Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

tion. The number of hungry Chinese fell by more than 50 percent, from
more than 400 million to under 200 million. Excluding China, the number
of hungry people increased by more than 10 percent. The effectiveness
of the land redistribution of the Chinese Revolution at reducing hunger
shows the importance of economic and cultural factors in fighting hunger.
However we view Malthusian ideas, population growth remains critical—
outside of China, increased population more than compensated for the
tremendous growth in agricultural production during the green revolution.
Another key reason why the green revolution did not end world hunger
is that increased crop yields depended on intensive fertilizer applications
that the poorest farmers could not afford. Higher yields can be more profitable
to farmers who can afford the new methods, but only if crop prices
cover increased costs for fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery. In third
world countries the price of outlays for fertilizers and pesticides increased
faster than green revolution crop yields. If the poor can’t afford to buy
food, increased harvests won’t feed them.
More ominously, the green revolution’s new seeds increased third-world
dependence on fertilizers and petroleum. In India agricultural output per
ton of fertilizer fell by two-thirds while fertilizer use increased sixfold. In
West Java a two-thirds jump in outlays for fertilizer and pesticides swallowed
up profits from the resulting one-quarter increase in crop yields in
the 1980s. Across Asia fertilizer use grew three to forty times faster than rice
yields. Since the 1980s falling Asian crop yields are thought to reflect soil
degradation from increasingly intensive irrigation and fertilizer use.
Without cheap fertilizers—and the cheap oil used to make them—this
productivity can’t be sustained. As oil prices continue climbing this century,
this cycle may stall with disastrous consequences. We burned more
than a trillion barrels of oil over the past two decades. That’s eighty million
barrels a day—enough to stack to the moon and back two thousand times.
Making oil requires a specific series of geologic accidents over inconceivable
amounts of time. First, organic-rich sediment needs to be buried faster
than it can decay. Then the stuff needs to get pushed miles down into the
earth’s crust to be cooked slowly. Buried too deep or cooked too fast and
the organic molecules burn off; trapped too shallow or not for long enough
and the muck never turns into oil. Finally, an impermeable layer needs to
seal the oil in a porous layer of rock from which it can be recovered. Then
somebody has to find it and get it out of the ground. It takes millions of
years to produce a barrel of oil; we use millions of barrels a day. There is no
question that we will run out of oil—the only question is when.
dirty business 199