor has planned the sell off of Darling Downs to make a few $’s in royalties and massive profts for major financial contributors.

Around the world in another socialist government also known for previous experiments in agriculture and social experiments, they too are suffering from droughts and if you think it wont affect us here, then think again.

Russia is a major food exporter, but record temperatures this summer are expected to halve exports; there are also fears the government could start an export ban to protect domestic supplies, which will result in a food price inflation. President of the Russian Grain Union, Arkady Zlachevsky says there is hope that Siberian crops will help improve the total output; however, non-political commentators believe a forecast if 11 million tonnes is more accurate than exports of 14 to 15 million tonnes.

Russia had agreed to sell 180 thousand tonnes of wheat to Egypt after shunning a similar offer from the United States. Grain prices last week reached $240 per tonne, up from $180. It doesn’t matter where it is, if the product is more scarce, then demand will push the price up, whatever the commodity.

During those years, irrigation practices improved as did variants of staple foods and GM forced itself uninvited and unwanted, onto the world market backed by heavy money and lighweight political will in naming food products tainted by – now proven – side effects and serious health issues.

But with this growing abundance, so too did the population explode, from around 3.5 billion people to nearly 7 billion, eating up surpluses and expected to rise to 9 billion by 2050.

Problems included no down-time for land, for it to have a rest and be nutrients re-enriched and we’re running out of potable water throughout the world, from the Americans and India, throughout Australia, Africa and China. Rising temperatures are affecting germination and pollination, killing bees and shriveling yields and potable water supplies are so polluted (with toxic pesticide residues) that rural cancer rates in Farmers is soaring; if the chemicals don’t get them, it will be crop failures and goughing banks.

Food reserves are now at 20 year lows and yet emerging market standards of living are consuming more and better food; vegetarian numbers are out-numbered by meat eaters which compete along with cars for food crops. The Chinese population is the largest in the world, and statistics indicate that pork demand has risen by 45% from 1993 to 2005; meat is an inefficient calorie transmission mechanism, creating demand for five times more grain than just eating the grain alone.

To produce one kilo of beef, you need 32 kilos of grain and over 4,000 litres of water and in Australia, they are going from the sheep’s back (wool) to sheep meat and the subsidy governments pay for ethanol and biofuel programs is an added burden of the system. However, any proposal of genetic engineering taking up the slack will be as volatile as theuse of DDT in the 50′s. While sustainable farming and smart irrigation may assist in a second green revolution, the reality is that any slack generated will be eaten away by a plague of the human population.

The amount of arable land per person has fallen since 1960 from 1.1 acres to 0.6 acres per person and that could halve again by 2050. Water will become even more scarce than land and productivity gains from new seed types are already hitting a wall. China is in a bind, with 20% of the world’s population and only 7% of the arable land; China has committed $5 billion to agricultural land in Africa and the Chinese government has sent well over a million Chinese agricultural workers outside it’s borders, even to Africa.

South Korea has leased half the arable land in Madagascar to insure their own food supplies and as the realisation of a global famine presents itself, many countries and their corporations are securing tracts of land around the world, including Argentina and Brazil or building portfolios of farms in their own regions. The question must be asked, will locals allow food to be harvested and shipped away if the populace is hungry … how long will local governments remain in power (let alone keeping their lives) if and when the poor see how the rich are doing ?

2009 was one of the greatest crop yields in history brought on by perfect summer weather and delivered one of the largest grain crops in history; however, rain-falls and an early frost meant that much of crops ended up rotting in the field, providing a backdrop for price rises of 30% across the board. In the USA, the US Department of Agricultural January crop report predicted a replay of record production in 2010, but the weather pattern / change in cycles may do as it did last year.

Food production has dropped off in Australia, resulting in more imported foods and prices going up; also, our oil dependence is growing rapidly as well and as the population grows out of control – as far as politicians seem concerned – we can expect to see higher food prices across the board; and thats not even mentioning rising water and electricity charges. So get in the habit of buying what you need and will use, reduce wastage and become more environmentally aware, if you don’t it will cost you, dearly.

One-quarter of all the maize and other grain crops grown in the US now ends up as biofuel in cars rather than being used to feed people according to new analysis which suggests that the biofuel revolution launched by former President George Bush in 2007.

