AS an East Yorkshire farmer with 45 years experience of growing carrots, onions, potatoes and wheat, I've known some profitable years, plenty of OK years, and an increasing number of years when we haven't done much better than break even.

Many of my neighbours have been diversifying, or even selling up altogether because they see no future in small-scale farming, and my own son stopped working on the family farm two years ago. In my area I can count on one hand the number of farmers who are under 30-years-old.

Then we have a year like this one, and suddenly farmers are more optimistic. Wheat, milk, potatoes and egg prices are all climbing. Welcome, overdue news, everyone in the food industry is thinking, and long may it continue.

But are sustained price increases really what we want? Could there be an ominous reason as to why it's happening?

As I'm sure you know, most foods are derived directly from grain or animals that eat grain, and shockingly, the world's grain reserves will have all but disappeared by the 2008 harvest. These grain reserves are intended to protect us from a poor harvest and it was normally considered safe if these reserves amounted to 120 days supply.

Over the last few years, reserves have been slowly used up. By harvest 2007 they were down to a dangerous 47 days supply. By next year we will be scraping the bottom of the barrel and need a big harvest to get us out of trouble.

If it's a bad world harvest, there will not be enough food to go round. With almost no reserves to help out, panic buying, speculation and hoarding will prevail, emptying the supermarket shelves.

This year has seen unrest and protests in Mexico, Russia and even Italy over food prices. Some countries are restricting grain exports to protect their own people, making things worse for importing nations.

Several factors have come together simultaneously to cause food supplies to fall short of demand. Rising demand from Asia – where populations are increasing rapidly on the back of greater prosperity – means that millions are switching from a grain-based diet to a more western diet of grain-fed meat and this requires much more land to sustain the livestock.

Millions of acres are now being sown with crops that make renewable fuels such as ethanol and bio-diesel. Governments encourage this on the grounds that it cuts carbon dioxide emissions and provided greater energy security. But in doing so it also reduces food supplies.

Extreme weather over the last few years has severely hit food production in various parts of the world. So far, bad harvests in one region have been partly offset by good harvests elsewhere. But as climate change intensifies, it can only be a matter of time before several major grain producing regions are hit in the same year.

All this is bad enough. But add to it the fact that the world population is expected to rise from the present 6.6 billion to eight billion by 2025 – just as agricultural land is being lost at the rate of 25m acres a year through desertification, erosion, road building and urban sprawl.

The carrying capacity of the earth has been temporarily increased by fossil-powered machines and vehicles. Millions of horses and oxen have gone from farming and transport, releasing the 30 per cent of cropland that was needed to grow their feed. Nitrogen fertilisers – made from natural gas – have added about 40 per cent to grain yields, while oil-based weed killers, insecticides and fungicides have pushed yields to levels that are unsustainable without them.

The fossil fuels that have allowed the tripling of world population in the last 60 years are finite and are becoming expensive. We in the West are becoming more and more dependent on unfriendly and unreliable suppliers. Terrorist action, war or the collapse of western-friendly regimes could quickly shut off our oil from the Middle East.

By 2030, Europe will be importing 93 per cent of its oil and 84 per cent of its gas. We could carry on for a while longer by changing coal to liquid fuel and by exploiting unconventional fuels such as the tar sands of Alberta.

Unfortunately, doing this is so energy-intensive that CO2 emissions would soar, causing even more rapid climate change.

Future generations will be incredulous that we built our entire food supply and distribution system on the burning of resources which disrupted our weather patterns and which we
knew could not be plentiful for ever.

There is a solution to all this. But it requires some sacrifice. We need to conserve energy by using technology in a way that meets our needs more efficiently. And we need to make more use of today's sunshine – instead of the sunshine that was collected by plants millions of years ago and stored as fossil fuels.

There is sufficient solar energy reaching us each day to meet all our needs many times over. But the availability and cheapness of fossil fuels have reduced the incentive to develop efficient way of collecting solar energy.

We can do much more through photo voltaic cells, solar panels, wind and water turbines and wave power.

But the most important solar panel remains the plant leaf – collecting solar energy through photosynthesis in the form of both food and fuel. And Yorkshire farmers have been at the forefront of renewable energy production with many thousands of acres of willow and miscanthus being grown to generate electricity, as well as some rapeseed going to make bio diesel.

Unfortunately, it is using land that will be needed for food production. We must think of ways to produce both food and fuel so that our valuable soils are not damaged.

One way is to make better use of crop residues. One example is oilseed rape. This has more energy in the straw than in the seed – but the straw is presently wasted and the CO2 that was taken-in during the growing season is released back to the atmosphere during natural decay without benefit. So let's use the straw for fuel.

We are entering a time when a huge population will expect more of everything when there will be less of everything. Yes, in the long term food prices will soar, but so will our costs of production. We must produce our own fuel, because without diesel, farming in Yorkshire in 10 or even five years time will be very different than it is now.

The worry that there may soon be famine – even in the West – has led me to set up a website, www.peakfood. co.uk to raise awareness. I have also written a book, Famine in the West, describing how farming became dependent on oil and gas. It sets out in more detail the many threats to food security, and lists the actions I feel need to be taken immediately.

This year we have been trying to point out the dangers, and have lobbied people such as our local MPs, Hilary Benn, Al Gore, Peter Ainsworth and even Richard Branson, but with very little success. Politicians know that until ordinary people come to appreciate the seriousness of the situation, preventative measures would be unpopular.

We advocate change now and outline six ways this can be achieved. So please visit http://peakfood.co.uk/tax-carbon-campaign/ and tell your friends about it.

Please leave your name (just first name if you wish to preserve your privacy) on our comments section so we can build up a petition of supporters.

You could also buy one our "tax carbon" T-shirts and bumper stickers etc – we make no profit on them.



Famine in the West is available as an E book (£2.99) or in printed form (£6.49 + £1.49 UK
P+ P) from www.peakfood.co.uk or by phoning 01430 410521.

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