Around a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, with another 20 percent hovering just above it. And while there are no statistics for the period 2012/2013, indications are that malnutrition rates of around 30 percent are also on the increase, he said.

“Without essential nutrients, minerals, vitamins, children cannot grow their brain potential. They have a lower academic performance,” he said. “Malnutrition is not only a personal problem of human suffering but impacts the nation as a whole.” 

It isn’t only meat, milk and new clothes that have disappeared from the Sayeds’ lives. The chance of a better future is also fading: All five children stopped going to school when even the meager expenses needed for free education became too much.  

“I feel sad when I see my friends go to school,” daughter Fatma, 13, said.

Her father has darker thoughts: “Sometimes, I even think of selling my kidney to live.”

We can expect more and more stories like these in the coming decades as economic insecurity, the rising costs of climate change and energy, and the political instability that accompany all of these things make food harder to access.  Ultimately, political stability is, in the end, all about dinner.

More than half of all French restaurant sales now take place, sacrilegiously, at fast food chains, according to a new survey by food consultancy firm Gira Conseil.

This is the first time fast food sales have surpassed sit-down restaurant sales in France —  you know, the the country that gave us cafes, bistros and the Michelin star. It also makes France the world’s second-biggest consumer of fast food, NPR reports, with 1,200 McDonalds franchises alone.

That number is only growing (much, it must be said, like French waistlines): Consumption at casual eateries jumped 14 percent just in the past year, according to the survey, and companies such as Subway and Burger King have launched major expansions in the country.

The fact that fast and cheap outrank, in economically insecure times, expensive and slow is not, perhaps as shocking as it might seem, even if it is sad.  The real problem is that there is so little GOOD fast and cheap out there (although some of the fast-food sales are surely creperies and such) in most developed world regions.

In most of the Global South, McDonalds certainly has a presence, but so do tons of independent street food dealers who can often offer better prices than the industrial giants because of a lack of supervision.  Now there are risks to this approach, of food borne-illness, but there are also rewards.  Some of the most amazing food in the world is produced by street vendors with the simplest possible equipment – a charcoal grill, a few pots and pans.  Again, small scale and local CAN compete, if we can design and enforce (and we could if we wanted to) food safety regulations for very small producers working on the home scale, rather than taking industrial regulations and applying them to everyone from McDonalds to your Mom with her pies.

The world needs fast, inexpensive food.  What we don’t remember, though, is that it doesn’t have to suck.

New research suggests that the Arctic summer sea ice loss is linked to extreme weather. Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francispoints to the phenomenon of “Arctic amplification”, where:

“The loss of Arctic summer sea ice and the rapid warming of the Far North are altering the jet stream over North America, Europe, and Russia. Scientists are now just beginning to understand how these profound shifts may be increasing the likelihood of more persistent and extreme weather.”

Extreme weather events over the last few years apparently driven by the accelerating Arctic melt process - including unprecedented heatwaves and droughts in the US and Russia, along with snowstorms and cold weather in northern Europe – have undermined harvests, dramatically impacting global food production and contributing to civil unrest.

US national security officials have taken an increasing interest in the destabilising impact of climate change. In February this year, the US Department of Defense (DoD) released its new Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, which noted that global warming will have:

“… significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to greater competition for more limited and critical life-sustaining resources like food and water.”

 

The words “it is about freakin’ time” come to mind.  The costs of climate change – both economic and other, are likely to be so great that this should have been at the front of the national agenda.  Sadly, they weren’t when it would have been most useful, and the crisis we’re facing is vastly more serious than it had to be.  But isn’t that the truth about all the crises we’re facing?

Better late than never.

And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped
—has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

Read it all.  It is worth it.

P: Now what about prices? We’ve seen oil prices soar from around $40 per barrel in 2004 to $140 per barrel in 2008. And nowadays, prices in the $100 range are pretty much normal.

CN: One of the implications of peak oil is that as production starts to falter, we need much higher prices in order to sustain production. And that’s exactly what’s happened since 2005.

Another implication is that the economy would be unable to tolerate those high prices and would contract. That also seems to have happened. U.S. employment is still below 2008 levels. Europe is struggling. Now, it’s difficult to sort out the effects of high oil prices on the global economy because we also had the financial crisis and everything else. But guys like James Hamilton have done some interesting research showing that when oil expenditures reach a certain percentage of GDP, that induces a recession. So there is some evidence.

