[ohanian]

To predict the shape of things to come, we need to look in history for a product which everybody wants but is in decline. Thus there is not enough to go around. Predictably the price of that product will shoot sky high. But is there ever such a product in the history of humanity. There is one such product, it's call grain.


Oil == grain/cereal
Minerals == cattle

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http://www.ucc.ie/famine/About/abfamine.htm


What is Famine

Extract from "The Challenge of Famine", John Osgood Field; Kumarian Press Conneticut, 1993
The Nature of the Beast

Famine may be seen as "the regional failure of food production or distribution systems, leading to sharply increased mortality due to starvation and associated disease" (Cox 1981, 5). While other definitions exist as well, this one usefully emphasizes regional, not family failure; points to the importance of markets and, by implication, of shifting market demand for different foods in addition to their aggregate supply; identifies "excess deaths" - deaths that otherwise would not have occurred- as the core feature of famine; and attributes those deaths to morbidity as well as to seriously reduced consumption. Indeed, most famine-induced mortality tends to occur after the worst of the food crisis is over but while the crisis of infectious disease persists (Bongaarts and Cain 1982; Greenough 1976 and 1982; see also the studies cited by Dreze and Sen 1989, 44).

What this definition does not adequately convey is that famine is the endpoint of a lengthy process in which people in increasing numbers lose their access to food. Most famines have long gestation periods, typically covering two or more crop seasons. Because the descent into famine is slow, early detection is possible. Because it is also typically shrouded in ambiguity, early detection is rarely definitive and seldom produces early response. Herein lies a dilemma that continues to plague famine early warning systems.

Moreover, famine entails more than a severe shortage of food and grotesque distortions of normal food prices. Famine features a deepening recession in the entire rural economy, one affecting production and exchange, employment, and income of farm and nonfarm households alike (Sen 1981; Greenough 1982; Ravallion 1987; Desai 1988; Dreze 1990a).

Landless laborers, artisans, and traders are among those most vulnerable to famine because of shrinking demand for their labor, goods, and services. Pastoralists and fishermen are also vulnerable because they rely on the exchange of meat and marine products to obtain the cheaper grain calories they require and because, in the dynamic leading to famine, the terms of trade turn sharply against what they sell relative to the grain they seek to buy.

In the Bengal famine of 1943-44, for example, the price of cloth, fish, milk, haircuts, and bamboo umbrellas deteriorated 70-80 percent versus grain (Emailer and Gavian 1987). In Ethiopia, animal calories normally cost about twice as much as grain calories, with herdsmen meeting half of their caloric requirements through consumption of grain; during the famine of 1972-74, the calorie exchange rate declined as much as 84-92 percent against animal products in some areas (Sen 1981, drawing on calculations by Seaman, Holt, and Rivers 1978 and Rivers, Holt, Seaman, and Bowden 1976). In Swaziland, cattle lost six to eight times their value relative to maize in the little-known famine of 1932, placing herders in acute distress (Packard 1984).

As a rule of thumb, when grain supplies and animal stocks both decline, the exchange rate worsens for animals. This double jeopardy underlies Sen's observation that the Ethiopian pastoralist, "hit by drought, was decimated by the market mechanism" (Sen 1981, 112; see also Wolde Mariam 1984). By contrast, large producers of grain and grain merchants can usually ride out a famine far more successfully than others in the afflicted environment.

Similarly, the definition of famine offered above fails to capture the extent of social disintegration that usually accompanies the downward slide into famine conditions. Social reciprocities and supports crumble under increasing stress. Hoarding and related pathologies (smuggling, black market profiteering, crime) become commonplace. The distress sale of assets (jewelry, animals, land) accelerates. Families divide in search of work or succor; wives may even be cast adrift and children sold (Greenough 1982; Vaughan 1987). Out-migration increases as ever more people abandon their lands, homes, and communities in desperation. Abnormally high mortality may be the hallmark of famine, but societal breakdown is its essence.

Finally, so far as these initial observations are concerned, it is important to note that famine occurs not only because a chain of events disposes to a famine outcome but also because nothing, or at least nothing effective, is done to break the process. It has been rare for the governments of famine-prone countries to possess the means with which to intervene to prevent famine. India over the last century and Botswana more recently are exceptions in this regard (McAlpin 1983; Dreze 1990a and 1990b; Holm and Morgan 1985; Hay 1988; Moremi 1988; Morgan 1988). Elsewhere the record has been quite dismal for the most part, while international assistance typically arrives after the worst has already happened. The usual way in which famine-prone areas become less famine prone is via economic development. In the long run, that remains the best solution even today (see Eicher 1987; Dreze and Sen 1989). However, we now know that intervention is possible and that it can work. Preparing for famine so as to prevent it, although not a new idea, is one that we should be thinking about and working to realize. The reasons are humanitarian, social, economic, and political. We can both protect development and promote it by preparedness planning to "deny famine a future" (Glantz 1987).

[Peak_Plus]

I think your analogy goes a lot further than you think. Europe has not experienced ordinary famine (outside of war) since the end of the 18th century. Why? Better transportation made it possible to supply food to ailing regions. The railroad and later automative industries continued to make regional dependencies anacronistic. Likewise, but actually less important in the question of regional supply, agricultural methods became increasingly energy and automative dependent. In short, energy dependence (transport and automation) replaced regional agricultural dependence.

In the modern era, we have had only *one* experience of famine-like conditions - during the OPEC embargo. Supply could not be secured. It was actually a very small event, but it indicates the type of famines that will occur in the downside (and plateau?) of peak oil. Maybe this is a good way to come to a consensus between the optimists and the pessimists. Civilization as we know it will not necessarily come to an end just because our energy supply is in danger. But periodic (perhaps severe) supply shortages during the next two to three generations, while we are developing a new energy paradigm, could certainly become the norm.

Do we have an historic parallel? Around 1300, famines began increasing in most of the world, probably because the agricultural methods had reached much of their "limits to growth" in the Chinese, Arabic and European worlds. At the same time, the earth's climate began to cool down. It took half a century, however, for the real effects to be felt. All three "weakened" cultural areas were hit with the bubonic plague.

Did civilization as we know it end? No. Did all developed areas suffer comparably? No. Some central European areas were hardly hit.

I would not be surprised if many parallels to this period arise.[/b]

[Jack]

Great post - thank you for taking the time to add this to the knowledge base.