The 2009 figures from the US Department of Agriculture shows ethanol production rising to record levels driven by farm subsidies and laws which require vehicles to use increasing amounts of biofuels “The grain grown to produce fuel in the US [in 2009] was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels,” said Lester Brown, the director of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington thinktank ithat conducted the analysis.

Last year 107m tonnes of grain, mostly corn, was grown by US farmers to be blended with petrol. This was nearly twice as much as in 2007, when Bush challenged farmers to increase production by 500% by 2017 to save cut oil imports and reduce carbon emissions.

More than 80 new ethanol plants have been built since then, with more expected by 2015, by which time the US will need to produce a further 5bn gallons of ethanol if it is to meet its renewable fuel standard.  According to Brown, the growing demand for US ethanol derived from grains helped to push world grain prices to record highs between late 2006 and 2008.

In 2008, the Guardian revealed a secret World Bank report that concluded that the drive for biofuels by American and European governments had pushed up food prices by 75%, in stark contrast to US claims that prices had risen only 2-3% as a result.  Since then, the number of hungry people in the world has increased to over 1 billion people according to the UN’s World Food programme.

“Continuing to divert more food to fuel, as is now mandated by the US federal government in its renewable fuel standard, will likely only reinforce the disturbing rise in world hunger. By subsidising the production of ethanol to the tune of some $6bn each year, US taxpayers are in effect subsidising rising food bills at home and around the world,” said Brown.

“The worst economic crisis since the great depression has recently brought food prices down from their peak, but they still remain well above their long-term average levels.” The US is by far the world’s leading grain exporter, exporting more than Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Russia combined. In 2008, the UN called for a comprehensive review of biofuel production from food crops.

“There is a direct link between biofuels and food prices. The needs of the hungry must come before the needs of cars,” said Meredith Alexander, biofuels campaigner at ActionAid in London. As well as the effect on food, campaigners also argue that many scientists question whether biofuels made from food crops actually save any greenhouse gas emissions.

But ethanol producers deny that their record production means less food “Continued innovation in ethanol production and agricultural technology means that we don’t have to make a false choice between food and fuel.

We can more than meet the demand for food and livestock feed while reducing our dependence on foreign oil through the production of homegrown renewable ethanol,” said Tom Buis, the chief executive of industry group Growth Energ.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

As you are probably aware, rats are used in trials of most foods. In this study, three varieties of Monsanto’s GM corn – Mon 863, insecticide-producing Mon 810, and Roundup® herbicide-absorbing NK 603 – were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities.  

Monsanto used its own crude statistical data after conducting a 90-day study, even though chronic problems can rarely be found and attributed after 90 days; and they concluded that the corn was safe for consumption.

However, at the conclusion of the IJBS study, researchers wrote: ‘effects were mostly concentrated in kidney and liver function, the two major diet detoxification organs, but in detail differed with each GM type.

In addition, some effects on heart, adrenal, spleen and blood cells were also frequently noted. As there normally exists sex differences in liver and kidney metabolism, the highly statistically significant disturbances in the function of these organs, seen between male and female rats, cannot be dismissed as biologically insignificant as has been proposed by others.

We therefore conclude that our data strongly suggests that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal toxicity….and these substances have never before been an integral part of the human or animal diet and therefore their health consequences for those who consume them, especially over long time periods are currently unknown’.

Monsanto immediately responded to the study, stating that the research was ‘based on faulty analytical methods and reasoning and do not call into question the safety findings for these products’. So although their research showed problems, they claim kidney and liver toxicifications are of no concern.

The IJBS study’s author Gilles-Eric Séralini responded to the Monsanto statement on the blog, Food Freedom, ‘our study contradicts Monsanto conclusions because Monsanto systematically neglects significant health effects in mammals that are different in males and females eating GMOs, or not proportional to the dose; this is a very serious mistake (sic) and dramatic for public health; this is the major conclusion revealed by our work, resulting only from careful re-analysis of Monsanto crude statistical data’.

Related blogs: Jennifer Grayson: Eco Etiquette: How Can I Avoid Genetically Modified Foods?; Ban Genetically Engineered Hormonal rBGH Milk; Meat Adulterated With Sex Hormones; GMO Corn; Gmos; International Journal Of Biological Sciences; Monsanto and Monsanto Corn Organ Damage; Monsanto Gm Corn; Monsanto Gmo Corn; National Food Safety; The Global Report, Twilight Earth and the University Of Caen

Not only are the Poms running out of oil (they are a net importer now), but depleted fish stocks and population spread and a reduced number of farmers see grim days ahead.

