Oil for Food, terrible idea?

Factual Questions
1

Maybe I’m a bit thick, but let’s see if you can follow my logic here:

There are several countries that depend on selling oil in order to buy enough food to feed their populations.

Now oil is a non-renewable resource. Sure, if it gets harder to find, then the supply will tend to go down, raising prices, giving the drillers more $$$ to drill in more places.

But EVENTUALLY, maybe 30, 50, or 100 years from now, the supply will get sooo small, and the price sooo high, that some substitutes will be found for using oil to power cars and industry. Then the price will tend to level off and eventually fall.

Now this may take MANY many years, but eventually countries like Iraq are going to have much less money to buy food.

So is there going to be hunger and starvation in those countries? Or will the decline in revenue be slow enough, many many decades, that the population will trim itself?

Any ideas?

2

Well, there are two other options these countries have besides trimming populations to meet food needs. The first is to develop other industries in the coming decades so that when the oil does run out, they still have enough money to buy food from other places. The United Arab Emirates is doing pretty good at meeting this goal - even without their oil revenue, their per-capita income would still be roughly as high as Greece, IIRC, and they have been pretty good at investing the oil money into useful infrastructure.

The other would be use invest their current oil money into improved agricultural infrastructure, to increase their food production. I imagine with modern agricultural techniques used in the fertile ceresent, Iraq could greatly increase its food production.