Sounds like Burke is deep in the pocket of the agriculture multinationals. One wonders whom these politicians serve - certainly not the voters. Peak oil means the eventual end of industrial agriculture and that seriously worries the multinationals who have been very successful in subjugating farmers and sequestering their profits for their shareholders. Future food security is to be found in produce grown locally and consumed locally. If agricultural land and produce are not owned by the people that do the farming the results can be catastrophic - look at the Irish potato famine where 1 million people starved while the English landowners were still exporting wheat from Ireland. Do you REALLY believe things would be different in a future oil-scarce world and with foreigners with more capacity to pay than destitute Australians?

A timely and interesting post Russ,
I was pleased to see that so much of our vegetables and fruit are grown locally.

We should start putting tariffs on fruit and other imported foodstuffs.
This will have the effect of reducing the oil used in moving the food
around the world faster than just the incrementing oil price.

There are arguments for large commercial farms and I am aware of the
oil consumed in large commercial production.
However some time ago I read of work being done to electrify the farm
machinery. It was however about batteries and fuel cells.
It would be possible with the sacrifice of small strips of
land to set up lines of poles and feed the machines in the same way
trolley buses are fed. There is an alternative system I have seen on
cranes where a one metre off the ground duct runs across the land and
an arm on the machine picks up from there.
Either seem to me to be totally practical.
It is unlikely batteries or fuel cells will ever be up to the job so
we should not waste time waiting for what may never come.

After their production, but provided we can get the pollies to listen,
electrified railways could move bulk foods like wheat from more remote
areas. Even bananas could be shipped to our southern cousins.

Whatever energy regime we end up with, it will end up outputting
electricity.

This is the same Minister who has mindlessly endorsed genetically engineered foods - a position you can only take if you are benefitting directly from the biotech companies or are willfulloy ignorant of the failings and dangers of the technology. The changes that we need to make to food production will not be made by a Minister who embraces the industrial model of food production.
Next

Federal Agriculture Minister, Tony Burke could look to innovation and new value added products with health benefits like prevention of tooth decay from local food "to get some legs on the other side of the world".

Nuts and cheese can be developed into products to chew before and after eating to displace trapped food between teeth and inside grooves on chewing surfaces to reduce demineralisation of teeth and increase remineralisation of tooth.

Chewing celery after eating helps saliva dilute trapped sugars,neutralise acid and repair demineralised tooth.

Marketing and dental health education can be integrated in a project like Supertooth and Good Food Friends www.supertoothndk.org and www.ndk.biz/choc

Even with fluoridation, a $21.5 billion global oral hygiene industry and dental health education, tooth decay is the most common and expensive disease yet the easiest to prevent.

School teachers, parents, health professionals and the public can register on line comment and participate in surveys. www.supertoothndk.or

Foodmiles are a great marketing ploy, but that is about it.

What we can show is that lamb grown in NZ, eating pasture,
then shipped to the UK, uses heaps less oil then lamb fed
on grain for most of its life, in the UK itself.

Free range farming is clearly far more efficient then factory
farming, shipping transport hardly comes into it.

Give Tony Burke some credit. He came in green into the agriculture
industry and so far has shown to be learning fast and quite pragmatic.
Credit where credit is due!

Farmers' markets certainly have sprung up everywhere and are well frequented - eventually it might even impact on our duopolised food retailers.

The free-market de-regulation spin doctors have certainly been successful in demonising 'protectionism' in the case of food supply. Tariffs to protect local industry were considered quite acceptable many years ago and some of the problems inherent in protectionism could easily be averted by increasing local competition and preventing monopolies.

Importing food that we already produce here in vast quantities in view of peak oil is quite absurd. The decision to stop imports will be thrust upon us before we know it but the lack of foresight is worrying from our elected leaders.

The way to go would be to return to smaller local production systems which supply a locally defined area and where imports would be limited to food unable to be grown in that area or off-season.

Can anyone else see the irony in agricultural exports from Africa when there is little food for their own people.

Yabby's point about NZ lamb and food miles is a valid one and methods of production would have to be accounted for when calculating food miles.

Pelican, yes spot on.
Globalisation will disappear with the oil.
At some point, probably well after the depletion starts the Coles
and Woolworths method of food retailing will no longer be viable.
For some time previously they would have been on a down spiral in
profit and turnover.

Local farmer markets would have been eating into their profits.
Eventually their least profitable stores would be closed and the space
in the shopping centre would be taken over by the local farmer markets
each having their own stall. They might migrate to a system where the
local farmers would employ staff to operate the market as a co op
and they just bring in their local product in every day.

Perhaps Coles & Woolies may change to buying their produce locally as
it would be the only product available.

It seems inevitable that petrol and diesel rationing will be necessary
fairly early in the decline so that might prompt very sudden change.
Much tinned food and other processed foods might also be in difficulty
due to fuel rationing unless the old idea of goods sheds at every
main railway station are reestablished.
Shipments of processed food could be delivered for each supermarket
by rail just as it was done in days of yore.