Defra (their department of primary industries) suggest the public must accept genetically-modified food.

Their membership in the EU means the Common Agricultural Policy adds £52 a year to every Briton’s annual food bill; however, to help local farmers, they will require food clearly labeled with the country of origin to help consumers choose.
The UK’s Sunday Telegraph campaigned for country-of-origin labelling and highlighted cases where consumers are misled as to where their food comes from; however, typical of Governments everywhere (looking after their sponsors) will stop short of promising compulsory labeling and will instead recommend a voluntary scheme.

The current food production system needs reform because it emits too much greenhouse gas, is overly bureaucratic and does not pay enough attention to soil quality and water use, the report, called Food 2030, will state.

The food industry needs to prepare for “sudden shocks” such as natural disasters, disruption to fuel supplies or transport networks, and commodity price spikes.

Gordon Brown – in his atypical double-speak – suggests to Britians ‘we need to think differently about food and that food production must increase without damaging the air, soil, water and marine, resources, biodiversity and climate that we all depend on; we need to feed more people globally, many of whom want or need to eat a better diet; we need to tackle increasing obesity and encourage healthier diets; we need to do all these things in light of the increasing challenge of climate change and while delivering continuous improvement in food safety’.

The rub is that farmers in the UK are efficient becaused of competition and regularly accuse ministers of failing to support British agriculture and allowing the number of farms to decline, along with the acreage of land under cultivation.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that world food supplies need to rise by 40 per cent by 2030 and by 70 per cent by 2050 to feed a forecasted global population of nine billion in 2050.  In my opinion, a physical impossability.

The country of origin labelling was defeated by the UK government and nine other countries (proven via leaked papers) in spite of promises to UK farmers, food producers and consumers. A controversial report will urge consumers not to insist on buying locally produced food, because doing so would reduce the prosperity of farmers in developing countries.

Environmental campaigners have called on shoppers to buy local as a way to minimise their carbon footprint. The term food miles (coined by Dr Tim Lang, professor of food policy at London’s City University, in the 1990s), measures the distance food travels from field to plate, as a way of measuring its environmental impact; however, the government is against it, but only to a point, halting imports from countries outside the EU such as Australia and Brazil, which inflates food prices dramatically.

But the British may have to buy most of their food from the southern hemisphere as scientists have uncovered more evidence for a dramatic weakening in the vast ocean current that gives Britain its relatively balmy climate by dragging warm water northwards from the tropics.

The slowdown, which climate modellers have predicted will follow global warming, has been confirmed by the most detailed study yet of ocean flow in the Atlantic. Most alarmingly, the data reveal that a part of the current, which is usually 60 times more powerful than the Amazon river, came to a temporary halt during November 2004.

The nightmare scenario of a shutdown in the meridional ocean current which drives the Gulf stream was dramatically portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow. The climate disaster film had Europe and North America plunged into a new ice age practically overnight. Although no scientist thinks the switch-off could happen that quickly, they do agree that even a weakening of the current over a few decades would have profound consequences.

Warm water brought to Europe’s shores raises the temperature by as much as 10 degrees C in some places and without it the continent would be much colder and drier. Researchers are not sure yet what to make of the recent 10-day hiatus. Harry Bryden at the National Oceanography Centre said ‘we’d never seen anything like that before and we don’t understand it; we didn’t know it could happen; is this the first sign that the current is stuttering to a halt; I want to know more before I say that’.

Lloyd Keigwin, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, in the US, described the temporary shutdown as ‘the most abrupt change in the whole [climate] record; it only lasted 10 days, but suppose it lasted 30 or 60 days; how can we rule out a longer one next year ?’

Prof Bryden’s group stunned climate researchers last year with data suggesting that the flow rate of the Atlantic circulation had dropped by about 6m tonnes of water a second from 1957 to 1998. If the current remained that weak, he predicted, it would lead to a 1C drop in the UK in the next decade. A complete shutdown would lead to a 4C-6C cooling over 20 years.

