Daily Oil Blog

Rice price seems to move up this recent months causing some households here to stock up prompted thailand to assure that there’s enough rice for all to ensure price stability.Indeed with rice as the food staple across Asia, rice production has become the talk of the town lately when Thai PM  suggested a rice cartel to be formed with her neighbouring countries.

Nothing concrete came out of that but the mindset to move towards a similar structure like opec with oil does raise some concerns.Fears of a small group will control the rice prices dictating the fate of billions of rice eaters will set off a series of fierce debates in the near future.

Thailand seems to think the low rice exports and expenisve oil imports is unfair to her and upset her trade balances and in a way the rice cartel will offset the imbalances.But there are serious issues on the table before any real talk of a rice cartel being form.

First, thailand must have the co operation of the countries which to form the cartel and also top importers of rice like china and japan. Both are big players not only in asia region but also the international stage of world trade.

Even if the external influences is solved, she must be able to control the supplies of her domestic output of rice farming which is not really possible in the forseeable future.With all the problems yet not overcome, rice production and prices will be open for business as usual.Politics aside, the filling of the stomach of the world populace comes first for better or for worse .

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In vitro meat seems to be gaining ground when scientists succeeded in creating the cultured meat 3 years ago.And animal rights group like PETA seems to be betting on it to be on the supermarkets in mass quantities soon.

Meat without blood is tasteless cause it lacked uric acid and the cultured meat is bland but nevertheless healthier without the blood vessels however researchers wants to take a step further and create the blooded meat to give it the taste that consumers want.

However something is needed to create something and “embryonic myoblasts” are needed to begin the in vitro meat production. This will give companies to exploit the livestock for gains similar to the farms who killed their livestock in cruel ways.The only difference is that the in vitro process happens in a lab does not make it more humane.

The whole process is confinement, rape and abortion of non human animals for in vitro meat production to be cultured.I will not bother you with the technical details but to say it’s to save the lives of livestock animals does not hold water.The use of fertilised egg and non human animal skeletal muscle cells will be a ongoing debate for years to come.

It seems that modern men failed to grapple high tech does not not really mean high ethics and we’re not talking about tinkering with some machines here but living things like us that’s a food source for homo sapiens from the dawn of mankind.

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Enjoy them while you can…with the rising price of oil, and the coming bio fuel caused commodities scarcity, beef may become an environmental and socially prohibited product.

Two recent statistics that have stuck in my head are that the amount of oil needed to bring a cow to market is the equivalent used by a small passenger car while driving across the continent from New York to Los Angeles, and that it takes 14 kilograms of grain to grow one kilogram of cow…and when the inedible parts of the cow are factored in, that figure grows to a nearly 20 to 1 ratio!

When environmentalists also warn that methane from cows is one of the leading causes of global warming and that increasing amounts of rainforest and other forested land are burned yearly for grazing land for American destined beef, it makes you wonder if it’s all worth it.

I mean I love a good steak, and a burger when done just right is a little piece of heaven…but when the social costs of cattle ranching are so extreme, maybe the way out of our current predicament is partially through a switch away from such an inefficient means of food production.

With political will mandating increasing percentages of domestically produced ethanol to fuel our cars, the prices of ethanol related commodities has been rising, and causing rising commodities prices across the spectrum of agriculture. With economists already predicting food shortages in some poorer countries as a result of these rising commodities prices, and we are as well limiting amounts of crops actually grown for food, perhaps we need to reserve the grain we have left to actually feed people, and not feed cows.

Although the world is not facing anything close to food shortages at the moment, market fluctuations and commodities prices will surely raise the price of the grain needed for the grain fed marbling in a good steak, and maybe with rising beef production costs, the demand for beef will diminish naturally…but I doubt it.

Driving cars and eating burgers, and eating burgers while driving cars…quintessentially American habits that may need to change as we strive to feed our expanding population in the world after peak oil.

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The tangled web of oil and food

What do a rich oil baron and a famine sufferer have in common…they are both very affected by the price of oil.

Food commodities prices have risen by 21% in the last year, and this is causing some disruption to the funding for, and therefore delivery disruption of badly needed food aid to many of the world’s poorest nations. The reason for this dramatic jump in food costs is the rising price of oil.

With the political instability of foreign oil as well as the skyrocketing pricing, nations, notably America as well as the EU, have been pushing for far greater ethanol production, and in the case of the EU, have even mandated a certain percentage of ethanol in all fuel. Since ethanol and bio diesel are produced largely from commodities staple products like palm, sugar cane and corn, this means that demand for these commodities has risen, and prices have gone up.

