The high vulnerability of the GIW’s food production and supply chains is demonstrated further in the recent work of Peter Alexander et al.[17] They show that “due to cumulative losses, the proportion of global agricultural dry biomass consumed as food is just 6% (9.0% for energy and 7.6% for protein)” of raw production. Figure 4, from their study shows vividly the extent of the losses (shown in light grey) and how slim is the flow of dry matter (and hence energy) that reaches consumers (shown in dark blue).

The key point is that this slim flow reaching consumers is entirely dependent on fizzling out net energy from oil… keeping in mind also that the raw flows shown of the left of Figure 4 are also generating some 30% of all GHG emissions. In energy terms, croplands and grasslands generate some 310EJ (Exajoules) resulting in 30.6EJ reaching consumers, i.e. (with 2.6EJ over consumed relative to actual food requirements).

In fact the situation is even worse… Sara Menker, former commodities trader, founder and chief executive of Gro Intelligence, an agricultural data technology company, has approached the matter by focusing on actual nutritional value, an approach similar to and furthering that of Alexander et al. She points out that on present trends by 2023 the population of China, India and Africa will amount to about 50% of world population. At that point the total food surplus of Europe and the Americas (north and south) available for exports would not be enough to compensate the total food deficit of China, India and Africa. By 2037 she expects a global 214 trillion calorie deficit (some 895TJ, Terajoules). This is still a small fraction of the total nutrients reaching consumers, but it marks a threshold after which, short of major change to something else, the deficit is set to grow rapidly.

Menker and her Gro Intelligence company aim to bridge the data and knowledge gap in the agriculture and food sectors. They fight cognitive failure. However, they have not yet integrated the impacts of OFDK or the impending loss of access to phytomass demonstrated by Schramski et al. (that we examined in Looking down the barrel — the Tooth Fairy & the Dragon-King — Part 1, Loss of access)

Beside soil degradation, deforestation, fires, floods, droughts, loss of pollinators, impacts of ground level ozone from transport air pollution, and other ecological challenges, loss of access also takes place in the form of crop failures due to emerging or reappearing pest plagues. We can name, for example, Ug99, a virulent strain of the Puccinia graminis fungus, aka black stem rust, discovered in Uganda in 1999 and that almost no wheat crops anywhere were resistant to. Various strains stemming from Ug99 are now spreading in Africa and threaten the Middle East and South Asia.

There is also the wheat blast (Magnaporthe oryzae) that has destroyed millions of hectares of crops in various parts of Latin America to the point that wheat growing has been abandoned in some regions. The wheat blast has now devastated over 15,000 ha of crops in Bangladesh and threatens to spread elsewhere.

The wheat rust (TTTTF) is also now back in Europe via Sicily, while new strains of the yellow rust are spreading in Europe, North Africa, East Africa and central Asia… Meanwhile, the fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda) has crossed over from the Americas to Africa where it has invaded more than 20 sub-Saharan countries devastating maize crops.

We can mention also the banana wilt, a virus threatening all global banana crops, staple food in many countries and a whole range of other diseases and pests threatening soybean, cassava, coffee crops, without forgetting resurging locust invasions here and there… In Europe fruit flies and viruses now threaten numerous fruit crops, and the Xyllela fastidiosa bacterium has crossed from the Americas to attack olive trees in Italy and Spain; millions of trees are under threat as well as almonds, grape, peach, citruses and overall some 359 species of plants and trees….

All of the above, and more, are primarily the outcomes of resounding cognitive failures. The accumulating and mounting threats to food security are now serious enough that in addition to the FAO issuing its usual reports,[18] the global insurance group the Lloyd’s of London has not only produced its own analysis of increasing food insecurity and related risks but also a shock scenario to assess further the potential impacts and responses.[19] In short, the GIW faces already worse than a food gap, much sooner than most expect it, well before 2030… and this is still without taking into account OFDK.

