John Anderson on food shocks, oil dependency and drought
John Anderson is the former leader of the National Party, Deputy Prime Minister and Federal Minister for Primary Industries and Energy. He’s retiring at the coming election to go back to the farm. As Deputy Prime Minister in 2004 he was one of the first significant politicians globally to acknowledge peak oil. He’s now making the links between climate change, peak oil and food security, and made the following comments on ABC Radio National, Sept 26 2007:
“It’s not beyond the realms of possiblity that we’ll see a food shock in the next few years. We talk about oil shocks, but we go on assuming that the supermarket shelves will be loaded.”
“The global situation is a serious one… We’re pouring as much oil into refrigerators as we are into our cars. Now, oil and energy dependency for the production and distribution and preparation of our food is really very worrying.”
Download the full interview [mp3 / 2.4MB]
Note: Anderson promotes GMOs as part of the solution — but we should be dubious about this as it puts control of solutions into multinational corporations, is inherently dangerous, and the industrial model of farming associated with GMOs is much less effective than small scale biodiverse permaculture systems with water harvesting systems. Because of the clumsyness of GMO technology, basically every cell in the body of the GMO produces proteins from the introduced gene, even in areas where they are not needed, or indeed may be toxic to the plant. This represents a metabolic overhead unsuited to tough conditions such as drought.