Oil and Food on the table

When we think about the rapidly approaching oil shortage and increasing oil prices we usually think about feeding our SUV's and not our stomachs. Almost a year ago I had a post, Oil, Half Way To Empty, where I discussed the peak of oil production. I quoted James Howard Kunstler on the impact of increasing oil prices on agriculture.

"The whole Archer Daniels Midland model of turning oil into corn into Taco Bell—that whole complex, that system, is really going to be over," says Kuntsler. "We're going to be forced to grow more of our food locally and return to a kind of agriculture that really hasn't been practiced here in a long time. A lot of the land that has only had value as suburban development in the past 30 or 40 years is going to have to be reassigned."

Yesterday I had a post on Jan Lundberg's Peak Oil Fast Crash Scenario where he suggests that the "The trucks will no longer pull into Wal-Mart. Or Safeway or other food stores." In The Energy Bulletin we learn that Oregon's own Rep. Earl Blumenauer is thinking about it and suggests the Time is ripe for urban agriculture.

Is America ready for a metropolitan agriculture policy? Is the time ripe to take some of the billions in subsidies now flowing to big commodity-crop operators and focus instead on sustainable farm production in and around the citistate regions where 80 percent of us live?

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., and the man who founded Congress' Livability Caucus, argues that with half of federal farm subsidies currently "flowing to six states to produce 13 commodities that in the main we don't need, like corn, wheat, cotton, and rice," there's a dramatically superior alternative.

We should, says Blumenauer, "use that money to build sustainable agriculture, create a farmer's market in every community, help farmers protect our land and water, preserve our viewsheds, foster land banks and control erosion."

Historically, he argues, our metropolitan regions weren't just centers of commerce but areas of fertile fields, often in lush river valleys. Even today, they have some of America's best land for sustainable agriculture. "With small diversions from the agriculture bill," argues Blumenauer, "we could provide grants for communities to develop year-round farmers' markets" and help local producers provide fresh vegetables and fruits, high-quality cheeses, honeys, nuts and more.

This is exactly what Kunstler was talking about and one of Lundberg's scenarios.

The Age of Bioregional Countries, based on cooperation and mutual aid will begin. A main job-category will be restoration of the land so as to provide a semblance of the diversity of food that Earth provided prior to petroleum farming. Social structures will no longer lend themselves to overcrowded workforces dependent on the dollar to buy goods and services from huge, distant and unaccountable corporations.

It is beginning to look like the communal hippies of the 60's and 70's may get the last laugh.