And now for OFDK

Bring OFDK into the picture and the food situation turns globally ugly in short order, not only for the Remainder but also for the whole of the 10%, globally — no one is immune to it. Recall our estimate that net energy from oil per average barrel becomes about nil by around 2022 — the end of hyper-realised “food”, the beginning of hunger and the return to real food.

To the best of my knowledge, Sweden is the sole country where agricultural experts have dared to contemplate how a major disruption to oil supplies, one lasting months and years, would look like food-wise.[20] In 2013 the JTI, Swedish Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Engineering, researched this very matter. It considered three different scenarios, where oil imports would be severely restricted (-25%, -50%, -75%) for a period of 3 to 5 years. They found that Sweden could avoid sheer starvation only in the 25% reduction in oil import case, although it would be extremely tough. Surveys they conducted have shown that most people (58%) could only manage for about one week of reduced supplies. In the worst case scenario, the consequence was the disappearing of cooking oil, 75% less fruits and berries, 67–70% less grains, 40% less milk, and 64% less pigs, chickens and eggs. The only things increasing were sheep and cow meat since a lot of land would be turned over to grazing.

In other words, in order to partly cope with a 75% reduction in its imports of oil or transport fuels, a Nordic country like Sweden would have to largely restructure its agriculture in accelerated fashion towards old rugged crops (wheat, rye, buckwheat, tubers like potatoes, swedes, turnips, parsnips, carrots, cabbages, apples), grass and animal meats. Re the latter, an advantage is that cattle and sheep can walk from farms to cities (as in the “good old days”). It would mean a substantially modified diet, much higher in meat — it would be this or starving, notwithstanding the preferences of vegetarians and vegans.

Of course, the coping strategies would vary substantially across other counties according to climate, soils, and access to water. For example, the Caribbean farmers practising sustainable rotational slash and burn farming, pig and chicken breeding whom I used to know when I was working on my PhD would do just fine as they have done for centuries and so would many others still using similar sustainable methods in tropical areas. However, they would not be able to produce enough to keep their urban fellow citizens away from famine…

No need to stress that even in Sweden JTI’s work has been gloriously ignored. I have similarly attempted in vain to raise interest in furthering the JTI’s approach by focusing specifically on OFDK’s most likely impacts, that is under situations where oil or transport fuel supplies become first highly erratic and then stop completely for long periods, that is, not 75% reductions but 100%. My colleagues and I were met with blank stares… This was a couple of years ago. Now much more data has accumulated corroborating our ODFK analyses. Now would be a good time to consider the food implications of OFDK.

To bring this home further, consider that when I say “the return to real food” I do not mean some kind of romantic reversal to the “good old days” of before the Industrial Revolution. There is no such going back. For one thing, over 99% of farmers within the GIW haven’t the slightest idea of how to produce food without oil-derived inputs as fuels for tractors and machinery, fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, and transport logistics over long distances. Remove fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, and this still includes the “organic” or “bio” lot…

For example, I know an unusual farmer, over 70 years old, who knows how to plough, till and harvest with traction animals (horse or ox). He has been anticipating the emerging situation and has also built a wood gasifier to keep operating his tractors and other machinery like his threshing machine. He owns a bit of a chestnut forest providing an abundance of wood and sweet chestnuts, good for sangliers (wild boars), pigs and humans. His farm is about 50ha overall. He is happy. How many like him? Not even 0.01% of farmers within the EU. As another example, in the US we can also mention Living Energy Farm in Virginia (www.livingenergyfarm.org).

Technically, it is feasible to achieve reasonably high yields going “organic” with zero oil-derived inputs, that is, 100% on solar (wood gasification, biogas, wind and PVs). However, even under well-funded farm extension conditions, in a situation where one has first to train the trainers and re-build traction animal capacity, it would take well over 20 years, more likely over 30 years, to begin to approach maybe half of the food supply levels required by the current GIW population. This would entail radically altered agricultural systems and food production chains to drastically reduce the losses shown on Figure 4. It would also, of course, entail a transformation of present diets for most within the GIW, whether part of the 10% or of the Remainder, a transformation most people have little idea of — so about zero net energy from the average oil barrel by 2022, in 5 years time, versus 20 to 30 years if lucky to achieve real food production to about 50% of current oil-based levels… Time to wake up.