BP: It seems like one of the implications of peak oil is that prices will bounce around a narrow window. They can’t go too low, because then all those tight oil wells in North Dakota will be unprofitable. But they can’t go too high, because that will crush the global economy.

CN: A number of analysts have argued that the floor on oil prices is now around $85 per barrel. It might vary from place to place. An existing well in the Bakken might be profitable when oil’s at $70 or $75. For Arctic drilling, prices might have to rise to $110 per barrel. But the floor is around $85.

But there’s also a price ceiling for what consumers are able to pay. I think that’s probably around $105 for West Texas Intermediate and $125 for Brent. This is why world prices have been bouncing around this narrow ledge between floor and ceiling since 2007. We have to keep prices in that range, not too high to kill demand, but not too low to kill supply. Again, that’s very consistent with the concept of what peak oil has always been.

BP: The other interesting dynamic you’ve noted is that once oil production stagnates, we’re essentially in competition for oil with China and India.

CN: Right now, all of the new oil consumption in the world is coming from outside the OECD and the developed world. It’s largely coming from in China and India. And that new oil demand is now being met, almost exactly, by declining demand in North American and Europe:

Another consequence of hitting that plateau is that net global oil exports will continue to fall. Oil-exporting nations will make a lot of money thanks to higher prices, and they’ll grow as a result. But that means they’ll also start consuming more of their own oil. And this is exactly what’s happening worldwide — net global oil exports have declined since 2005. Countries like Saudi Arabia have seen enormous growth in oil consumption.

And what that means is that the United States will have to cut consumption in response. We are the most vulnerable oil importer: We consume about 18 million barrels per day and produce about 7 million. So as net global exports decline, our consumption will have to fall. And that’s already happened.

Nelder does a great job of covering the main salient points intelligently.  Read the whole thing!

Check it out!

When I went to Paris a year ago with my niece Hannah, I brought back some confiture by Christine Ferber. She makes some of the most prized jellies and jams in all of France. They’re expensive; those little jars you see above, which I brought back from that trip, cost about $9 or $10 each at the exchange rate back then. But oh, so very worth it. It’s hard to describe the intensity of Ferber’s confitures, which are difficult to impossible to find in the US. We brought back five jars from our trip to Paris last fall, and we’re just now on the last one; we have been stretching them out for all this time, something that’s easy to do because they are like jellied fruit electricity. A little Ferber confiture goes a very long way. And the pleasure — man, it’s such a special, special taste.

I’ve had her confiture (Eric and I visited Alsace in the 1990s), and it was wonderful and amazing, but I admit, I don’t quite get the reverence foodies have for certain very high-cost, very labor-intense foods.  Which is strange, because aren’t I the queen of home preservation, and haven’t I spent all this time persuading people to do the time consuming work of putting up their own?

Yes, I have.  But I guess I’m not that interested in food-as-art, if by art we mean “time consuming, expensive and rare.”  To me, eating is a passing thing – it is fun, I’ve had some amazing meals I still treasure the memory of, but ultimately, I want my food experiences to be ones that can be repeated and accessed.  The truth is that my household of ten (ish) people doesn’t need tiny $10 jars of confiture from France – one would last about through one piece of toast.  What it needs is absolutely delicious blackberry jam in quart jars.  I don’t want to eat an artisanal cheese that I can only afford once a year, so much as a really good functional goat cheese I can crumble on my salad whenever I need a great dinner quickly.

A reader asks Dreher what the difference is between Ferber who is admittedly obsessed with making good jam, and a corporate lawyer workaholic.  Dreher tries to suss it out, with interesting results.  For me, I don’t see much difference, other than that I personally prefer to eat jam over reading briefs.  As long as there isn’t a family being neglected, being an obsessive artist or workaholic of any kind is one’s own privilege.  If it messes up other people’s lives, I’d go for the good, but less perfect jam you can do in human time.

All of this really comes down to the fact that I’m not a true foodie.  Don’t get me wrong – I love food, I enjoy eating delicious things, I like to try new stuff, I’m interested in artisanal food.  But the idea of eating one amazing thing one time, just me or just me and one other person because I can’t afford to share it out, that doesn’t do much for me.  I think what she does is interesting, and am curious about what could be applied to my own preserving, but I don’t see the idea of a food hero there, maybe because I’m not an artist myself.

