Hi Ludi,
Sorry for the eventual misunderstanding, but I didn't say anything about transportation of foods or overpopulation. I just wanted to say something about the amount of food which can be produced in comparison to the number of people which are already living or will live in the next years no matter where they live.
I didn't read Mollison till today, but as soon as i can afford it, i will buy this book.
There is an Austrian farmer, about 60 years old, who follows the same principles as Mollison, who knows Joe Polaischer from the Rainbow Valley Farm in New Zealand, and he is even today fighting against bureaucracy in the EU with respect of conventional farming. He is called the "Rebel of the Alps". His first book was "The agrarian rebel". I do have his second book "Permaculture".
Yes there will be very big problems coming for many countries when peak oil really is going to hurt the businesses. For example Japan will surely have to import food even if they stop consuming meat (you need a lot of staple food to feed a cow).
And in times of even more and faster degradation of soils respectively desertification of huge amount of lands the politics of many nations can't be understood.
China also could surely get problems with the supply of his population. Every year it has to import more food, in the moment from Australia, i think. So a lot of countries in this region will get problems.
But if for example the mass production of cars, of entertainment electronics, mass production of tins resp. cans and glass jars is reduced to the minimum and more efficient power saving techniques are introduced etc. , things will look more easily i think.
All the people who worked in the mentioned industries has to be transferred to the food "industries".
With the continously growing installation of windpower plants, of biomass utilities and more and more solar powered plants the basic energy needs all over the world should be reached.
Another big factor is the production of palm-tree oil in the tropic regions. You get a lot of oil per hectare in this areas (e.g. in Brazil where is still enough land left where ecological planted palm-trees can deliver a lot of biological energy) with this sort of tree after several years.
So this energy can be used to distribute food surplusses from "food growing countries" to the rest of the world.
Birth control is already a big and even a growing problem.
I read the book of John Seymour "The new book about farm life" (i don't know the correct title). And i read an online book in german called "The last chance - for a future without need" from Annie Francé-Harrar the women of a famous biologist (Raoul Heinrich Francé).
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/france.pierre/
Here is the link to this very good book, which is now only available through the Web-Archive, because of too much advertising on a german forum for the original link
. I don't know how long this book (without pictures) will be there, but i hope for lot of years more. There is unfortunately a problem: The text has a lot of mistakes and missing parts because i think the text was scanned automatically from an old version of this book and never revised.
With the help of Google-translation-tools you should get at least a good survey of the contents:
"Die letzte Chance" (The last chance; with table of contents)"
web.archive.org/web/20050305223610/http://www.regenwurm.de/fr001.htm
Here you can read revised parts of it:
http://wiki25.parsimony.net/cgi-bin/wik ... iki63512;1
The parts in the list are beginning with "Gedanken Zum Humus"
On one page you can see which revised documents are available (signed with *).
I learned really a lot more about european history which i never heard in school. For example that Hungary was once one of the countries which fed all the europeans with it's opulent production of wheat (now you have vast areas of steppe). No wonder it was a monarchy in the Middle Ages.
This book explained to me why the Romans had to import food into Italy and why so many ancient ports are now lying a lot of miles away from the coast. Why Spain has so much deserts (it wasn't only because of the Armada but also because of building more and more houses which many times burned down and had to be rebuild, which was not only a Spanish phenomenon. European cities were built always very tight and so fires spreaded out like hell. Reforestation or sustainability was a really unknown word in this times) and why so many europeans had to emigrate to America (really bad agricultural techniques, when nobody knew something about fertilizers and the bad results for the soil and the supply of water of cutting trees in vast areas without reforestations).
This book describes also that Japan had an era of about two hundred years ("The Tokugawa shogunate or Tokugawa bakufu (徳川幕府) (also known as the Edo bakufu) was a feudal military dictatorship of Japan established in 1603 by Tokugawa Ieyasu and ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family until 1868. This period is known as the Edo period and gets its name from the capital city of Edo, now Tokyo. ";
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_shogunate).
During this era the Shogun (Princes) led a regime with a very strict birth-control. They gave certain medicine to the people which enhanced the erotical feeling but at the same time reduced their fertility.
So the population numbers remained stable in about two hundred years and so there were also no showdowns with its neighbours or its population. The book says that because of the energy of christian missionarys the national concepts were undermined and the overwhelming military power of the Occident broke the power of the Shoguns for ever. And shortly after that, the birth-rate grew rapidly and the need for wars arose again.
A funny thing is that neither the english nor the german version of the Tokugawa-Shogunate is telling something about the most important factor of birth control as the cause of the peaceful and blowing culture in Japan.
There is only a description of a politic of isolation together with a strict and established order which could not be seriously challenged by noumerous internal confrontations between peasants and samurais.
I wonder if the situation in Irak will go on for 200 years by a strict and established order?
