Tue 17 Jul 2007
Fertilizers, climate change and peakism
Posted by Darragh Field under Peakist , Global Warming , Environment , Agriculture , Climate Change , food security[2] Comments
Howard Kunstler wrote ‘The Long Emergency’ on the premise that in the near future our lives will change dramatically due to a confluence point of simultaineous global problems. The primary issue here being peak oil. A secondary issue he touched on was climate change, to which many are attributing this summer’s uncharacteristic weather patterns.
I believe this is the first micro effects of a confluence of problems that will directly effect the standards of living in the western world.
” In the 40 years between 1950 and 1992, the area of planted arable land increased by 14.5 per cent from 611 million hectares to 700 million hectares; in the same period, grain output rose from 692 million tons to a staggering 1,920 million tons, an increase of 177.5 per cent…….. The ability of agriculture to produce far greater quantities food this century than in previous centuries can be attributed to four factors: advanced plant breeding techniques, the use of intensive irrigation, the availability of fertilizers on a commercial scale, and the development of plant protection products. Applied together, these four technologies have produced a remarkable outcome: although there has been an enormous increase in world population during the twentieth century, and although there are still parts of the world where people are suffering from malnutrition, nowadays, starvation is no longer a common cause of death, as it was in the last century. Nevertheless, because the population of the world continues to rise, 680 million people - or 12 per cent of the world’s population - could be chronically undernourished by 2010, according to FAO projections. This means that the demands on agriculture to be both productive and sustainable are increasing. ” source EFMA
