Looming food and water shortages

I’ve talked before about oil, biofuels, overpopulation, and the economy. All of these are already beginning to affect food costs. In fact, food is becoming such a huge problem, and it’s worsening so quickly, that those in the know are now telling us that we shouldn’t bother worrying about climate change or even oil – starvation is going to screw us over first.

With more people to feed, the demand for food is increasing. The supply isn’t increasing, though. In fact, it’s decreasing, because much of the cropland is being shunted over to biofuel production. So growing demand and shrinking supply means skyrocketing prices. Simple, basic economics. And since these price icreases are hitting the fundamental staples (like wheat), just about all food prices are increasing. Pizza, beer, and hot dogs, traditionally cheap food for students and others with minimal income, will no longer be viable core dietary elements. Add to that the increasing cost of oil (for transporting all that food the thousands of miles from production to consumption), and groceries will shortly become luxuries, rather than the entitlements we currently see them as.

So to prevent starvation, people are going to have to start growing their own foods. It’s worked before, in the form of Victory Gardens. Which works well enough when you’ve actually got some land, and the time and motivation to culture it. The problem now is that people are too wrapped up in their own lives to even think outside the box, for things like this to occur to them. They see gardening as a hobby (which they don’t have time for), not as a method of subsistence, and therefore they don’t have the motivation. By the time most people get the motivation it’ll likely be too late, because nobody has the foresight to see things like this coming anymore.

The third element is land, which is even less widely available. The vast majority of the land now under cultivation requires massive amounts of fertilizer, because the soil itself has already been depeleted of its natural store of nutrients. And new fertilizer isn’t being produced in anywhere near the quanitities necessary. Part of the reason for that is a reduction in the supply of natural gas. As with the food end-product, higher demand with less supply leads to increasing prices, and higher fertilizer costs means even higher consumer costs.

The obvious solution is to buy more local and organic foods, to reduce the effect of increasing costs of transportation and fertilizer. In the near future, local and organic foods, rather than being the more expensive exception that you have to actively seek out, will become the cheaper standard option.

But what about the people who don’t have that choice? It’s impossible to grow much of your own food in a city. Individuals might well have a garden in the little backyard of their townhouse, but as a whole, cities are fundamentally unsustainable, and need their food trucked in from elsewhere (despite occasional instances like this, and green roofs). As the cost of food increases, urbanites will be paying more for less. As people get more and more desperate to feed their families, crime will increase, likely leading quickly to riots.

There have also been increasing reports over the last decade of (particularly old) people dying in their houses because of the heat (like in Europe, August of 2003), when they can’t afford to cool themselves, or freezing because they can’t afford heat. That’s another thing that’s likely to spike, as costs of everything rise.

So in the cities, we’ll have malnutrition, starvation, high crime, and weather-related fatalities. And nothing to do with the bodies. With such a large scale cascade of problems, bodies are likely to pile up and breed all kinds of interesting diseases, only increasing the death toll.

The larger cities like New York, and much of California, will be completely fucked. DC isn’t likely to be much better, because there’s at least a two-county radius from the District itself before you get to any arable land. And then, on the Virginia side, at least, it’s largely populated by rednecks who are likely to be even more trigger happy once there’s nobody to stop them picking off anybody who doesn’t speak with their preferred drawl. From what I’ve seen of the Maryland side, it fades into Baltimore, without much untamed greenery around to be taken advantage of (read: run into the ground).

I’m not sure what to make of midwestern cities. They seem to have a steeper city-to-rural transition, meaning more potential farmland closer to the population center, but that implies to me that it’s likely to be destroyed in fairly short order, either by competition over it, or by overuse.

A quote from Richard Heinberg’s :
Peak Everything:
"Many people would leave cities looking for places to live where they could grow some food. Yet they might find all of the available land already owned by banks or the government. Without experience of farming, even those who succeeded in gaining access to acreage would fail to produce much food and would ruin large tracts of land in the process."

So, for the sake of argument, you’ve managed not to starve. Water is still going to be a major issue. Ground water is getting progressively more scarce and/or contaminated, and you obviously can’t trust surface water, given what we flush into it – both from our own contaminated bodies and the cropland runoff. Which will lead to more health problems across the board.

I mentioned Georgia getting uppity about a claim to part of the Tennessee River, but there are also larger issues, like the national movement to drain the Great Lakes, and distribute the water to thirsty southern states.

Similarly, California farmers are now selling their water rations directly to the major cities (rather than growing crops with it, the reason for the apportionment), because it’s more cost-effective that way. This is mentioned more or less in passing at the end of this article, and I’d like to link you to more detail on it, but both the article I originally found and the article this guy links to are gone, with no traces. I smell a conspiracy.