Our current high-tech society provides an abundance of cheap food and consumer goods for those living in the misdeveloped world, even though other living costs such as accomodation, taxes and transport make balancing their budget a challenge for many people.
Both cheap food and cheap consumer goods however, are completely dependant on cheap oil. Like land, oil is something they ain't making any more, so its price basically moves in one direction only. Of course vegetable oil is a renewable resource, but when cars are competing with people for crops, the agregate population of both will have to decline, and it won't make any difference to the direction oil's price moves.
So, we can still benefit from cheap oil while it lasts, whether that's in the short or medium term; the greatest benefit we can get from it is to prepare for lean times ahead.
Many ancient civilisations have died as they have become over-complex, and found food, energy or other necessary resources becoming too scarce to maintain themselves. It is necessary to for the preservation of society to realise that we are now on that downward curve. If we try to maintain things as they are, then we will sink, and undergo an unpleasant and violent struggle for those at the top of the pile to keep their luxuries while those at the bottom starve.
Society must face up to the reality of peak oil, and adjust by subsidising and investing in a parallel local low-tech economy based on manual, animal and other renewable energy sources before it is too late. The most basic human needs are food, shelter and water, so it is these resources which we must develop now, while we still have abundant and relatively-cheap fosil and nuclear fuel sources to ease the transition.
the first thing is to have a plan, and the first element of that plan must be a population policy. With an open-ended, unplanned and growing population, there is no possibility of coping with the multiple stresses of 21st century energy depletion and environmental degredation.
The second element of the plan must be to invest in an oil-free agricultural sector. That is, the ability to product and distribute foods, from seed to field to plate, with as little oil input as possible.What does this kind of farming look like? It is local, organic, saving and trading seeds, using animal power and human labour to plough, sow, nurture, weed, harvest and distribute grains and vegetables. It looks like farming from a few hundred years ago, updated a little from modern sciences of permaculture, breeding and mechanical engineering.
Such sustainable agriculture today finds it hard to compete against its high-tech counterpart, even with demand for organic food soaring: it is expensive, and hard work; but still, as oil becomes sharply scarcer and more costly, this is the only kind of agriculture which will feed us. Any sane, forward-thinking government would start to convert the sector as soon as possible.
It would take the analysis of many statistics to say exactly when it will become uneconomic to continue with oil-based agriculture: that process by which many calories of oil are expended to produce a single calorie worth of food on a plate. Even with such analysis, the future can never be predicted with exact, quantitive certainty. What we can say though, is that once the consequenses of peak oil hit, oil-based agriculture will become not only an energy sink, but also a financial sink, sometime between now (October 2007) and, at the latest, the mid 21st centure, i.e. 2050.
From there, it's a simple calculation to work out a line of targets for percentage oil-free food production and distribution: from whatever it is now, probably close to zero, to 100% in 2050 or so. It would have to be a radical shift in policy to even have a target of 1% in 2010.
And what benefit would that give us?
The security of knowing that our food supplies do not depend on a complex, international, high-technology network of potential failure points and diminishing oil supplies.
