Anonymous #443D
I agree, and I think this point in particular deserves elucidation and amplification.
One underappreciated aspect of the high productivity of industrialized agriculture in the West since the late 19th Century is synthetic fertilizers made from phosphate rock, mostly mined in Brazil and Chile, bought up at low subsidized prices by American agribusiness superhyperultramegalocorporations, and imported into the US, Canada, and so on by the megaton. Usable phosphate minerals are a commodity existing in very finite quantity in the Earth’s crust.
We don’t even have to run out of phosphate for the West’s agriculture export industry to go away, either. What happens when the price of asphalt and refinery still bottoms–this is the stuff that’s melted and fed into the titanic engines that drive the big ore boats back and forth across the seas–goes up? There’s only so much of it. It’s a commodity in finite supply but demand for it grows year over year. What happens when there’s no more diesel for the tractors, no more synthetic fertilizer for that half million square miles of farm land in the US? Look at the headlines about closed pipelines and note the trend in fuel prices just since January.
This model of agriculture, the one we all grew up with and think of as normal, is unsustainable. It’s already tottering and it’s going to be very, very messy when it all falls down. When the machine comes to a stop, it’s unlikely to be a smooth stop. Things are going to get very bad, very fast, particularly in parts of the world that can’t feed themselves without importing food.
If we use massive amounts of ground water and phosphates and use natural gas to pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere we can turn the desert into an oasis for a few decades until those non-renewable resources run out.
I agree, and I think this point in particular deserves elucidation and amplification.
One underappreciated aspect of the high productivity of industrialized agriculture in the West since the late 19th Century is synthetic fertilizers made from phosphate rock, mostly mined in Brazil and Chile, bought up at low subsidized prices by American agribusiness superhyperultramegalocorporations, and imported into the US, Canada, and so on by the megaton. Usable phosphate minerals are a commodity existing in very finite quantity in the Earth’s crust.
We don’t even have to run out of phosphate for the West’s agriculture export industry to go away, either. What happens when the price of asphalt and refinery still bottoms–this is the stuff that’s melted and fed into the titanic engines that drive the big ore boats back and forth across the seas–goes up? There’s only so much of it. It’s a commodity in finite supply but demand for it grows year over year. What happens when there’s no more diesel for the tractors, no more synthetic fertilizer for that half million square miles of farm land in the US? Look at the headlines about closed pipelines and note the trend in fuel prices just since January.
This model of agriculture, the one we all grew up with and think of as normal, is unsustainable. It’s already tottering and it’s going to be very, very messy when it all falls down. When the machine comes to a stop, it’s unlikely to be a smooth stop. Things are going to get very bad, very fast, particularly in parts of the world that can’t feed themselves without importing food.
