Description:

During the month of October, CBC Radio’s political affairs show, The House ran a four-part mini-series on peak oil, called “Going Local.”

This series was based on the analysis of Canadian economist and author Jeff Rubin, whose recent book examined the implications of peak oil (Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, 2009).

The third episode, which examined the implications of peak oil for the Canadian agri-food sector, was chosen as a CBC “Editor’s Choice” item. The audio is posted here.

This 10 minute item includes interviews with two farmers near Ottawa, Ontario and a discussion with Rick Munroe, the energy security analyst for Canada’s National Farmers Union.

Thanks to the team at CBC’s The House for their progressive work on this issue.

Audio:

Transcript:

Transcribed by Keith Mac Cuish

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Pedro Martinez: This is Editor’s Choice. I’m your host, Pedro Mendez. For a few weeks now, CBC Radio’s political affairs program, The House, has been looking into the effects of higher energy costs on a number of different policy areas. So far, the program has focused on manufacturing and urban planning. This week, they had a look at the food in our fridges. The CBC’s Louise Elliot brought us this look at what the end of cheap oil means for agriculture.

Louise Elliot: Dwight Foster is standing on an iron ladder watching his latest harvest pour out of his grain elevator and onto the back of an eighteen wheeler truck.

Dwight Foster: I’m Dwight Foster, a grains and oil seeds producer from North Gower, Ontario. We’re moving grains to Montreal and Sorel and the board of Prescott; it’s a good soy bean crop this year.

LE: Along with the soy beans, Foster also produces beef cattle and corn for ethanol plants here in Ontario. He’s worried about Peak Oil and he has been for a while. He’s said no one’s been preparing for it.

DW: Well, the struggle as a farmer is that as the price of oil goes up not only does it affect our fuel costs, but urea is a petroleum based product and our fertilizer bills also, this year for example we’re paying twice the price on fertilizer as we have on years gone by. So it really affects us. We’re price takers on this market and we would like to be able to say we had a bit of say for the price we get for our crops, but at the end of the day it’s frustrating when our expenses mount but we don’t have a lot of control over what we sell our product for.

LE: Foster has placed his faith in ethanol as a solution. Not only as a substitute fuel, but also as a tool to drive up the price of grain.

DW: If the price of oil goes up, I’m hoping as a result of the utilization of ethanol that the price of grain will also ride along with it.

LE: The point is one of great debate in agriculture. Ethanol opponents argue that ethanol will make grain unaffordable and result in a hunger crisis. Eighty kilometers away, Robin Turner is working on a very different kind of farm. One that grows local produce for local consumers in the Ottawa area. I catch up with him while as he shucks a huge bucket of garlic.

Robin Turner: Hi, I’m Robin Turner and I’m a farmer in the National Capital Greenbelt. I am a manager at Riverglen Biodynamic Farm.

LE: The Greenbelt around Ottawa is a ring of land set aside in the 1950s to prevent urban sprawl. It didn’t work and the cities spread outside its green border while the mechanization of food production grew and grew.

RT: The global food system as we know it, the global industrial food system, relies on almost exclusively on oil as an input directly in the form of fuel to power all the machinery that is required and indirectly because almost everything else is created by oil. For example, the machinery itself needs a great amount of oil and fossil fuels in order to be built. The chemical fertilizers and pesticides also require huge amounts of input; the packaging is mostly plastic. Almost everything is oil derived. So as the price of oil goes up, the price of the food in the grocery store, which is really subsidized by millions of years of oil production deep under the earth, is going to increase drastically as well and I think at that point it will become much more viable for people to shop locally.

LE: For Robin, the solution is for farmers to cut out the huge supply chain that now exists between farmers and consumers.

RT: That means marketing locally, for the most part. But it is very complicated because people require a lot of food and there are a lot of people out there and the cold hard fact is that you can’t produce on such a huge scale without the use of fossil fuels and the use of machinery. I don’t know how you can do it. So to be providing a million loaves of bread for Ottawa every week is going to take more than turning all the Greenbelt into wheat fields. It’s going to take Saskatchewan and that’s going to take machinery and that’s going to take oil. How that’s going to play out in the long run, I’m not sure and I think it will be painful, definitely.

LE: For the House, I’m Louise Elliot in Kanata Ontario.