Isn’t there a better way? Yes, there is.

This brings us back to the “bigger picture” that we examined in our first post of this series on Looking down the barrel — the Tooth Fairy & the Dragon-King, namely that we are in the process of losing access to the two main sources of energy we vitally depend on, phytomass and net energy from oil.

We pointed out that changing course rapidly takes considerable additional energy over and above ensuring the continuity of existing energy supplies required to feed people and maintain the GIW. The bioenergy component being far too depleted, it must not and cannot be drained any further. In fact we now know that some “food shock” is already in the making and bound to coincide with the Oil Pearl Harbor that we also examine in an earlier post. It ensues that the sole pools of energy available to humankind in order to extricate itself from the emerging situation we are now in are what remains of the recoverable fossil fuels stocks and the direct solar influx.

In that earlier post on loss of access, we also noted that with current technology, climate change and other ecological challenges strongly constrain ongoing fossil fuels use. Still, presently, both regaining access to bioenergy, aka food, and simultaneously gaining access to the direct solar influx are critically contingent upon retaining ongoing access to oil-derived fuels. None of this is feasible rapidly enough and on a large enough scale with existing technology integrations, logistic operations, business structures and modes of operation, as well as modes of energy use at household levels and also concerning existing financial systems. All are built around abundant oil-derived fuel supplies now vanishing and an amazing wastage of materials and energy (as illustrated in extremely low food EROI values and on Figure 4)

It ensues that, fundamentally, to retain the means of using oil-derived fuel, albeit in much reduced amounts, and simultaneously to access solar energy in vastly expanded new fashions requires new integrations of technologies able to achieve orders of magnitude higher overall energy efficiencies, new forms of logistics, new ways of doing business, and new financial means, all with much higher efficiencies. Is this even remotely doable?

Consider first that the alternative is an abrupt return to preindustrial famine conditions… a strong incentive to not just think in terms of “if” but also of “must do”…

In practice, what we are contemplating above, given the short timeframe, is whether farmers could somehow drastically reduce their dependence on oil-derived fuels and still keep operating their existing machinery and tractors, while also directly accessing solar energy in large amounts (much more than with PV panels with efficiencies only in the 12% to 20% range). For the rest, the farming extension services to assist them to reduce or even eliminate their dependence on oil-derived inputs, like fertilisers and pesticides, already exist and could be substantially expanded at pace. In the EU, for example, many farmers are already shifting to “organic”.

Similarly, the impact of OFDK could be readily addressed if the logistic operators of food supply chains could also adapt technically and operationally to the new conditions using drastically reduced amounts of transport fuels and if they also could gain access to high efficiency direct solar; ditto all the way to the final consumers, if they too could access the energy they require directly from a new energy pool, high efficiency, direct solar.

Beside renewed access to energy, the other missing ingredients are effective new means of energy and communications networking as well as robust financial means and systems both largely independent from present highly inefficient legacy systems that are unable to resist OFDK impacts. With such means at their disposal and under the intense OFDK pressure that we have been mapping out over previous posts, individual entrepreneurial creativity could rise to the challenges all the way from farms to consumers, inclusively.