The study prompted the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council to set up an array of 16 submerged stations spread across the Atlantic, from Florida to north Africa, to measure flow rate and other variables at different depths. Data from these stations confirmed the slowdown in 1998 was not a “freak observation”- although the current does seem to have picked up slightly since.

We think the society around us is solid but there is an old political aphorism: the difference between social order and disorder is 36 hours without food.

Think about that for even a moment and you know it’s true. Food security is the basis of everything we call civilised.

This is the perfect time of year to consider the subject because at this time of abundance, we need to know that Australia’s food security is declining.

With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 came a chicken boom. The humble, productive backyard chook helped America, and Australia, get through the greatest financial crisis and highest unemployment of the last hundred years.

Eighty years later, in an era of factory farming, cheap food and pervasive obesity, this boom in backyard chicken-raising in America is a telling detail because the levels of unemployment, debt, foreclosure and political anger are all far higher in the United States than in Australia.

The world’s largest mail-order poultry operation, Murray McMurray Hatchery in Iowa, is shipping almost 2 million live birds a year and has been unable to expand production in pace with demand. (McMurray sells about 170 breeds of birds, including black swans.) The online forum BackyardChickens.com has 40,000 members and is only one of several big chicken online communities in the US. When the American writer Susan Orlean decided to buy a chicken coop and keep a few hens, she stumbled into a social phenomena: ”The chicken movement seems to be expanding exponentially.”

Even the White House has been caught up in acknowledging the long and damaging decline of home-grown food. In March, the first lady, Michelle Obama, became the first occupant of the White House since the Depression to have a working vegetable garden, the last being Eleanor Roosevelt.

Note the symmetry between economic hardship and backyard food.

The Obama plot is producing vegetables on the South Lawn, a site chosen for its visibility to outside visitors. Michelle Obama wants to educate her daughters and the general public about the need for healthy, local, seasonal food at a time when obesity has become America’s No.1 health problem. She expects every member of the family to participate in the necessary weeding, including the President, although out of deference to the Commander-in-Chief, she is not growing beetroot because he doesn’t like it.

There has even been talk of a chicken coop, which would be a wonderful symbol because every chicken in a backyard is at least one less bird subjected to the grotesque cruelty of factory farming, which we pretend is not the real cost behind every cheap chicken breast, wing and pale egg.

The hidden costs of our food system are high. There is the obvious
cost in health as our diets have an abundance of bulk and taste but
an increasing paucity of nutritional value. The energy cost is
extremely high, with a mass-distribution system built on
transportation, packaging, refrigeration, storage and preservation.
The moral cost is also high as food animals, especially chickens,
live out their lives in an abject state of constriction.

The solution is partly within our grasp. One of Australia’s
sustainability visionaries, Michael Mobbs, whose famous inner-city
house is completely self-sufficient in energy and water, has
developed the embryo of a system of urban street gardens – communal
food production in the spare space on our footpaths.

His street, Myrtle Street, Chippendale, has multiple but unobtrusive
fruit and vegetable patches, and communal composting bins. If you
didn’t know, you might not even realise it. You’d just think the
street was unusually bushy. His scheme has had no problems from City
of Sydney council, quite the contrary. ”The council has taken what
we’ve done in Myrtle Street and made it draft policy for the whole
council area,” he says. ”That’s a real win.

”I know of a dozen streets that I’m directly involved with that are
doing street gardens,” Mobbs said. ”I think there must be hundreds
more. Food transcends party politics. Food is the future of
politics.”

The council is even considering setting up an urban farm on one of
its green spaces to grow vegetables and produce eggs.

A more advanced variation on this grassroots theme is the Landshare
program set up by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the Devon-based TV
chef and organic food producer. As a food and media impresario,
Fearnley-Whittingstall has not wasted his celebrity on mere fame but
championed self-sufficiency, organic food, and the consumption of
local, seasonal produce.

Landshare uses the internet to match people with spare land and those
who want to grow vegetables. It has become nationwide, with 1300
landowners, 3500 gardeners and 500 helpers across Britain.

Australia, in contrast, is going in the opposite direction. Much of
the rich farmland surrounding Sydney and Melbourne has been replaced
by urban spread. There are just 1050 surviving market gardens around
Sydney and half are in the sights of the developer-dominated NSW
Labor Government.

