The Oil Drum

This is a guest post by WisdomfromPakistan. Wisdom is a computer engineer living and working in Karachi, a cultured city of some 20 million people. He has been conducting his own research into human nutritional requirements and the Earth's carrying capacity which he now wants to share with The Oil Drum readership.

As peak oil approaches, shortly followed by peak gas and eventually peak energy, we have to retreat to agriculture as the prime energy producer in society. Post-peak agriculture will be radically different to modern agriculture. Today’s agriculture is more an energy consumer than an energy producer. In developed countries it takes ten calories worth of energy from fossil fuels put into a farm in the form of fertilizers, pesticides and transportation fuel, to get one calorie back in the form of food (see also here and here).

Happy children fetching water