 It's been such a great party, what a time. Humanity has had a few centuries of growing material affluence. Driven by fossil fuels, powering new technologies, society and the global climate, has been completely changed. But like all celebrations, that process is arguably coming to an end. And like all the best parties, those who have had a really good time don't want it to stop. Of course, you won't hear the demands to turn down the music repeated in the media, who must always end on a positive note, stressing some scheme or political project that will keep the party going. The reality is though, this party has already ended for the bottom 10% in society two decades ago, and since then that economic malaise has slowly climbed up the wealth spectrum, to the point where it is now starting to engulf the middle income groups, and they really don't like it. Last year I wrote a blog on the right to food. It examined how Britain failed to implement this human right, and how Covid exposed Britain's failure to deal with poverty and especially poor diet. In this blog post I'll extend that idea. I want to look at the economic crisis that is likely to explode over the course of 2022, in particular whether recent disruptions are exposing a longer term structural shift in the human system. To ask the metaphorical question, is the party over? Sorry to butt in with a quick advert, but if you'd like to see more content like this, then you really should consider liking this video, subscribing to my YouTube channel, perhaps leaving a comment below, and following me on social media. In today's digital analytics popularity contest, all that button pressing means something in this messed up world, and if we're going to challenge that, then we have to do our bit to whack the algorithms, supporting the kind of content we want to see by clicking on it. What do the Limits to Growth look like? Fifty years ago, the Limits to Growth study projected the human system would peak over the 2020s and 2030s, and then decline. But whenever this issue is raised, pundits always argue the reasons why that's not possible, and why growth will continue. Let's invert that pro-growth argument. In the context of food prices and food supply, if the limits to growth are happening right now, what would that look like in terms of food production and food prices? As has been known for some time, modern food is fossil-fuelled energy. From the tractors burning diesel at a rate of a few miles per gallon, to the natural gas used to make fertilizer, to the electricity that's essential to food processing and the supply chain. As a result, there is a strong correlation between energy and food prices. The recent oil and especially natural gas price spike won't feed through into food prices until next year, until the next harvest has been sown and gathered. Even now, growers are considering which crops may not be planted or raised later this year, which will feed through into supply disruptions next year. So this cycle of supply disruptions and rising prices won't end for at least another two years. Just like the pandemic, the previous excuse, the Ukraine crisis exposed these trends more startlier than they would otherwise appear. It disrupts the human system because, running at its physical limits, it cannot absorb a large systemic shock. It's the lack of spare capacity that demonstrates the system is operating at its limit, and it is that lack of spare capacity that disrupts supply and drives up prices. While the Ukrainian conflict has caused prices to spike, there is no evidence to show this is the only reason for price rises. It's a convenient excuse to avoid looking at the data that describe the current trends, which emerged well over a decade before 2022. This graph shows global oil prices for the last 60 years. There are two lines shown. The nominal price, which is the value in that year, and the real price, which is adjusted for inflation, so that a value years ago can be directly compared to today's value. Comparing the real price, the levels today are similar to the late 1970s. This is why commentators say that the current prices are the worst of 40 years. Why, then, doesn't the media point out that this trend was growing well before the pandemic? Arguably since the early 2000s. It raises difficult and complex questions. Why are oil prices rising? Because there is no spare capacity. Why is there no spare capacity? Because conventional oil production, instead of plateau, representing the peak of global production. Today, the easy-to-produce sources of oil are nearly used up, and the harder-to-produce sources have become progressively more expensive to develop. What has kept the oil market fluid is unconventional production from fracking and ore sands, which, apart from being more expensive to produce, is worse for the climate. For example, fracking companies in the US were going bankrupt up until recently, and it's only with the recent price spike that they return to profitability. Therein lies the contradiction. Even if we ignore climate change, the energy and financial resources required to undertake more marginal and more extreme forms of oil and gas production, are not economic at a price the global economy can afford. That's what's eroded spare capacity, and caused, on average, prices to gradually move upwards for the last 20 years. This represents real barrier to future growth, because the prices at which new production are profitable cause a crash in other parts of the economy. It doesn't require running out of oil to cause a price spike. There just has to be a small shortfalling capacity to create a sudden spike. Is there any better illustration that the fossil fuel industry is operating at its practical limits? Cereals are not all food, but they are a good indicator of the food system. When we look at future trends for global food supply and hunger, cereal production reflects the adequacy of that system as a whole, rather like oil reflects the energy sector. This graph shows United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation's Food Prices Index. It's a weighted basket of foods from around the world that produces a snapshot of food prices at any one time. Just like the oil price, it also gives nominal and real values to compare over time. Compare the cereal's graph to the oil price graph. They are almost a sketch copy of one another, as food is so infused with fossil fuels, so its price is largely determined by the value of fossil fuels, not simply the costs of land or labour. It was the Green Revolution which created this iron link between fossil fuels and food production, due to the far-high use of mechanisation and chemical inputs. That didn't matter in the 1960s when in 2020's value, a barrel of oil cost $14.50. Now that price has risen four to six times, it creates a new problem. There may be food, but many, especially in the global south, can't afford to buy it. This graph shows cereal's production and population, and then calculates the global share of cereal's per person. The effects of the Green Revolution peated out in the late 1980s, in part because of the oil price rise. That then caused food prices to rise in the 1990s as production fell. From the late 1990s, as prices rose, corporate finance poured into the global commodity farming sector. That expanded the land under intensive production, boosting the supply per person into the 2000s. At the same time though, it increased the clearance of forests and uncultivated land, damaging global biodiversity, contributing to soil loss, climate change and agricultural pollution. Since the early 2000s, to keep profits flowing, agriculture around the globe began to consolidate, creating the very few agribusiness corporations who dominate the trade in food commodities today. These corporations make profits