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Food: Learn More

Ever since the nineteenth century economist, Thomas Malthus, argued that growth in human population numbers would inevitably outstrip growth in food production, people have been worried about food scarcity. Much focus has gone into increasing yields by developing new varieties of food crops and more intensive forms of farming using chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Nowadays genetic engineers claim that this new technology will increase yields even farther and so help agriculture keep up with the burgeoning human population.

Unfortunately things are a little more complicated than this picture suggests. Filling our environment with chemicals has not only been killing ‘pests’ and ‘weeds’ but lots of other wildlife too – including those useful to agriculture. Added to loss of biodiversity on our farmland is water pollution and a degrading of the soil. Chemicals and fertilizers leach into our water systems (see water) and gradually soil is simply disappearing through over intensive use.

It is not as simple either as matching global food production to global population. People go hungry when they cannot get access to food. therefore making it into an issue of poverty and social justice as much as productivity. In fact, because intensifying agriculture requires the farmer to buy expensive chemicals and fertilizers, he must then earn enough cash from his produce to pay for them. The result can be an increase in hunger as small farmers are pushed off the land and into city slums to make way for intensively farmed cash crops for export.

Intensive meat production is a very inefficient way of using land. It takes much more space than would be needed to produce the same amount of vegetable or cereal food. As global demand for meat is increasing , this is set to become a real global problem, tying up much needed land to produce for those affluent enough to afford meat.

The most positive developments in food production is where research and development has worked in partnership, and in the interests of, the small farmer using low artificial inputs and where the concern has been food security rather than simply productivity.