This article appears to be ideology in quite a number of ways. It seems that Tony Burke’s sin was to make the point that promotion of low food miles for food as a means of reducing carbon outputs is simplistic and needs to take into account other issues. In fact, he was quite correct to do so. Two of the issues in food miles are: the production of produce in high energy situations, such as heated glasshouses, can use more energy than importing produce from the other side and the use of food miles as a trade restriction. We see both of these happening in the UK at the moment. The Soil Association for example wants to remove the organic label from any imported produce, supposedly as a way of reducing carbon footprint, but really in order to protect the UK organic industry from more efficient off-shore producers. Strangely, Grayson recognises both these issues, but that doesn’t stop him taking a shot at Burke for not being a true believer. Secondly, Grayson seems to think that a conference in Lismore that almost nobody from the agricultural sector attended should be demonstration that Burke is wrong. Thirdly, Grayson points to statements made by a fringe organisation in the UK that virtually no-one has heard of is also evidence Burke is wrong. Grayson would do better to look at statements made in the popular press as the point of criticism.

Somewhat predictably michael_in_adelaide accuses Burke of being bought by the multinationals. m_i_a seems to believe that if people don’t agree with him, they must have been bought by big business. Sadly for m_i_a the truth could well be that Burke and his advisers have looked at the issue and come to a conclusion on the basis of evidence rather than m_i_a’s anti-globalization ideology.

Agronomist said;

Two of the issues in food miles are: the production of produce in high
energy situations, such as heated glasshouses, can use more energy
than importing produce from the other side and the use of food miles
as a trade restriction.

unquote

Surely the issue is will there be fuel to transport the food over long
distances, whether it is more economical in fuel or not compared to
glasshouses.
Glass houses may not be available anyway because of the lack or cost
of energy but does it just mean we will have to eat what is in season
rather than rely on glasshouses.

Fuel will be rationed either by price or regulation and this will
simply rule out long distance transport, except perhaps by electric
rail or sea born transport.

Yabby's comment regarding NZ lamb being more efficient for the UK than UK lamb may be premature, methinks. We are nowhere near a workable carbon footprint system yet and i dont think people are taking into account all of the embodied energy in the import/export industry. For example, it took 2 years for a research company to come up with a 'Dust to Dust' report on ALL of the embodied energy in automobiles. It is not just about the litres of diesel burnt by the specific cargo ship getting from point A to B.

Also agronomist, do you really think that Soil Association (if they were removing certficiation for imports) would be protecting UK farmers because the importers were more efficient? Not because the UK has the most valuable currency in the world?

I also feel there is a spiritual side to this conversation - i would much rather eat local food because its grown close to me, by people close to me, plain and simple. There are certain anomalies to the 'eat local', though. Victoriaan rice, for example, desert-grown, pesticide covered cotton also.

Bazza, you are correct that as fuel prices rise choices will have to be made. However, at the moment in the UK you have the silliness of glasshouse-grown tomatoes and lettuces being described as “greener” because they have fewer food miles than out-doors grown produce from North Africa.

In terms of transport, ship transport is probably the most energy efficient and certainly lamb from New Zealand can be landed cheaper in the UK than home-grown lamb. Whether there is less energy involved, I don’t quite know, but UK lamb fed on grain imported from South America would suggest not.

Mule, one of the problems with the expansion of the EU has been an increase in competition from countries like Romania. Land and labour are very much cheaper in Romania than the UK. The same is true for a number of third world countries. The Soil Association has been moaning over the last 4-5 years about the increasing percentage of organic food bought in the UK that has been imported. Then last year they come up with the food miles proposal. Call me cynical if you will, but this looks, feels and smells like protectionism.

That you want to eat local food for religious (spiritual) reasons is fine, but how local is local? Is it 5 km, 10 km or 2000 km. If it is the latter, why shouldn’t New Zealand produce also count as local?

Point taken Agronomist,
I believe that the scale of sheep farming in the UK is a much
more expensive operation than it is in New Zealand.
Even so it is easy to believe that by the time refrigeration and
transport is taken into account the fuel consumed must be very
significant. That it is cheaper says more about the cost of bunkering
oils than it says about food production.

We are moving past the point where cost on the butcher's counter is
the start and finish of the matter, but from here on the energy cost
is all that matters. CO2 is a sideline consideration but if it
reduces that it will make some happy.

What it needs is a study by an agronomist and a shipping transport
expert to do an energy audit of the process.
They would need to know how much of the cargo is, in this case, frozen
lamb, how much fuel is used in keeping the containers frozen, and
the land transport at each end. A non trivial calculation.

No longer can pure cost be the measure of whether a process is valid.

Bazza, you describe a typical market situation. If the costs associated with transport of produce get higher, produce transported a short distance becomes economically more attractive. This is how markets typically work.

Unfortunately, at the moment transport is a fairly small component of current costs, with labour and other factors making up a much larger component.

Energy use is already factored into the costs. Doing a full energy budget may show that one strategy uses more energy than another, but while energy is cheaper than labour, labour costs will dominate the costs. To change this, energy will have to become more expensive than labour, or a tax (such as a carbon tax) will need to be introduced in order to change behaviour. One of the problems with taxes (or indeed subsidies) where the tax is not representative of the value of the service is that they end up distorting markets