Australia’s food security is going backwards. Our lax food-labelling
laws are being exploited by the giant retail chains to import cheap
food from abroad, mix it with Australian product and, if more than 50
per cent of the value of the mix is Australian, to label it ”Made in
Australia”. The consumer is being duped and the practice is sending
some local farmers broke.

If Australia’s population keeps growing at a rate of 1.2 million
people every three years, and the Murray-Darling Basin continues to
degrade, and the arid zone continues to expand, and cheap imported
food continues to out-compete local product, Australia will become a
net importer of food sooner rather than later. Hard to imagine, but
inevitable on present trends.

Food for thought.

What started as a informative perspective of whomever had written his presentation soon turned into plan and simple bullshit; even a student with poor mathematics skills could see the implausible that journalists seems to so easily swallow, small wonder we are in the pickle we are in, when those paid to ask the right questions are caught up in the thrill of perhaps 15 seconds of fame on top of a free meal at the Press Club. (Press Gang Club more like it).

So why would anyone try to peddle GM foods when all around the world there are problems with lower crop yields and even soil ‘sterilization’, leaving aside the fact that just about every person asked if they would accept GM food say NO and all citizens – at least in Australia – want food packaging marked so they can avoid the product?

Why would politicians act against the interests and legitimate fears of the people they were elected to represent and the answer is simple, to line their own pockets.

Right Burke suggested that food production – after climate change considerations – would fall somewhere between 2% and 6% world wide and 9% to 10% in Australia yet our food productivity would grow – one would assume exponentially – to address the 10% fall in production in addition to our growing population while drought stricken soil and water shortages grows daily.

He then went on to defend food miles and genetically modified foods and suggested that many of crops grown here were not natural to Australia, so what is the problem with GM?

So how does one educate someone who has such a contorted understanding of thermodynamics, where energy in has an end result of heat out; that to grow food here and then fly it there has no compounding effect on the environment ?

But before we start examining the massive holes in ‘Right Burke’s’ fanciful proposal, we have to understand that ‘carrying capacity’ applies to everything, from the amount of force that will break the strongest rope, how much weight a vehicle or road surface can cope to ‘the straw that broke the camels back’; so when we talk about the carrying capacity of the land, it’s the available arable soil, the quantity and quality of water and the weather that puts a cap on whatever the crop production, be it wheat, vegetable and fruit or meat.

As the ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) was not about, there are only guesstimates as to the Aboriginal populations in Australia, which where anywhere from 300,000 to 1,500,000. When I was a child, white ‘documentaries’ (theories of whites) proposed that Aboriginals were blight on the country, particularly demonstrated by burn-backs (now part of ‘land management’ these days). More recently, we have seen that Aboriginals actually ‘farmed’ the land in many ways, but never with the devastation that we whites have perpetrated. So after some 40,000 years, one could say that the land’s carrying capacity was in the order of (say) one million five thousand people; given advances in water storage and a wider variety of food growing practices, I would hazard a guess that Australia’s ‘carrying capacity’ would be about *3 million.

*[9 out of every food energy calories we eat represent the fossil fuels coal, gas and oil; as these diminish and therefore become more expensive, less people will be able to be fed, leading to mass starvation which is already happening increasingly around the world, with poorer nations – when having to compete with rich nations for food – being the first affected]

So let’s consider the – foolish – suggestion that food productivity will grow at a faster rate than Australia’s ability to produce assuming a loss of 9%. We know there are water shortages throughout Australia. The total gross value of irrigated agricultural production in 2004-05 was $9,076 million compared to $AUD 9,618 million in 2000-01, about a 6% drop in productivity. [Irrigated crops are highly dependant on irrigation as opposed to ‘dry cropping’ which relies on seasonal rainfall. Rivers, water-tables and catchment areas are obviously dependant on a regular and minimium rainfall otherwise crop production is not possible. Example: Dalby (Queensland) which has now run out of water; where food production and human and livestock now have to compete with an ethanol plant that uses 25% of the areas captured water]

The Australian Bureau of Statistics 1901 census counted 3,773,801 people; in 2001 the national census tallied 18,972,350 people and the estimated population mid-2004 was 20,111,300 (footprint of about 2.4 people per square kilometre). So if we look at these two statistics, a 6% population increase and (above) a 6% decrease in production; this is a variance of 12% in just 4 years and in excess of the 10% nominated by ‘Right Burke’.

