Peak Food: Global Food Supply at Breaking Point

Peak Oil = Peak Food. And as with all the contracting industries, agriculture is also contracting. Species are being destroyed. The exception is us. We just keep on feeding and breeding.

James Kunstler made an interesting point in today's Kunstlerkast. He says that come April, American farmers aren't going to find the capital they need to buy pesticides, fertilizers, seeds....to use the machines they want to use...to basically get those massified farms operating at the capacities they used to. A lot of countries import grain from the USA. That's going to be unlikely at the end of 2009/2010. We may see food shortages - in addition to rice - again this year, right here in the suburbs.

clipped from ipsnews.net BROOKLIN, Canada, May 17 (IPS) - The world is now eating more food than farmers grow, pushing global grain stocks to their lowest level in 30 years. Rising population, water shortages, climate change, and the growing costs of fossil fuel-based fertilisers point to a calamitous shortfall in the world's grain supplies in the near future, according to Canada's National Farmers Union (NFU). Thirty years ago, the oceans were teeming with fish, but today more people rely on farmers to produce their food than ever before, says Stewart Wells, NFU's president. In five of the last six years, global population ate significantly more grains than farmers produced. And with the world's farmers unable to increase food production, policymakers must address the "massive challenges to the ability of humanity to continue to feed its growing numbers", Wells said in a statement. "There's not nearly enough discussion about how people will be fed 20 years from now," he said.