Experts warns that these so called greener alternatives may not look so green once demand rises to a level that has poorer South American and Asian farmers clearing large swathes of rainforest to grow massive amounts of fuel purposed commodities, and in addition to the ecological impact, these poorer nations may also see price increases in domestic food costs. These large commodities plantations, generally the domain of rich plantation owners and bio fuel corporations, do not create wealth distribution to the masses, and as a result the higher commodity prices on food will not be offset by a proportional gain in earnings from the sale of these domestically produced commodities.

Absurdly, many of the recipient nations for food aid are also the poorer nations courting bio fuel agro businesses. These bio fuel plantations change food crop production to fuel crop production and reduce the natural biodiversity, and thus the natural food sources. These bio fuel plantations drive the prices of domestic food commodities up, thus increasing their relative national need for food aid, but at the same token by participating in the bio fuel business, they also increase the prices for donor nations, and as a result will likely see less total food aid.

Bio fuel may well cause a higher demand for food aid in the countries producing the fuel crops, and because they are producing these fuel corps, they have driven the prices up, and as a result will get less aid.

The price of oil weaves a tangled web of influence, and it certainly doesn’t stop at the gas pumps.

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When evaluating our personal petrochemical footprint on the planet, few of us consider the bag of carrots sitting in the fridge, but maybe we should.

The debate on environmental harm reduction tends to focus on our personal transportation contributions to global warming causing emission, but in America, 17% of the annual national energy consumption is burned while growing and transporting the food we eat. That translates into billions of gallons of oil consumed each year to bring those carrots and hamburgers to my table!

The problem starts with fertilizer, and 1 kilogram of nitrogen equivalent fertilizer–very commonly used–requires an equal kilogram of crude oil to produce. The quantity of this fertilizer used by farmers each year is astronomical, and partially explains the huge energy debt of our modern food production methods. Oil continues to be burned during the mechanical care and harvesting, packaging, shipping, repackaging and re shipping, until we eventually find the product at the supermarket, and burn ever more oil while motoring home to prepare dinner.

So what’s a conscientious cook to do?

The answer, at least in part, is to buy locally produced products, and eat with the seasons. By supporting your local farmers, you greatly minimize the distances food must travel, and also likely minimize the processing steps along the way. Eating locally tastes better anyways, and a tomato grown a few miles from home at least ripened on the vine, and not over a 5000 mile journey across the continent.

The second thing that can be done is to eat organically. Organic farming methods minimize the use of oil intensive fertilizers and other agro chemicals, and as such reduce the overall petrochemical burden of the production. These products are also generally tastier and better for you as well.

The third thing to do is not to eat organically. That’s right, eating an organic tomato grown 5000 miles away is not preferable to eating a commercially grown and oil fertilized product grown close to home. The largest single factor in the relative oil consumption implicit in any food is the distance it needs to be transported, regardless of the method that was used in its production.

The hidden oil in the food we consume is substantial, and the agro food industry is enormously dependent on cheap oil for the production and transport of the foods we eat.

Oil isn’t that tasty anyway

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As oil prices skyrocket and the impact of green house emissions continues to exacerbate damage to the planet, the debate invariably turns to energy conservation, and how nations and their citizens can reduce their overall oil needs. For the most part these debates center around transportation, and the usage of alternative technologies in motoring and home heating or cooling are often discussed; but what rarely receives the attention it merits is the global commercial system of food production, and the massive amounts of oil that are needed to stock our pantries with the products we consume without a second thought.

A case in point is ketchup. A recent Swedish study on domestically produced tomato ketchup identified 52 separate stages in the process and shipping of the product, and all of these stages were dependent on oil. The tomatoes were grown in Italy and shipped to a separate facility for processing into tomato paste, packed and shipped into bags that were themselves shipped from out of the country, and then shipped from the Italian factory to a factory in Sweden. By the time the tomato ketchup had reached the supermarket, different products needed for the production and packaging of the ketchup and been trucked from around Europe 52 times.

Ketchup is only a single example of how dependent our food processing and distribution networks are on cheap and available oil, and just how much oil is being burned in the production of any one of the thousands and thousands of products that line our supermarket shelves.

We are reliant on, and have become accustomed to the finest of the world’s produce, available throughout the year without a thought of seasonality or the origination of production. In many parts of the world, it may not be natural to be enjoying asparagus in January, but we count ourselves lucky that it is available when we want it. We rarely consider that the asparagus that was obviously not harvested from under the snow drifts outside, was likely trucked and then flown to our doorsteps, and as a result has caused the consumption of a significant quantity of oil in the process.

As oil prices continue to rise, it will be interesting to see how high food production costs must go before consumers balk at the implied oil costs in imported foods, and when a head of iceberg lettuce in February may be an extravagance.

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