Shirin Wertime has a must-read article at Culture Change that poses the question: what will happen to our food system as fossil fuels become increasingly scarce and expensive? The following is my summary of some of the highlights.

Today’s agri-food systems are almost entirely dependent on fossil fuel energy for everything from food production to transportation to food preparation and storage. The structure of agriculture production, aided and abetted by government policies, has spurred the expansion of farm specialization and consolidation, monocultures, the delocalization of agricultural production, and the adoption of industrial farming practices. The increase in globalized food production, which has come at the expense of local production, is sustainable only as long as cheap energy supplies can subsidize the transportation of goods across long distances. It will take deep-rooted structural and institutional changes as well as lifestyle changes on the part of individuals, their governments, and societies to transition to a more sustainable, non-petroleum based food system which oil depletion and rising costs will inexorably force on us.

Farming itself has become the least profitable and least energy intensive segment of the entire economy of agriculture. Only one-fifth of the energy that goes into our mouths is actually used for growing food. The rest goes to transport, processing, packaging, marketing, and food preparation and storage. Farmers end up with only 10% of the total food dollar, while 25% pays for farm inputs and 65% goes for transportation, processing and marketing. A century ago, farmers ended up with closer to 40% of the food dollar and most farm inputs were produced by the farmers themselves by using draft animal power, storing seeds, and using animal manure for fertilizer.

As oil declines, industrial agriculture in its current form will become impossible. It will prove increasingly difficult to feed the world with diminishing fertile land and water resources. The current structure of power relations and resource control in the United States prevents the widespread move away from fossil fuel based agriculture and transition to localized, sustainable agriculture. Without a change in the status quo, small local and sustainable producers cannot compete against fossil fuel subsidized agribusiness. But the reality is that the present agricultural system cannot be maintained for much longer. Decreasing oil production and rising oil prices will effectively bankrupt the American agri-food system. Without petroleum and all of its benefits, there will be little choice but to revert to a system of local, organic production and consumption.

Peak oil will turn our entire world upside down. There will be a return to localized, small-scale photosynthesis-based, appropriate-tech agricultural production and an end to the domination of economic and power structures that place profit above all else.

Now, I can buy all of this except the last part of the last sentence. I’ll believe in the end of avarice only when I see it.