I also sometimes have a bit of trouble with the larger culture that says that the most important and interesting food is food-as-art.  It is natural, but the truth is that everyone has to eat three meals a day.  I’m personally most interested in how you make all three of those meals as fresh, delicious and environmentally sound as possible within the realistic parameters of one’ s imperfect life, not in occasional transcendence.  That’s a personal taste, of course, but I also am troubled by a food culture in which we watch television to see people make meals that no one could actually make at home in real life, but lack access to good, tasty food that we can put together on a daily basis.  Now it isn’t either/or – there’s a place for the wonderful and transcendent at dinner too, the meal you can’t have often.  I just don’t find myself most interested in the heroic artist, but in how ordinary people feed themselves and others well every day.

Sharon

Former Irish President Mary Robinson’s foundation for climate justice is hosting a major conference in Dublin this week. Research presented there said that rising incomes and growth in the global population, expected to create 2 billion more mouths to feed by 2050, will drive food prices higher by 40 to 50 percent.

“We must prepare today for higher temperatures in all sectors,” said Gerald Nelson, a senior economist with the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

All of the studies suggest the worst impacts will be felt by the poorest people. Robinson, Ireland’s first female president, said: “Climate change is already having a domino effect on food and nutritional security for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. Child malnutrition is predicted to increase by 20 percent by 2050.”

But from Europe to the U.S. to Asia, no population will remain insulated from the huge changes in food production that the rest of the century will bring.

The intersections between food and politics, population and agriculture, economics and climate are incredibly complex, and very hard to sort out.  The truth is that while we all know nothing good will come of them, the exact implications are complex to model.  But there is something else truly critical missing from the models – any understanding of how energy and food prices have become so tightly intertwined, and what peak oil will do to these models.

While at this point climate change is not reducing overall grain yields (although it is expected to begin doing so in the 2020s by most models I’ve seen), in a way that’s still troubling – because our last global food crisis came during a period of record yields.  Ultimately, yield is hugely important, but cost and distribution are what really matter most, and the complicated ways in which we’ve tied food prices to the price of oil mean global hunger can skyrocket EVEN IF yields don’t fall.  If they eventually do fall, which pretty much everyone expects, that’s a recipe for disaster.

The problem is that at this point, no one is providing a clear and complete modelling picture of the intersections of energy, food, population, economics and climate – and yes, that’s one hell of a complex modelling problem.  But it also may be the most critical modelling problem of our times:

I’ve taken the UN to task for not adding peak energy into their modelling programs, but the UN  is just a starting point – although a critical one:

Peak Oil changes the world food picture entirely – agro ecological responses to our food crisis, endorsed by several UN reports in the last few years, become not just a good idea but an absolute necessity when you have to reduce the amount of energy and in particular liquid fuels, consumed in agriculture. The UN has been a consistent leader in recognizing the ways that biofuels drive up the price of food for the world’s hungry poor, but has failed to grasp the ways that without a conscious untangling, food and energy prices will become even more tightly bound together – potentially leaving billions hungry.

Peak Oil is fundamental to nearly every issue that the UN addresses. Understanding why energy shortages tempt us to burn coal – and how to avoid it is critical to our climate picture. The UN’s emergent focus on women’s impact in reducing poverty and improving lives must continue – but must move in areas that aren’t fossil fuel dependent. We must prepare for a less-globalized, not more globalized, society and one struggling with new poverty in new places as climate change and Peak Oil come together. Human rights of all sorts will be affected by the changes that are coming. If we do not wish to lose gains because we are surprised by depletion, we must prepare to hang on to them in a lower energy society.

There is, at this moment, as far as I know, no comprehensive UN study on energy resources and their future. This is both a shame and a scandal – we are preparing for the coming century without a clear picture of the real problems that beset us. Every nation on earth relies on UN research and material to make decisions – and that material is becoming increasingly irrelevant. It is time for the UN to come into the 21st century and recognize that finite resources are truly finite – and that a clear picture of our limits is essential to our human future.

Nearly everyone is failing to take into account the role of geology, oil and energy limits in their predictions – and we’re racing towards disaster.

