>Does anyone have an idea of the percentage of world >wide food production that is dependent on oil and gas? >James
Hello Keith Difficult question to answer. Even getting a good handle on world wide food production itself isn't that easy. There are figures of course, but often they turn out to mean not quite what they seemed to mean. Would you class mainstream grain production as "food", even though most of it's fed to livestock, or would just the livestock products be food, or both? What I'm trying to get a feel for is the percentage of humanity that relies on industrial agriculture and where they are. I think that regarding grain the vast bulk eventually ends up inside people in some form or other, so I'd be inclined to count all as food - or perhaps try to identify other uses as a percentage of the total and deduct. So what else is grain used for? Cosmetics? Cleaning products? Pharmaceuticals? I've no idea in fact. How about the maize that gets turned into high-fructose corn syrup and scattered throughout the industrialised processed food supply? Is that food? I'd say yes, assuming that most of it ends up in human stomachs. If "food" is what people actually eat, then there are a great many people who depend on food production that doesn't appear in the production figures, like the very large numbers fed by city farms for instance. Subsistence farms also often get left out, or they lie about their production (if they have any sense, which they do). Food security data gives a better idea of this than production figures do. Yes, and what I'm reflecting is that as the prices of oil and food rise it will be the developed world that suffers most. Perhaps there is a little justice in the world after all. There are a couple of approaches I can think of. I'd like to know that answer too, and if I checked it out I could nail down a few other things I'd like to know, or like to know better. I'll try to have a look at it in the next few days. Look forward to that. Best wishes James ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70 http://us.click.yahoo.com/Z1wmxD/DREIAA/yQLSAA/FGYolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