by shifting the financial risk on to farmers and producers, which has led to falling farm incomes around the globe, even though retail prices have been rising. Look at the graph again. Notice that population is rising faster than cereal's production. Within the next decade or so, there is a big question as to whether cereal's production can be maintained. Some have projected the entire cereal system will have to change, including changing the types of crops grown to maintain production. If that sounds like the problems of capacity in the oil industry, then it's because both industries are based on the same extreme models of economic financialisation, outsourcing and short-term profit seeking. Whether people like to talk about it or not, rising human populations are a factor too, but that's not as significant as feeling intensively produced crops to animals in industrialised meat production systems to satisfy the demand for meat eating that arises with greater affluence. Just like the lack of spare capacity in the oil market, these factors are driving this system towards its breaking point. It's not just a question of that aren't linked to fossil fuel prices. Farming, a large amount of single commodities, represents a diminishing return, and soon that trend of progress is likely to halt due either to climate change, oil depletion, or because the nature of this system is destroying the fertility of the land farming relies upon. Put simply, the reliance on cereal production is another limit to growth. Neoliberal economics dictate that changing agricultural practices must not change your underlying economic, and especially property rights systems that underpin modern agriculture. No one in government or policy circles is arguing for radical change, only for the reform of these existing practices. If we could have a completely open choice, without beholding to the elite landowners and economic interests, what could we do? This aerial photograph shows my hometown, Bambry, around 1949 to 1954. About 19,000 people and hundreds of allotments spread all around the edge of the town. Those gardens, some of them operated commercially by people who lived in the town, supplied vegetables, meat, and dairy products to homes and local shops. From the 1930s up to the 1970s and 1980s economic downturns, these plots are essential to the well-being of local families. Most have been built on by the late 1980s. I know what many will be thinking at this point. Modern farming is more efficient. This is not accurate. Modern farming is more economically efficient in terms of the revenue generated. In terms of the calories the food produced per unit of land, it's worse. And the embodied energy and embedded emissions that intensive farming generates are far worse. Recent research has shown that a third of the world's food supply is grown by small farmers on plots of less than two hectares using only a quarter of the farmed land area. In other words, small farmers are producing a third more food per unit area of land than larger, more intensive operations. Small farmers do not use commodity-oriented mechanised monoculture practices. They use various, often locally evolved integrated polyculture techniques that maximise food production by growing multiple crops in the same space. For example, a recent study found that Cuban farmers were able to maintain yields with 70% less inputs, while in nearby South America, large farmers were still increasing inputs just to maintain production levels. Recent European research and agroforestry systems show production levels 36% to 100% higher than equivalent monoculture operations. Research in Australia shows that urban agriculture can be more productive than intensive systems with the potential to require far lower resource inputs. This graph is taken from a classic 2005 study, widely cited by other research studies. It identifies the ecological footprint of the average Dutch consumer, broadly similar to England. Food, shaded in yellow, is the single largest part of the individual's lifestyle, more than housing. The fact is, by taking 10 calories to get a calorie of food in your mouth, on average, per person per day, this puts more energy into our mouths than into the average house. In many different ways, as shown in research from projects in Spain, the kind of local food we had in Bambri, before the rise of consumerism, has the potential to make large cuts in resource use and emissions required to address the ecological crisis. Why then does the ecological debate not discuss re-wilding the humans? Well, I spend so much time in effort looking at the economics of all and food. It demonstrates the link between industrialised agriculture and the way people are forced to live in urbanised societies. But the greater issue here is how we break that link. The mainstream political and economic debate assumes that everyone eats intensively produced, highly processed food from supermarkets. What happens when a group in society, the precarious, cannot participate in that lifestyle, even when in full time employment? This is the issue at the heart of the cost of living crisis today, but for the poorest in Britain, this has been the day-to-day reality not for the last few months, but for the last decade or two. In the global south, counter-impression from developed states grabbing land for commodity agriculture, food sovereignty and access to the means of producing food has become a rallying point for community organisation. In the global north, where the importance of food was ignored in the shift from humans being to humans consuming, land rights, access to land and producing food has been eliminated from political debate. Irrespective of how powerful a policy change it would be, to reduce carbon emissions, consumption and improved diet, allowing people to move back to the land in England or create an extent of plots around urban areas is never going to happen by any reasonable means. Because a thousand years of English history mean that 0.04% of the population still own 50% of the land area. That's why we need a truly radical project to address access to food and low cost, low impact lifestyles. The only way we're going to change the current system is not through reform, but by rendering its economic rules and priorities obsolete. The current global food crisis created by the Green Revolution and driven to extremes by the agricultural specialisation, consolidation and outsourcing is reason enough to change. That system simply doesn't work. At the same time the ecological crisis is a function of that globalised system and it will not be solved until we reverse that trend. The fact is the benefits of low impact and integrated polyculture cannot happen unless a de-intensification of farming takes place. That inevitably means shrinking farm sizes which requires more people in the landscape growing food. That's not going to happen overnight and so a halfway point of urban populations having access to land to grow food is an essential step in that process. Imminently, as the oil and gas price spike moves through the economic cycle in the next year or so, food and fuel prices will create a global recession. More disruptive though are the changes to what or where food is grown due to the rising price of inputs. That might affect food availability for perhaps two or three years ahead, compounding price rises. That will provoke riots in the global south and as people fall into destitution, perhaps here too. There is an alternative but that cannot work within the current ideology of economics and property rights. We need to move beyond those arbitrary historic restrictions to revalue food, the land and access to land to create the transformation of society demanded by the ecological crisis and the worsening crisis of the limits to growth.