I bloody hate Earth Day. No offense to those of you who love it, and I know there are some awesome Earth Day programs out there, but by the time we get there, I’m spending my days hiding under the covers, because every freakin’ time I open my email inbox a wave of the most nauseating spew of greenwashing comes flowing out.

Guess what? A major department store chain, nearly in bankruptcy, is now selling the eco-tote, made from organic sheepskin, embossed with “Think Global, Act Local” to show your care for the earth and indifference to grammar. And not to trouble me, but just so you know, the manufacturers of a disgusting sugar laden soft-drink have a new organic one, in a special collectible earth-day bottle. Don’t forget to follow the adventures of Eddie, who is marching nude across the Alaskan wilderness (except for his high priced hiking boots, oh, and the camera crew is clothed, as are the drivers of the six suport jeeps that follow him at 3 mph for the whole way) to raise awareness of Caribou migration Here’s a new website that helps affluent consumers buy carbon offsets so they don’t have to give a shit about their flights to Cancun wants to let me have an interview with their CEO. And don’t forget the chance to meet the manufacturer of a new, even bigger hybrid SUV that gets …woah…23 mpg!

This happens every year, but of course, for the fortieth anniversary of earth day, the bullshit levels reach new heights. My favorite new innovation is that now the press-releases actually acknowledge the problem of greenwashing, implying that you can’t trust those other manufacturers of pointless bullshit, but you definitely, really and truly, can trust someone who a. knows the word “greenwashing” and b. cares enough to add your email to a mailing list of 70,000 people.

I find myself frustrated by the way that words like “organic” and “local” and “sustainable” are used by these companies. I know that most of them have only the lightest relationship to environmentalism, and many of them have given money to politicians and institutions that have tried to delay or stymie global warming legislation. Moreover, the culture of buying new, high status clothing every season, or driving around in slightly more fuel efficient cars simply can’t get you where we need to go in the relevant time. Utlimately, their products are part of the problem. Moreover, track back the histories of many green products and you find they aren’t really green. Consider bamboo fiber, touted as a replacement for cotton – the process used to soften and process it is incredibly polluting and toxic. Or look at “biodegradable” diapers and plastic bags – manufactured from corn grown in China with heavy doses of nitrogen fertilizer. There’s nothing sustainable about this. Or organic food grown by enormous companies who use more fossil fuels and treat their farm workers badly.

Colin Beavan, aka “No Impact Man” used to say that environmentalism has to become as easy as rolling off a log to get most people invested, and there’s some real truth there. The problem, of course, is that it can’t be. It isn’t easy to figure out what the right choice is – and there isn’t a universal right choice. Should you eat meat? Well no one should eat feedlot meat. But what about a small amount of local and grassfed? Well, it depends on where you live – is your soil mostly tillable? Is there enough water to feed cattle? Do you live on a prairie that needs grazing animals, or on the side of a mountain where you can’t grow wheat? Do you live in a city where you could raise poultry or rabbits on food waste that would otherwise be producing methane in landfills? Even if the answer is yes doesn’t mean unrestricted or infinite numbers of cows – grazing populations have to take water availability and a whole host of other things into consideration. But it does mean that there’s not one answer.

And when there is one answer, when it isn’t complicated, the answer doesn’t usually involve buying anything. It involves using a lot less of that thing – cutting the amount of shampoo you use in half, and then half again and seeing just how little you can use and still have passably clean hair. It involves thrift shops and mending and creative reuse – and hard work and thought about whether you really need something.

The thing is, it is possible to engage people with these more complex strategies. Historian Timothy Breen argues that these “rituals of non-consumption” emerge in difficult times to replace the satisfaction people gets from consumption. But they are communal, collective, and they involve conversations and practices that replace, rather than just eliminate. It isn’t enough to say “stop shopping” – instead you have to give someone something as satisfying as shopping to do, and a community to do it within. When Miranda Edel and I founded the Riot for Austerity, we found that this was the esssential element – that we could get people to cut their usage by 70, 80 and 90% over the average American – and without major political interventions or buying that 20,000 dollar solar system. But what was needed was the fun of the participatory exercise of reducing one’s usage. What was needed was a good story about how we were all part of something.

