Somethingschange overnight. Other things do not. For example, regardless of the outcome of yesterday’s election, I am still a geek.
Ok, I know, that’s a silly justification for talking about something other than yesterday’s election. But something’s been weighing on this geek’s mind since I posted about the nation’s corn harvest last week: I think I overestimated how many calories actually come from corn in the US. (The horror!)
You see, based on the most recent US harvest projections for 2006, and a relatively conservative estimate of the calorie content of corn, the US corn crop provides about 5 times as many calories as the entire human population of the nation needs to survive—not 7 times, as I said last week. Sorry, y’all.
I still think it’s a pretty incredible statistic, though; it certainly suggests that the agricultural system is out of whack, and—to me, anyway—calls into question whether we need to spend so much on corn subsidies.
On the plus side, though, there’s always this: if an energy crisis were to push up the cost of fertilizer, pesticides, tractor fuel and such—and the corn harvest were to fall as a result—there’s still a lot of slack in the food system. Sure, if corn gets expensive, meat and dairy will get more expensive as well. Still, harvests would have to fall by 80 percent or more before corn—a single crop, occupying a fraction of the nation’s cropland—would fail to provide us with enough calories to squeak by. Whether things would work out that way in practice is an open question—but in theory at least, things would have to get really messed up before there’s an actual shortage of food calories in the US system.
Dan
Kunstler talks about this rather often. There are three main sectors for fossil fuel: food, material, transportation. When supply constricts, which one’s gonna go? Certainly fertilizer use will drop, and combined with high gas prices, this will effectively eventually end industrial ag and we’ll be small farmers again (BTW, I intend to semi-retire as a consultant, teaching people how to grow food on their suburban lot, so you see where I come from).The issue is wrt political stability, as trading food will cost much more. Countries with scarce water resources right now don’t have a problem because they trade for their water by buying grain from other countries. When this ends, countries with water will have to absorb environmental refugees, and we all know how we absorb environmental refugees. What’s that, you say? We can adapt! Katrina. Our social evolution hasn’t adapted to this possibility yet. We have enough trouble with internal societal differences: stem cells, gay marriage, property rights. Boy, them property rights are going right out the window with 25 million environmental refugees coming into the country. Regards,
Clark Williams-Derry
Yeah, I’ve heard Kunstler talk about this. Still, the issues seem to me to be more political (who controls the distribution of food?) than practical. I’ll leave the political/social questions to brighter minds than mine; but I have a hard time seeing actual shortages in food calories.
Dan
There is little calorie shortage if you can ship food. If you can’t ship, then many areas will have calorie shortages because, simply, they don’t have the wealth to buy technology to increase production, they don’t have sufficient water, or their climate is ill-suited to staple grains (tropics).