The following is my take on a selection from Environmental Studies, by Thomas Easton. This is it in a nutshell, tried to get the just of what the author was saying. Please leave a comment of your take on these issues.
Selection 28.
Food Scarcity: An Environmental Wakeup Call
Humans are having a severe impact on mother Earth, be it over fishing, deforestation, soil mismanagement, we are continuing to deplete resources that are vital to earths ecosystem. It is now that we are seeing the impacts of a few “misbehaviours” here or there, on a larger scale, adding up all of these acts, we are starting to see the thousand small impacts we are committing on the landscape.
Agriculture: The missing Link
The food system has been a main player in causing the collapse of civilizations, and should not be over looked today. The fact is that if an economy or civilization cannot meet its own food needs, it will not be at it healthiest. So when the food sector starts to go, if it already hasn’t started to, we will start to see our economic decline1.
We will start to see a rise in food stocks as land is deteriorated to the point that it can’t produce the numbers it once did, causing a smaller supply of food, with a smaller supply, we will see the price to go up. Since people can only pay so much for a loaf of bread, it won’t be long after that that we will see a greater amount of people questioning why the prices are so high, why there is such a limited amount, and what practices we are using that is causing such an event. With the people involved we will start to see politicians trying to answer these questions, or at least start to point fingers.
People who live in third world countries, or live dollar by dollar, will be the first to notice these small increases in food cost, as it will mean whether or not they will eat or not. Furthermore we might see unhappy citizens start to find other ways to get food, such as rioting, steeling, even killing, as prices increase dramatically as world food stocks diminish. These people would turn to the government to try and lower the inflation.
As our population continues to grow by millions more per year, it is becoming harder and harder to feed the world. We are seeing more people dying of hunger as they lack the resources to gain this food, and if the price continues to grow, we will see these “disease” grow in numbers as more people die of starvation.
In Search Of Land
We face a dwindling amount of fertile land as well as a lower amount of water per person. Even with advances in agriculture, that have created new ways of farming, such as terracing mountains to farm steep slopes, or turning the low wetland areas into productive fields, we are still facing a declining per person area of agricultural land. So basically as our population grows, the amount of room to grow food for each new person shrinks. We are now at a record low 0.12 hectares per person1.
In Search Of Water
Lack of land is not the only factor farmers are facing, water is another hard commodity to come by these days. As new technologies have led farmers to farm arid lands by use of irrigation, it has meant lowering river levels to the point where they no longer reach the seas, and left some urban cities choosing supplying the city with water and cutting off rural irrigation. Since water is usually given to the city, grains are now left to be imported from elsewhere as there is no water left to irrigate. Importing grains in essence is like importing water, because they no longer have grow their own, and no longer need the water for the growing. Aquifer depletion is now growing in areas such as the US and China1, where they grow about half the worlds grain.
The Onset Of Food Scarcity
We now face the lowest levels in a long time of foods like fish and grain, as resources diminish and population increases. This has all lead to a lower amount of reserved food, falling from a safe 70 days of food to a mere 59 days[1]. The lack of foods and growing problems we face both in sickness and in rioting will finally bring to the attention of the people and the governments that environmental degradation is not something to let go unnoticed.
An Unprecedented Challenge
Supplying food for future generations is now a problem farmers must help partake in. Making sure there is enough food and the right amount of people is key to the survival of future generations. We must change our impacts on the land, as well as our own reproductive guidelines. We are starting to see some countries limit the number of children born, lower than the replacement rate. Others are starting to deal with carbon emissions. We are starting to see an effort to save crucial farm land from turning into urban areas, and even further more protecting it from erosion. Water use is starting to be used more efficient, and not just for crop land. All of these acts have helped, but not solved our problem. We will need to continue and adapt more of these practices if we are to meet the needs of future generations.
Feeding the Future
The world used to have three backup supplies of food in the case of global emergencies. Cropland idled under farmlands, grains in storage, and the grains used to feed livestock. In the late 1990s, the first two were used up, leaving only one backup supply at hand in the face of emergency. If we do have another emergency, we will start to see the switch from animals like cows that eat a lot of grain to smaller grain dependant animals. A tax, that would be put on these animals, like cows, would increase their cost, offsetting the cost of grain, by lowering the amount used on these animals. Being environmentally sustainable is key to the future of food for future generations.
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