Peak Food

This article is getting referenced everywhere, and for damn good reason. Please read the whole thing because almost every sentence reveals how important and urgent a message this is for us to heed.

Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point

Here's a smattering:

"The world is now eating more food than farmers grow, pushing global grain stocks to their lowest level in 30 years....In five of the last six years, global population ate significantly more grains than farmers produced.

There isn't much land left on the planet that can be converted into new food-producing areas, notes Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington-based non-governmental organisation. And what is left is of generally poor quality or likely to turn into dust bowls if heavily exploited, Brown told IPS.

..."Biotechnology has made little difference so far," he said.

Even if the long-promised biotech advances in drought, cold, and disease-resistance come about in the next decade, they will boost yields little more than five percent globally, Brown said.

"There's not nearly enough discussion about how people will be fed 20 years from now," he said.

..."The food production system is designed to generate profits, not produce food or nutrition for people," Qualman told IPS...."It's a system that's perfectly happy to leave hundreds of millions of people unfed," he said.

...Shifting from a global food production system to local food for local people would go a long way towards addressing inequity, Qualman believes.

"The 100-mile diet, where people obtain their food from within a 100-mile radius of their homes, makes good sense for most of the world," he said."

Comments

[Cornfed]

There still seems to be a high level of denial about the extent of the problem. The solutions the article proposes may work to increase the yield of marginal areas while the rest on the system is still functioning, but will do nothing to address the systemic collapse we are about to face. It will be interesting to see whether the multitudes starve to death relatively quickly or whether there is a period where food is still available but of such nutritionally poor quality that they suffer various ailments before finally shuffling off.

I think the best way for non-sheeple males to avoid starvation would be to find a way to collect wild food while still earning a living within the system and then slowly increase your food gathering activities while decreasing your dependence on earned income. You would therefore want some rural-based profession that was (down) scalable and couldn't easily be outsourced to China, taken over by women or done by migrant workers for sub-minimum wage. Some such professions might include becoming a professional hunter/trapper, fencer, surveyor, tramping guide, wilderness survival instructor etc.

[Jason DuMars]

Peak oil
Peak food
Peak fresh water
Peak natural gas
Peak arable land
Climate change
H5N1
Global thermonuclear war
End-times theocrats being guided by "God"
Global financial collapse
Hyperinflation
Eminent domain
Torture
Ethnic cleansing
Pollution
Fast food
...

I get this feeling that we may be in trouble here.

[Steven Lagavulin]

Jason,
As this article by journalist George Monbiot suggests, you may have put Fast Food too far down the list...

Research shows a direct link between junk food and violent behaviour. But governments are in cahoots with the industry

[Loveandlight]

This is interesting, because I live in the Midwestern USA, where a lot of people try to fill their vast personal spiritual voids with hypercompulsive gluttony.

[nulinegvgv]

it isn't just the midwest.

[TarNutz]

The best way to avoid starvation is to expand what's on the menu. Most people won't like this, but when you're starving, not liking the taste of pine bark isn't as important as not liking to die slowly.

Most mammals on the planet are edible: this doesn't mean that they're so tasty (raccoon, for instance, is rarely eaten if only because they can carry diseases like rabies). The problem with game-meats is that they're often stringy and don't have a lot of fat: a modern health nut will tell you this is good (if they don't vegan at you), but a survival expert will mention "rabbit starvation" due to low fat content. Fats are good for short term survival: if the power ain't coming back on for a long time, eat all the ice cream.

There's a lot of veggies we can't eat because they're poisonous, or the cellulose walls are too tough for our stomachs to break down (like grass). A lot of herbivores can and do get down on these staples, and we can eat them. So thus, the best solution for long-term food is probably small farming, which will require some space. If you're living in the burbs and the food distribution system (and other social networks) break down, get out, unless you want to go Road Warrior.

Live-trapping some wabbits for a hutch might be a good start for a sustainable food source: wild cottontails don't tame, though, so you'd probably be better off buying some domesticated European bunnies. Chickens are better in that they produce eggs: the manure of both is great for the garden. Getting enough feed for the chickens might be a challenge without ready access to grain.

Hunting might be an option for a short while, but it'll require a good bit of hard work and some luck if game get scarce (and they will if people are starving). I'd suggest bow-hunting for survival: arrows are renewable, silent (and less likely to attract attention to your kill), and can be used on anything from deer to fish without ruining the meat or leaving bits of lead in the carcass.

Mah $0.02

Tar

[Vanessa Schulz]

Trapping as a remedy to human starvation should not be considered an option. Steel leghold traps, snares and conibear traps rarely kill on impact. They torture animals until many eventually die of starvation and exposure.

A far saner, holistic way of securing food in the future is by growing it.

Investigate permaculture and intentional communities where people work together to create everything they need. Permaculture is a way to create completely self-reliant, sustainable communities that produce (and use) all their own products. The food is animal and plant based. But it's not only about food, it's about a better way of life, accessible to every person in the world.