Then there’s ‘Right Burke’s GM solution. Laboratory tests are carried out on mice, rats, pigs and monkeys because we share much of their genetic make up (pigs hearts have been transplanted into humans) and many tests find out what may or may not work. One of the many problems with GM genetically modified crops is that certain splicing of ‘pest resistance’ actually kill friendly insects that otherwise would assist farmers in their battle to save crops. [The Americans are renowned for loss of life and casualties in their ‘friendly fire’ and collateral damage philosophies – the end justifies the means]

One has to remember that GM food is not about the nobility of addressing world starvation, its about profiteering and monopolising the market. The USA has flooded markets everywhere with GM food to close down local farming and make people dependant on their products. GM companies want to be the only ones who control the supply of seed; in Iraq that actually banned local farmers from storing their own seed to replant, forcing them to use GM seeds.

The main issue is over population / exceeding the land’s carrying capacity. Why doesn’t Tony Burke have 10 or more children ? Most probably because his income is insufficient to support that many kids, so why should governments be more focused on stabilizing the population and meet the needs of those already here; why not have the necessary infrastructure in place … the nurses, teachers, doctors and hospitals and schools and public transport in place before encouraging growth ?

The engineering of herbicide-tolerant crops, as well as crops that produce their own insecticides, is all about finding ways to maintain and expand large-scale chemical intensive, monoculture farming systems, rather than about ways of shifting to ecologically sustainable farming practices such as organic and traditional agricultural forms.

Apart from one crop seeds (the off-spring carry no seeds to replant, more have to be bought from the GM companies), in Canada, modified genes from GM crops have transferred into local wild plants, creating herbicide resistant super-weeds; this had been considered impossible by GM ‘scientists’ only two years into a three year program; and farm scale trials provided scientific evidence that herbicide tolerant GM oilseed rape and sugar beet were bad for biodiversity because the herbicide used to kill weeds around the GM crops wiped out most natural organisms and wildlife compared to conventional crops.

Burke also stated we are now a net importer of sea foods (and we are surrounded by sea ?); why not address run-off from farming and the practice of wiping out mangrove that is crucial to the formation of all marine life instead of the well off having all important water views ? What about warming seas killing off whole species of various food chains ?

Tackling the salary’s of CEO’s of companies who provided ‘support’ to Australian framers may sound productive, but at the end of the day, pissing in one’s own pocket and other peoples does not address the real issue/s.

Iran is an oppressive state – using religion as the main connection with the people – where orphaned children are taken under the wing of the state and conditioned to defend the regime whatever it takes, even killing innocent women.

I just watched a movie called ‘crossing over’ about the illegal immigrants in the USA, and how the right of free speech costs everything. An obviously rebellious teenager puts forward the proposition that the terrorists in actual fact were expressing themselves the only way they could – through 911 – for what the American corporate-government was doing to countries around the world, bringing ‘democracy’ to the people.

When the United Nations and its members provide ‘aid’, it’s usually expressed in $; however, what it does leave out is that the ‘aid’ is conditional on the corporations of the given country supplying the ‘aid’ to be given preferential / exclusive treatment.

We know that much of the food that China (and other Asian countries) exports to the world is low in nutritional value and at times heavily contaminated with chemicals, but what is less publicised is that much of the food ‘aid’ by the Americans is likewise suspect; GM (genetically modified) and or poor nutritional value foods.

Many African countries refused American GM foods but to add to the misery, rice from the USA lacks the nutritional value of the whole-grain native crop and an epidemic of Beriberi in the Haitian populace was traced back to USA rice, which is processed in such a way that removes vitamin B.

USA foreign aid adds to the global problem of food growth by distributing food produced by US corporations, rather than purchasing it from local farmers to strengthen their capacity to feed their own.

Be careful the hand you hold doesn’t hold you down …

On closer inspection, the brussel sprouts were similarly affected, despite having grown Marigold nearby (as it is said to ward off some of the many insects that lay waste to vegetation).

We have had a beautiful crop of cherry tomatoes and roma tomatoes, but in spite of protestations by our politicians and their select climate experts, it is hotter and dryer and not uncommon to find the tomatoes have actually been cooked in the sun.

