From Nick Palmer.
ANOTHER part of Jersey’s fast-shrinking economic diversity is becoming extinct.

The news that our tomato and carnation glasshouse-based industries are falling by the wayside, and what is planned for the sites, is even worse than it may appear.

Peak oil has been very recently forecast by serious analysts to start biting within five years. The only reason the world can (just about) feed its current 6.66 billion inhabitants is because we use oil to make artificial fertiliser and pesticides, not to mention the fuel for tractor-based cultivation and long-distance transport etc.

As oil starts to get harder to find, and takes more energy to extract, the price will skyrocket. Food will soar in price and fall in availability as a consequence. There will be steadily increasing shortages.

We should be planning now for local food security for the Island by boosting our existing agricultural and horticultural sectors, not allowing them to fail. We should also encourage using organic, sustainable techniques which will rapidly become more economic than oil-based agriculture.

To allow existing glasshouses to be demolished and houses built on the sites would be the height of folly and would de-monstrate that the States literally has no clue whatsoever, despite the millions it has spent on consultants, about what the wider and relatively near future holds, and what we need to be doing to cope with it.

Most of our States appear to be living in a fool’s paradise, not realising what is happening to the world and how it will start to affect every one of us within the term of office of our re-elected and newly elected Senators. What will it take to wake them up?
Winterwood,
Rue des Hamonnets,
St Lawrence.