At GB we have ascertained that there is at least one feasible and affordable way of converting existing tractors and machinery that reduces fuel consumption by about 50%, and in such a fashion that they can run on just about any fuel, oil-derived or not — in our view this is a must do. We have also ascertained the feasibility of mass-producing affordable 100% solar power generation units of small to medium sizes (3kW to 1MW) with overall energy efficiencies over 90% generating all the energy flows required by end-users, when and where required, at the point of use, in the amounts required — motive power, electricity, process heat, air conditioning, hot water, refrigeration and freezing. Under mass production conditions, we estimate it feasible to achieve point-of-use energy costs in the order of 4 cents per kWh (versus currently 20 cents households average electricity prices at PPP within the OECD), with those costs trending towards 2.8 cents/kWh at the 2030 time horizon (versus OECD prices trending towards 30 cents) — in our view this is also a must do…

In short, in our view, it possible to address the OFDK challenges and most crucially the food challenge, profitably, affordably for all and extremely rapidly. Crucially, we consider that this can be done relying at the outset only on the available “Lego set”, that is, using only existing, proven, technology components, albeit integrated in radically novel ways. Not only is this doable with the present Lego set, but also it is necessary to use only this set, because within the timeframe remaining to address the above challenges this is the only one that is available.

As stressed above, just having such means, tractor, farm machinery, truck conversions and solar power generation units cannot be enough. Let’s stress it again. The old game is over. Just changing a few technological building blocks can’t suffice. Given the short timeframe and the abruptness of the fizzling out of net energy from oil, it is the entire set of existing value chains that have to be re-invented, in a hell of a hurry. This is why we keep emphasising that the emerging situation also entails new means of networking that are sustainable and extend well beyond current Internet technologies, and means of accounting, exchange and value storage that are sustainable under OFDK impacts — something that none of the current fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies can achieve.

We are touching here upon the core of the emerging demand for something else. This is why we have been stressing since our first post on Elephants in the cryptocurrency room, and all along this series on Looking down the barrel — the Tooth Fairy & the Dragon-King, the urgent necessity of putting in place means of access to energy, a new class of networking and new cryptocurrency means.

No doubt readers would like to know more. We plan to complete first the Looking down the barrel post series. Then, in a new post series, we plan to expand on our findings concerning how OFDK could possibly be addressed, swiftly, profitably, and independently from sleepwalking powers-that-be.

* * * * * *

If you have followed our posts to this point, a reminder:

This series focuses on the emerging global demand for something else than what we currently have concerning energy and all other aspects of living in the globalised industrial world (the GIW). Most importantly it concerns money, the end of fiat currencies over the next few years and their unavoidable replacement with cryptocurrencies backed with sustainable energy supplies.

The posts gradually explain the rationale for the solutions that we are developing to address that global demand for something else. A subsequent series will explain our solutions themselves and our entire approach to creating a sustainable and scalable energy backed cryptocurrency.

You can find all the previous posts at: https://medium.com/@GeeeBee/

[1] B.W. Hill, 9–3–15, peakoil.com.

[2] Eerie, from eri, fearful, timid, dialectal variant of ergh, from Old English earg, cowardly, fearful, timid, cognate with Old Frisian erg, evil, bad, Old High German, arg, cowardly, worthless, from Proto-Germanic *arƷaz and Indo-European *ergh- to tremble…

[3] Bohm, David, 1980, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 28 — Bohm’s own emphasis.

[4] David Spratt and Ian Dunlop, 2017, What lies beneath, the scientific understatement of climate risks, Breakthrough — National Centre for Climate Restoration, Melbourne, Australia. breakthroughonline.org.au. On the cover and within their report, they use the same image of an iceberg that we have used concerning the invisible part of the PPS that “gobbles-up” such a large amount of the gross energy from oil and is the source of a large fraction of GHG emissions.

[5] Nik Gowing and Chris Langdon, 2016, Thinking the unthinkable, Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. www.cimaglobal.com/thought-leadership and www.thinkunthinkable.org.

[6] Nader, Laura, 1981, Energy and Equity, Magic, Science and Religion Revisited, 51st ANZAAS Congress, Brisbane.

