Scare supplies of water, according to the IPS article, “will be a key
constraint to food production.” If there is no change in current
practices in food production and consumption, according to a
contributor to the Stockholm report, “it is likely that twice as much
water as that used today would be required by 2015 to produce the
world’s required food.” But that amount of water would not be
available, indicating the possibility of widespread food fights and
even famine.
“Peak Food” is a term that California farmer and author John Jeavons
uses in workshops. Jeavons “says peak food is actually related to four
other intertwined crises: peak farmable land, peak water, peak oil, and
global warming,” according to the article “Monocrops Bring Food Crisis”
by Alex Roslin in the Canadian publication
www.straight.com.
A solution--according to Jeavons in his classic book “How to Grow More
Vegetables”--is to revive small-scale farming, such as used to prevail
in the United States. In addition to Jeavon’s biointensive farming,
others advocate the system referred to as permaculture. Heinberg calls
for the de-industrialization of agriculture. He says that a key will be
getting more farmers and re-ruralization and re-localization.
“Food Banks Face Rising Costs,” headlines a May 26 MSNBC article. 2/
“While demand is up, supplies and donations are down,” the article
reveals. “The way it’s going, we’re going to have a food disaster
pretty soon,” the MSNBC article quotes Phyllis Legg of the Merced Food
Bank in the foreclosure-ravaged Merced County in California.
“If gas keeps going up, its going to be catastrophic in every possible
way,” the article quotes Ross Fraser, a spokesperson for America’s
Second Harvest—The Nation’s Food Bank Network. “The price of gasoline
is going to drive the price of everything else,” Fraser asserts.
A food bank in Albuquerque, N.M., runs out of food and turns people
away. Public school students in Baton Rouge, La. bring home some of
their lunches to have something to eat for dinner. A food bank in
Lorain, Ohio, meets only 25 to 30% of the need for food. In Stockton,
Ca., which has the highest foreclosure rate in the country, customers
line up several hours before the food bank’s 10 a.m. opening.
“When people go to the gas pump and watch that dial roll over, there
goes breakfast, lunch and dinner. People are living on the edge,” Don
Lindsay is quoted in a May 26 article in the New York Times-owned daily
Press Democrat of Sonoma County, where this reporter lives in Northern
California. Lindsay is operations director of the Redwood Empire Food
Bank. It feeds 50,000 people in our semi-rural county of around
500,000. Such pantries are an essential aspect of the safety net that
is diminishing.
“Present and future generations may become acquainted with that old,
formerly familiar but unwelcome houseguest—famine,” writes Heinberg.
The electrical grid in Baghdad is not expected to be restored for many
years and is already down in other parts of the world, making
electricity and it many benefits unavailable. An increasing number of
people in parts of Hawai’i, California’s North Coast, and elsewhere are
planning for the future by making homes that are off the electrical
grid. Industrial societies run on electricity powered by the cheap
energy of fossil fuels. As the supply of those energy sources decline
and world-wide competition for them through wars and other means
heighten, more electrical grids will fail, and with them access to both
food and water.
The pace quickens. The signs are more numerous. We need even more than
food security; we need food sovereignty. Who controls your food?
Growing at least part of one's own food--and having something to
trade--will be essential to survival.
1.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/wp-content/photos/0524_03_1.jpg
2.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24832584/from/ET/
(Dr. Shepherd Bliss,
sbliss@hawaii.edu, teaches at Sonoma State
University and has run the organic Kokopelli Farm for most of the last
15 years. He has contributed to two dozen books and is currently
writing about agropsychology and agrotherapy.)
Writings 
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