One global impact that is already affecting our economy, and will soon radically alter our whole pattern of community, is the end of cheap oil. Worldwide, the oil price shock is already having a tangible impact through food price inflation, for a number of reasons. Whereas the global food distribution system took fuel to be an incidental cost, the price of fuel has now risen to the point where it has actually reversed globalization – local sources are quickly becoming cheaper regardless of lower labor, growing and processing costs elsewhere. The rise of ethanol as an alternative fuel has started to crowd out food production in the US, causing food riots in Mexico, while actually using more energy to produce than it takes to make, and worsening global warming.

But the much larger problem is that the so-called Green Revolution was actually a fossil fuel revolution, based on fertilizer made primarily from natural gas, plus herbicides and pesticides made from oil. The curves for agricultural yield, GDP, fossil fuel use, and human population growth in the 21st century all have the same shape, because all spring fundamentally from oil…and all are likely to decline with the oil supply. It appears now that the global oil supply peaked in May 2005, and whether or not that level of production (approximately 87 million barrels per day) is ever exceeded slightly, we are fundamentally on a plateau, with a permanently declining energy supply to follow no later than 2015, and local supplies to decline sooner. (Mexico, for example, will be a net zero exporter by 2013. It is currently the third largest supplier to the US, which imports approximately 12 million barrels a day of oil. A replacement for Mexico’s oil will not be forthcoming.)

The consequences are obvious. Agricultural yields from industrial farms will start to decline as the fossil fuel inputs become unaffordable. Shipping food long distances will stop as oil and diesel become unavailable, and when anticipated gasoline and diesel shortages begin (sometime in the next 5 years), the just-in-time supply line that delivers 24 hours worth of food to our supermarkets will be disrupted and will eventually stop. Panic buying will result, followed by predictable social problems. This means we have an extremely short time frame in which to begin raising most of our food locally and in much greater abundance, with organic (non-fossil-fuel-based) methods. It means that the highest and best use of land is for growing food, since a society without food security is at the greatest risk of all.

The social realignments of production of all goods, but first of all food, means that we cannot take anything we have now for granted. The imminent decline of the global oil supply dictates that we must plan for food security, which starts with protecting farmland and in fact clawing back lost farmland, and pursuing a range of other initiatives from making home gardens a priority to adaptive re-use of buildings and rooftops for our own food production.

For the source of the above figures, see Jon Cooksey’s notes on the 2008 ASPO Confererence.