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Food and drink

What costs this food?

Mom called last night right before dinner and within minutes we were talking about high food costs.

So many of us young 'uns don't really notice food prices like previous generations of Canadians have had to.

But mom, who is a grocery-budget queen after raising a family of five on, well, not much, is amazed at how much prices are escalating these days, and not just by nickels and dimes like they used to. Some things, she remarked, will jump a couple of bucks since her last shopping trip.

For retirees like my parents and others living on limited incomes, rising food costs hurt.

So imagine trying to survive on a pension or limited income in a place like, say, Nunavut, where a jug of milk costs $14 and an apple is two bucks because of high transportation costs. Unless you know how to earn at least some of your living off the land, you'd be hooped. Or, should I say, unless you are able to live off the land, given the radical changes in ocean currents, precipitation and ecosystems that the Arctic and other regions are facing with climate change.

Factor in peak oil and the subsequent rise in oil prices and soon I won't be able to even mention food prices to mom.

But moms in Nunavut and beyond, if you think you've got challenges now to make those grocery dollars work, look out - look way out, past peak oil and into our future with a changing climate.

But first, the oil. Right now, it takes between one and 10 calories of oil energy to generate one calorie of food. By comparison, the opposite was true in the 1940s when the average U.S. farm produced over two calories of food for every calorie of oil burned.

Either way, the comparisons sum up our entrenched oil/food interdependency, one many of us fail to put in the context of food costs.

And it's not just the high transportation costs of our current, privileged, carbon-intensive supply model, which depends on trucking food thousands of kilometres from source to plate, especially plates in remote places like Nunavut or Patagonia. It's also the cost of the billions of tonnes of oil-based fertilizers and oil-based pesticides pumped into our food-growing fields annually.

In his lauded and applauded 2004 Harper's article, The Oil We Eat, Richard Manning points out that if all of the world ate the way the U.S. does, with all its oil-dependent systems, we would exhaust all known fossil fuel reserves on Earth in just over seven years.

In 1978, when food prices did creep up by nickels and dimes, a barrel of oil was the same price as that jug of milk in Nunavut - $14. The world's population was just over 4 billion.

If you think food prices are high now, when oil is at about 75 bucks a barrel and we have about 6.8 billion mouths to feed on Earth, stand by.

UN projections for "peak people": 9.2 billion in 2075. As for projecting peak oil and peak oil prices, that's a fool's game, with informed guesses ranging from 2010 to 2020 and on to God-knows-when, and prices guesstimated at - take your pick - $400/barrel, $500/barrel. (It was $148/barrel last summer, BTW.)

Yes, locavore-ing and slow food are all the rage and Victory Gardens are back in vogue. Even Michelle Obama had some of the White House lawn dug up to plant a community garden. Habaneros are still counting on their post-Soviet-support huertas (kitchen gardens). London Food is promising over 2,000 mini-farms all over the city within a few years and salad gardens are sprouting up on high-rise rooftops.

But four to five mega-companies still control 60-80 per cent of global food supply and everything along the system, from production and transport to warehousing and packaging.

And it's all dependent on one other factor besides sweet crude - food crops, which are far more dependent on current ecosystems and climatic conditions than they are on oil. Crops, that, if they cannot adapt to changing climatic conditions, will fail. Crops that, if they need to be replaced, scientists may need years to develop new hybrids.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose work and importance we Canadians seem to be woefully, blissfully, stupidly ignorant of while the acronym IPCC trips off the tongues of Europeans and Aussies as easily as we say "Hockey Night in Canada," observed in 2007 - two long years ago - that increased frequency of heat stress, droughts and floods will negatively affect crop yields and livestock beyond the impacts of any direct effects of climate change. (You know, your basic CC stuff like more and more severe hurricanes and storms and drought and increased evaporation and wacko rainfall patterns.)

This will, and I quote from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website, "create the possibility for surprises, with impacts that are larger, and occurring earlier, than predicted using changes in mean variables alone. This is especially the case for subsistence sectors at low latitudes."

Translation: Bangladesh, India, Africa's sub-sahara - the world's poorest places will be hardest hit with far worse than higher food prices.

Oxfam International has been tracking crops and climate in 15 countries and warns that "millions of farmers will have to give up traditional crops as they experience changes in the seasons..."

This week, on the heels of the failed UN food summit in Rome and right before the mind-bogglingly important climate talks in Copenhagen - so mind-boggling, apparently, that they have befuddled our federal leaders into running into the bar in the Titanic to wait for someone to warm the seats in the lifeboats - comes a report from 26 climate scientists (Google: The Copenhagen Diagnosis).

It concludes that key climate indicators are tracking near or worse than the worst-case scenarios of that 2007 IPCC report.

Hello, Mr. Harper? Mr. Prentice? That's near or worse than the worst-case scenarios.

And, mom, about that food budget? Forget it...

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who is sickened by Canada's lame stance on climate change.