The oil we eat: Middle East- food & politics

The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq—By Richard Manning (Harper's Magazine)
I adore this article. I really do. I read it back in 2006 in an Anthropology of Globalization class and don't regret a second of it.

Here is what I take from the article from my 4th reading of it, from this morning.
It is strangely ironic that I am fighting the war on poverty in the place the war on the poor has been developing and creating the machinery . Every calorie from corn, wheat, and sugar comes from a calorie of oil. America is actively engaged in this very second in killing to keep access to this resource. Killing for food. Iowa corn by extension kills people in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Nigeria. It is here in Dubuque, Iowa where the weapons of war - in the form of the John Deere plant - are produced and then sent oversees where people choose to continue destroying the land.

Here in Dubuque, this war is profitable and even claims to be the solution to poverty - if the people from Dubuque who are living as victims of green revolution just join the war, by getting the $20-per-hour jobs available to them at the plant that solves poverty, right? That is the working assumption. Somehow being the victim of structural violence's solution is trapped in the plan to just become the oppressor.

I guess somewhere between my research into creating a position to help people from poverty to self-sufficiency, and my moral convictions that we are structurally failing to solve problems, I have this one question to deal with,

"If there isn't food the one think worth killing for?"

Here are the highlights of the article.

"Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated... If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry [agriculture]....However, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action...In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa's fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year...On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year's worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land—in 1997 we burned through more than 400 years' worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else. Even as the earth beneath Iowa shrinks, it is being globalized...

What would happen when the planet's supply of arable land ran out? We have a clear answer. In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. There was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.

The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain—wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of these three grains so that they could be hypercharged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased “efficiency” of the industrialized factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.

For openers, it disrupted long-standing patterns of rural life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world's most severe poverty. The experience in population control in the developing world is by now clear: It is not that people make more people so much as it is that they make more poor people. In the forty-year period beginning about 1960, the world's population doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3 billion to the world's poorest classes, the most fecund classes. The way in which the green revolution raised that grain contributed hugely to the population boom, and it is the weight of the population that leaves humanity in its present untenable position.

Discussion of these, the most poor, however, is largely irrelevant to the American situation....

Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten... That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap. It appears, however, that the corn cycle is about to come full circle. If a bipartisan coalition of farm-state lawmakers has their way—and it appears they will—we will soon buy gasoline containing twice as much fuel alcohol as it does now. Fuel alcohol already ranks second as a use for processed corn in the United States, just behind corn sweeteners. According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest. The USDA calls this a bargain, because gasohol is a “clean fuel.” This claim to cleanness is in dispute at the tailpipe level, and it certainly ignores the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide pollution, and the haze of global gases gathering over every farm field. Nor does this claim cover clean conscience; some still might be unsettled knowing that our SUVs' demands for fuel compete with the poor's demand for grain."