And that’s why I’m a skeptic about Earth Day and Earth Hour and anything that has you be green for a weekend or a day or an hour. Yes, I’m the original poster girl for “your personal choice makes an impact” – but not one day a year. And yes, teaching kids about the basics of environmentalism is awesome, and having festivals is good. But the truth is that I don’t see it sticking.

I see Earth Day as the new Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day, a Hallmark holiday for us to give lip service to the environment. There are contrary forces, good in the mix – but then there are good things in the mix of Mother’s Day or Father’s Day or Valentines as well. But the reality of Mother’s Day doesn’t seem to be that it inspires us to be more respectful of the needs of mothers – what comes out of Mother’s Day isn’t more calls for breastfeeding stations and child friendly policies, but a “we told you we loved you last Sunday…aren’t we done yet?” The same is true of Valentines Day – there’s no compelling reason to believe that once a year special chocolates and sex really do all that much to lower the national divorce rate.

The problem of living in a culture whose dominant message is that consumption is all – that we are not citizens but consumers, is that we learn to think of ourselves as baby birds with our mouths open. Our job is to create markets, to buy the right things, to spend money. And how you spend your money definitely matters. But it matters in context with how you vote and act and live your life and demonstrate and speak and model a meaningful way of life. More is simply required of us that opening our beaks.

Isak Dineson famously said “All suffering is bearable if seen as part of a story.” The emptiness that people feel when they live a life primarily as consumers is no accident – the problem is that the story we’re engaged in isn’t very interesting. A story where your primary role is to create a market, to consume and come back for more is incredibly dull – try writing one someday. But the good news is that there really is a worthwhile story to be told – just not one to be told one day a year. It has all the best elements you can imagine – survival against odds and courage and journeys through difficult circumstances. It has heroes and acts of heroism and passion and drama. It is the story of our lives in the circumstances we find ourselves in – and it is no accident that despite the fact that bazillions of dollars are spent telling us we are just consumers, and that’s all the story we could ever need, people by the thousands and sometimes even millions are frustrated and looking for a better story. And it is here.

It is also no accident that corporations and others are attempting to transform the story of our future, of our journey to and through a difficult and remarkable transition as the story of just another shopping day.

Is it any wonder, if you live your life like a baby bird with your mouth open that what gets dropped into it every time is a worm? People will attempt to reshape your worm and convince you that it is extra yummy this time, but it is still a worm. And the story of consumers is still boring.

If you are going to get better than that, we’re going to have to participate, and go out and seek new sources and resources and options, we’re going to have to replace much of our consumption with rituals of non-consumption. We’re going to have to write a good and compelling story with our lives. The good news is that it is a lot more fun to be a citizen than a consumer, and rituals of non-consumption are just as satisfying as retail therapy. The good news is that there are better stories out there for the claiming and the living, and events are conspiring to keep our times interesting. The good news is that we can do better than worms.

(I then wrote a sequel to this post, after I annoyed a bunch of people.  You can read the whole thing here)

The central message of most Earth Day celebrations is that if we all do a little, we’ll make the world a better place. But the fact is that that’s not true, and as much as we like to hear such a friendly, fuzzy message, we can’t make it factual just by wanting it to be true. The blunt reality is that unless we all do an awful lot, very fast, we’re facing disaster. We use the word “sustainable” casually, to mean “well, we can probably do a little more of this if we cut back a little now.” But we are facing a sustainability crisis in the deepest sense – if we don’t make massive changes and quite rapidly, our children’s future is in question – and the children of billions of people around the world.

The rhetoric of baby steps and we each have to do our tiny part masks the fact that only a massive collective effort can succeed. It is not accident that climate change and peak oil activists always invoke WWII – because we know it is possible to invest everyone in a vast international project, given sufficient motivation, but as long as even the folks on the side of the planet insist on using warm fuzzy rhetoric and not telling the hard truths, we’ll find ourselves bang up against people who say “even you don’t think this is a big deal, so why do it at all.”

Baby steps haven’t gotten us very far – our cloth bags and our CF bulbs haven’t done enough. It is time to admit that we can’t live the way we are for very much longer, and it is time to change the rhetoric. Now it is possible that Earth Day could, actually, result in that kind of changes – but so far, it hasn’t. It has pleasantly helped propagate the idea that because we’re not ready to deal with things as the laws of reality require, we don’t have to, that we can do only what we are comfortable with.

