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Post Carbon Institute

Toward a Post-Carbon Food System

Toward a Post Carbon Food System

The Food & Farming

Transition

Post Carbon InstituteDecember 2008

Post Carbon InstituteSpring 2009

Post Carbon Instituteii

The Food and Farming Transition

The Food and Farming Transition: Toward a Post-Carbon Food SystemPost Carbon Institute Authors

Richard Heinberg, Senior FellowMichael Bomford, Ph.D., Fellow; Principal Investigator, Organic / Sustainable Vegetable Production, Kentucky State Univ.

Editors

Asher Miller, Executive DirectorDaniel Lerch, Program DirectorPrepared in cooperation with The Soil Association (UK). Available online at www.postcarbon.org/food.©

2009

by Post Carbon Institute

Post Carbon Institute

500 N Main Street, Suite

100

Sebastopol, CA

95472

USA

+1 (707) 823-8700

1

Post Carbon Institute

Toward a Post-Carbon Food System

Why Transition Is Mandatory I.

During the past century world annual agricultural production has more than tripled. Thisunprecedented achievement in humanity’s quest for food security and abundance was largelymade possible by the development of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; new hybridcrop varieties; the application of irrigation in arid regions; and the introduction of powered farmmachinery.Central to most of these strategies for intensifying farm productivity were fossil fuels,especially oil and natural gas. Natural gas provides the hydrogen and energy used to produce mostnitrogen fertilizers, and both gas and oil are the sources for other agricultural chemicals, includingpesticides and herbicides. Meanwhile, oil fuels most farm machinery (often including irrigationpumps), and has enabled growth in the scale and distance of transportation of crop inputs andoutputs. Today, food items are shipped worldwide and enormous quantities of food are routinelytransported from places of abundance to sites of scarcity, enabling cities to be built in deserts.This application of fossil fuels to the food system has supported a human population growingfrom fewer than two billion at the turn of the twentieth century to nearly seven billion today. Inthe process, the way we feed ourselves has changed profoundly.Particularly in industrialized nations, the food system has become more articulated(it has more basic components) and more centralized. Today in most countries, farmers makeup a smaller proportion of the population, and they typically work larger parcels of land.They also typically sell their harvest to a distributor or processor, who then sells packagedfood products to a wholesaler, who in turn sells these products to chains of supermarkets.The ultimate consumer of the food is thus several steps removed from the producer, and foodsystems in most nations or regions have become dominated by a few giant multinational seedcompanies, agricultural chemicals corporations, and farm machinery manufacturers, as wellas food wholesalers, distributors, and supermarket chains. In the U.S., the process of gettingfood from the farm to the plate uses over four times as much energy as farming (Figure 1).

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Upload Date:	04/14/2009
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