[7] Matt Burns, 2017, 10 of the most-funded start-ups to fail in 2017. https://techcrunch.com

[8] Re cognitive failure concerning infrastructures see for example, Elizabeth Drew, 2016, A Country Breaking Down. The New York Review of Books 24/04/2016 11:21. Re cognitive failure in health see for example, Le Monde, 02/09/2017 — the opioid epidemic that resulted in over 183 000 deaths and millions dependents on opioid medicines in the US is directly derived from doctors having been given assurances that those medications were safe in a large number of scientific publications that ultimately all relied on a short letter to the editor of 5 sentences that was by and large irrelevant to the matter of long term prescription of opioids (Jane Porter, 1980, Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics. N Engl J Med 1980; 302:123January 10, 1980DOI: 10.1056/NEJM198001103020221). As an other example of cognitive failure, US geographer Julie Hernandez points out that the Harvey hurricane, then tropical storm is part of the “new normal” that has been known for quite some time but that town-planning authorities keep ignoring (Julie Hernandez, 2017, Tempête Harvey : « La catastrophe n’était pas inattendue » [Harvey storm: the catastrophe was not unexpected]. Le Monde, 2 September). Yet another example, Marie Charrel, 2017, La paupérisation des classes moyennes gonfle la dette des ménages [The pauperisation of middle-classes inflate household debt]. Le Monde, 2 September.

[9] I talk here from extensive professional experience, having consulted for many years in that field. I have a background in both the agriculture/food-processing world and in energy matters extending over 47 years.

[10] From his initial works, The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumption Society (1970) to his last The Agony of Power (2010, Semiotext(e)), Jean is internationally known for his sharp analyses and critiques of the world we live in and the death trajectory it is on.

[11] See also, Alice Friedemann, 2016, When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation. SpringerBriefs in Energy. ISBN-13: 978–3319263731.

[12] See also, Beddington J, Asaduzzaman M, Clark M, Fernández A, Guillou M, Jahn M, Erda L, Mamo T, Van Bo N, Nobre CA, Scholes R, Sharma R, Wakhungu J. 2012. Achieving food security in the face of climate change: Final report from the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change. CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). Copenhagen, Denmark. Available online at: www.ccafs.cgiar.org/commission.

[13] http://www.globalopportunitynetwork.org/report-2016/global-food-crisis/.

[14] See for example, FAO. 2011. Global food losses and food waste — Extent, causes and prevention. Rome.

[15] Based on Canning et al., 2010, Energy Use in the US Food System, USDA.

[16] Thomas S. Lough, 1999, Energy, Agriculture, Patriarchy and Ecocide. Human Ecology Review, Vol. 6, №2.

[17] Peter Alexander, Calum Brown, Almut Arneth, John Finnigan, Dominic Moran, Mark D.A. Rounsevell, 2017, Losses, inefficiencies and waste in the global food system. Agricultural Systems 153 (2017) 190–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2017.01.014.

[18] FAO. 2017. The future of food and agriculture — Trends and challenges. Rome.

[19] Trevor Maynard, Neil Smith and Sandra Gonzalez, 2015, Feast or famine, business and insurance implications of food safety and security, Lloyd’s. Trevor Maynard, 2015, Food System Shock, Emerging Risk Report, Lloyd’s.

[20] Baky, Andras, 2015, Oil supply shock, food shortages, and potential starvation in Sweden? http://peakresources.blogspot.se/2015/10/oil-supply-shock-food-shortages-and.html, 10 August; Baky, Andras, Widerberg, Anna, Landquist, Birgit, Norberg, Ida, Berlin, Johanna, Engstrom, Jonas, Svanang, Karin, Lorentzon, Katarina, Cronholm, Lars-Ake, Pettersson, Ola, 2013, Sveriges primarproduktion och forsorjning av livsmedel — mojliga konsekvenser vid en brist pa fossil energi [Sweden’s primary production and supply of food — the possible consequences of a lack of fossil energy], Institutet för Jordbruks och miljöteknik (JTI, Swedish Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Engineering).