We do not like to acknowledge that we may not have the time, resources or leisure to do things in comfortable, pleasant ways. We do not like to acknowledge that if everyone on the planet can’t live like us, that means we have to change our lives, and soon – we like to think that the rest of the planet doesn’t really mind if we take more than our share. Well, they mind. We like to think that we can have what we want and be oblivious – that we can choose not to know what the real state of our planet is. But all these things are lies, and if you believe in the truth, it is better to know the truth and begin to go forward from reality than to live in the world of polite lies. That is just another kind of greenwashing.

I know, right now, you are thinking “geez, she’s depressing, she wants me to feel guilty.” But no, I don’t. I think guilt is an empty emotion, a weak emotion – “Oh, I shouldn’t eat this cookie..oops, I’m really bad because I ate the cookie, I really shouldn’t eat another one…” I have no truck with guilt, and frankly, no interest in it. I’m interested, instead, in action and what is possible, in the taking of responsibility, the acknowledgement of truth and the making of real change. So no, don’t feel guilty. Do things that matter.

The difference between ET_o and precipitation indicates that there may be a loss of soil moisture by 0.181 m/year (0.042–0.236 m/year) during the period of 2011 through 2050. Increase in temperature was estimated to be 1.8–4.1 °C, which can increase agricultural water demands by 5–15 % to obtain the current level of agricultural productions. This study anticipates significant reductions in water sources, which can impose further stress on agriculture and drinking water sources. Deterioration of source water quality is also expected.

The fact that many nations can clearly predict that they will not be able to feed their populations is fueling a Global Land-Grab in which expected food-short nations are buying up land in nations with better agricultural production.  This will likely produce new colonialisms, and new international conflicts.  Food insecurity is dangerous for every nation, no matter how rich.

Saudi Arabia will have fuel to trade for a long time to come, as Kurt Cobb rightly points out, since super-giant fields are still the ones that actually matter for world oil production:

1. The world’s 507 giant oil fields comprise a little over one percent of all oil fields, but produce 60 percent of current world supply (2005). (A giant field is defined as having more than 500 million barrels of ultimately recoverable resources of conventional crude. Heavy oil deposits are not included in the study.)
2. “[A] majority of the largest giant fields are over 50 years old, and fewer and fewer new giants have been discovered since the decade of the 1960s.” The top 10 fields with their location and the year production began are: Ghawar (Saudi Arabia) 1951, Burgan (Kuwait) 1945, Safaniya (Saudi Arabia) 1957, Rumaila (Iraq) 1955, Bolivar Coastal (Venezuela) 1917, Samotlor (Russia) 1964, Kirkuk (Iraq) 1934, Berri (Saudi Arabia) 1964, Manifa (Saudi Arabia) 1964, and Shaybah (Saudi Arabia) 1998 (discovered 1968). (This list was taken from Fredrik Robelius’s “Giant Oil Fields -The Highway to Oil.”)
3. The 2009 study focused on 331 giant oil fields from a database previously created for the groundbreaking work of Robelius mentioned above. Of those, 261 or 79 percent are considered past their peak and in decline.
4. The average annual production decline for those 261 fields has been 6.5 percent. That means, of course, that the number of barrels coming from these fields on average is 6.5 percent less EACH YEAR.
5. Now, here’s the key insight from the study. An evaluation of giant fields by date of peak shows that new technologies applied to those fields has kept their production higher for longer only to lead to more rapid declines later. As the world’s giant fields continue to age and more start to decline, we can therefore expect the annual decline in their rate of production to worsen. Land-based and offshore giants that went into decline in the last decade showed annual production declines on average above 10 percent.
6. What this means is that it will become progressively more difficult for new discoveries to replace declining production from existing giants. And, though I may sound like a broken record, it is important to remind readers that the world remains on a bumpy production plateau for crude oil including lease condensate (which is the definition of oil), a plateau which began in 2005.

Many of the fuel-rich but food insecure nations recognize that their own political stability depends on ensuring a food supply for their people – and that they haven’t always done very well at it.  It only gets harder now with world food prices predicted to rise dramatically due to climate change, high energy prices and population growth.

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