Our soil seems to lack the nutrition to grow egg-plant and zucchinis, squash and pumpkin struggles even though we compost and use horse manure (picked up by car); however, beetroot, carrots, corn and tomatoes flourish.

As I’ve mentioned before (in earlier posts), 9 out of 10 energy (Joules) in our food represent fossil fuels, be it the diesel in farm equipment, petrol in cars and trucks, gas in fertilizers and coal to electricity from processing food to refrigeration.

Even my organic vegetables have a embodied energy cost (from the seedlings being collected, planted in small planter punnets, watered and cared for by paid staff, transported to wholesalers, then to retailers and then when I drove down in the car to pick them up), that includes water.

At the end of the day, what we eat predominantly eat, comes via the front door, which raises the question as to how much longer this can continue. By this I mean that phosphate supplies around the world are nearly finished, natural gas used in the manufacture of fertilizers now has more value in other uses (so the cost for fertilizers goes up), oil costs more and electricity supplies and usage are fast converging.

In another article I used Ethiopia’s famine of some 20 years ago being replicated again not because of poor farming practices, but the fact that their population has double since then; and now the UN has released data stating the there are over one billion people in Africa, so how can the planet survive being overrun – like my garden – with a species that keeps growing in numbers and consuming all in it’s path.

A stroll through markets in China will show you we humans will eat just about everything. But how can the population keep growing if there is a ceiling on available water, how can people afford food when there is so much embodied energy – coal, gas and oil – that goes into the production of food ?  At the end of the day, the veggie patch will stop producing.

The most obvious energy source that goes into food is oil, from diesel to petrol in every facet from sowing the seed, to fertilizing and watering it to the pesticides to try and keep the bugs at bay; then there is the harvesting, transport to the processing factories etc, to wholesale, retail and via our car to be housed in a fridge.

We know that oil is a finite resource, that eventually it will run out, but the organisation that monitors energy / oil is in denial about the ability to produce more when extraction from oil sites around the world is falling.

Its’ happening right now, countries that had their own oil and became dependant now rely on other nations to supply them. The USA was once the leading exporter of oil; the UK had its own oil reserves that also on their last legs and before that, they just about ran out of coal.

Less than a month ago, two whistleblowers from the IEA (International Energy Agency) alleged that the IEA had deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world’s oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Several days later, researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA’s forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible.  If we fail to replace oil before the supply crashes, the global economy is well and truly stuffed.

There is a story about a Pembrokeshire farmer, Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, who has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester onto nearby fields.

He’s replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.

According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel(3). The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil.

Unless farmers can change the way it’s grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world’s people. Any responsible government would be asking urgent questions about how long we have got.

Instead, most of them delegate this job to the International Energy Agency; however, in the new World Energy Outlook published by the IEA last week, they expect global demand for oil to rise from 85m barrels a day in 2008 to 105m in 2030 and oil production will rise to 103m barrels, with biofuels making up any shortfall. What seems unimaginable is that the IEA believe the oil will be ‘there’ because we want it; even though all oil fields yields are slowing.

Even if IEA’s forecasts for supply were met by new and undiscovered oil fields, the cost of bringing these fields would financially be prohibitive, particularly given the global financial crash.

In October the UK Energy Research Centre published a massive review of all the available evidence on global oil supplies and found that the date of peak oil will be determined not by the total size of the global resource but by the rate at which it can be exploited.

New discoveries would have to be implausibly large to make a significant difference: even if a field the size of all the oil reserves ever struck in the USA were miraculously discovered, it would delay the date of Peak Oil by only four years; and as far as global discoveries go, they peaked in the 1960s.

The UKERC review finds that just to keep oil supply at present levels, “more than two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030 … at best, this is likely to prove extremely challenging”. Unconventional oils won’t save us as even the Canadian tar sands could only deliver 5m barrels a day by 2030.

A report commissioned by the US Department of Energy shows an emergency programme to replace current energy supplies or equipment to anticipate peak oil would need about 20 years to take effect. The world economy has collapsed whatever we might do now, but we could look to saving farming, where broad acre is replaced with much smaller human labour intensive farms and cooperatives.

Don’t expect corporate government to come up with a replacement that will remove their ability to draw an income, however, don’t be surprised when the governments start placing a tax on home grown foods; a  switch to back-yard gardens and other forms of permaculture is tricky, but we have no choice.