1. Global Food, Water, and Climate
Crisis: Prospects for Future Human
& Environmental Security
Compiled by T. Rhamis Kent for PRI Australia
(rhamis@permaculture.org.au)
2. "Anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting
from, the problems of food production and distribution
will see that in the long run the safest food supply is a
local food supply, not a supply that is dependent on a
global economy. Nations and regions within nations
must be left free - and should be encouraged - to
develop the local food economies that best suit local
needs and local conditions."
- Wendell Berry quoted in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (1993), “A Bad Big
Idea”
3. "Once plants and animals were raised together on the
same farm — which therefore neither produced
unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and
to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such
quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of
America farm experts is very well demonstrated here:
they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two
problems."
- Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture (1996), p. 62
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44. “Just how much energy does it take to fuel the US food system? A
lot. It required just over 12 Calories of fuel to produce one Calorie of
food in 2002, once waste and spoilage were accounted for.1 Of
these, 1.6 fuel Calories were used in the agricultural sector, while 2.7
were used to process and package food.
“Distribution, which includes transportation, wholesale and retail
outlets, and food service operations such as restaurants and catering
services, used another 4.3 fuel Calories. Finally, food-related
household energy use added another 3.4 Calories to the tab. This
figure has been on an upward trend; it took just over 14 fuel Calories
to deliver a Calorie of consumed food in 2007, and if we extrapolate
this trend the US food system requires about 15 Calories of fuel to
deliver a Calorie of consumed food in 2013.”
45. “As high as this 15 Calorie figure might seem, it’s surely an underestimate.
The report from which these data were drawn left out a number of sectors
within the US food system that require energy as a key input to their
operations, including research and development, waste disposal, water
provision, and food system governance, among others. If we did a more
expansive assessment of the energy use in the US food system, the total
energy demand would probably be 15-20 Calories of fuel per consumed
food Calorie, or more.”
“To put these statistics into perspective, 15 fuel Calories equates, in energy
terms, to 1.2 gallons of gasoline embodied in the average American’s daily
diet. That’s 420 gallons of gasoline per person per year to deliver Americans
the food they eat, an amount on par with the 430 gallons the average
American burns in their car. The US food system is admittedly more energy
intensive than most, but high fuel demand in the service of food
procurement is the norm around the world.”
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73. These technologies don't even work in the
"First World". So if there is such concern
about solving global hunger, why would this
be transferred to the "Third World"?
74. The thinking behind the development of the genetically
modified organism is a powerful metaphor for our time:
born from an attempt to impose an order based on a
misunderstanding of natural systems (resulting in an
increased "engineered" disorder), fuelled by businessrelated motives (revenue and profit generated via
proprietary technology & intellectual property rights),
producing an inherent conflict-of-interest & moral hazard
which ultimately begs the question...
Is the objective to solve a problem or to sell a product?
The two are NOT to be assumed as being synonymous.