PM: So what plan does the Canadian government have for a world with much higher oil prices? Rick Munroe has asked the Feds that question many times. He’s a farmer and teacher who has studied and lectured on the issue of peak oil. He lives in Kingston Ontario and he spoke with host, Kathleen Petty.

Kathleen Petty: So, I’m curious to know from you how seriously you think the Canadian government is taking the dilemma described in Louise’s story: this dilemma that farmers find themselves in with rising energy prices and all the complications that that presents.

Rick Munroe: Our government is not taking it seriously as all. Our lead agency is Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) which insists that, I’m quoting here, ‘there is no imminent peak oil challenge.’ So since they don’t see a problem on the horizon, nor does AgCanada, and Agriculture Canada made it very clear that they trust the assessment of their advisors on energy which is NRCan.

KP: Is that because you really think that they don’t believe it or because they’re just not quite sure how to confront it if they did believe it?

RM: I’m not sure. I was part of a three hour meeting with senior NRCan officials back in the spring and if they have reservations, they were not forthcoming. In fact, the question was asked if they actually believe the IEA’s projection that there might in fact be the equivalent of six Saudi Arabia’s out there to be found and developed between now and 2030 and their answer was yes.

KP: So if they don’t believe in Peak Oil as a concept, they surely believe in the idea of rising energy costs though don’t they?

RM: They may. And, again I think that’s the real stickler on this thing: there will always be oil available at some price to some people. But if you want to focus primarily here on the agri-food sector, farmers for the most part are near the bottom of the income scale and we’re in no position to absorb a major price increase, as Dwight Foster said, ‘that we’re price takers’.

KP: And is that the plan? To just have farmers absorb it?

RM: I would say that there is no plan at this point. Unlike the UK and USA which have done studies and have parliamentary or congressional bodies to address Peak Oil, our MPs haven’t even brought it up in the house as far as I’m aware.

KP: So if they were to take it seriously – let’s say you could magically have them all believe in Peak Oil – what would they do in response? What would be the policy response in your view?

RM: Well, for the government as a whole I would hope they would quickly alert the various departments, so in this case it would be AgCan, to let them know that yes, the information on Peak Oil does appear to be credible and they would then, I presume, especially in light of Jeff Rubin’s information about globalization maybe they would stop encouraging farmers to aim for that big global export market and focus more on making sure that our own citizens are properly fed.

KP: So in other words, focus on domestic food production. What impact would that have on the farm in terms of how many farms we would have and how many farmers we’d have and how big the farms would be; that sort of thing.

RM: Absolutely. I don’t have answers to that. That’s why we have well paid bureaucrats in Ottawa I guess, to examine these issues. At this point it does not seem to be on the radar screen. Now, when they’re asked, they will say, ‘oh yes, we’re very concerned about climate change.’ But nothing in the way of policy direction to farmers, which is as you said, the size of the farms; is it still smart for us to go out and buy two-hundred horsepower tractors. Those are the practical things farmers need to know.

KP: And who’s got the answers?

RM: Well, for sure we have no answers if we don’t even ask the questions and then they’re not even at that point. They just don’t see a problem on the horizon.

KP: OK so, then that’s the key here, because it sounds like you don’t have the answer, you don’t know what agriculture should look like based on what you’re telling me. You don’t think the government knows what it should look like. But you have to sort of acknowledge that the problem exists before you can find the answers – is that what I’m hearing from you?

RM: That is step one. And obviously, I think they need to err on the side of prudence, they need to err on the side of caution; for sure it’s going to look a lot more local as Jeff Rubin has said. And I think step one at a very practical level, in Ottawa community or my Kingston community here, you have farmers who are producing and you have consumers who would love to support them, but we’ve lost our local infrastructure. Here in the Kingston area, we’ve lost almost all of our slaughter houses, our abattoirs; we’ve lost that whole infrastructure for local food production. I guess we have to start reversing the last forty years and rebuild all that stuff.

KP: Quite a job ahead. Rick Munroe, good of you to take the time this morning, thanks very much.

RM: You’re very welcome.

PM: Rick Munroe is a farmer and teacher in Kingston, Ontario. That’s it for Editor’s Choice today. The show was produced by Kaitlin Goodie and Lilly Mills. I’m Pedro Mendez, I will be back tomorrow with more highlight audio from CBC Radio.