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Impacts of agriculture on the environment
The impact of agriculture on biodiversity
Impacts of agriculture on the environment
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Chapter four of Who Really Feeds the World?, focuses on how Biodiversity is one of the main components of how the world gets fed. Shiva states how over the course of history over seven thousand species have fed the world. However, today on roughly thirty species make up roughly ninety percent of the calories in the typical human diet, yet only three species make up fifty percent of this ninety percent. These three species include, rice, wheat and maize which can be found in many varieties of foods consumed by the human race. The production industries in the world have strayed away from biodiversity systems due to the perception that they are negative due to low production, however, the mass production farms are destroying biodiversity and causing
Family Dinners: gone. Lunch at the new greek place: gone. Meeting up with friends for coffee: gone
David Suzuki, Zoologist and the writer of an essays “Food Connection” and “It always Costs”, from Essay Writing for Canadian Students with Readings, by Kay Stewart, Roger Davis, Chris Bullock & Marian Allen. 6thed Toronto: Pearson, 2008. 344-349, stated that food is what nourishes us, connects us with the Earth, and reminds us of the cycles of the seasons. Eating is an activity that we as humans do at least two times a day. We live in a world where the variety of food is immense, and we are responsible for what we eat. We decide what we are about to eat and how it will affect our bodies. In his essay “It always cost” he emphasized that technology nowadays constantly seems to seep its way into our daily routines. Everything we do is somehow connected with technology. We must understand that...
In the documentary, Food Inc., we get an inside look at the secrets and horrors of the food industry. The director, Robert Kenner, argues that most Americans have no idea where their food comes from or what happens to it before they put it in their bodies. To him, this is a major issue and a great danger to society as a whole. One of the conclusions of this documentary is that we should not blindly trust the food companies, and we should ultimately be more concerned with what we are eating and feeding to our children. Through his investigations, he hopes to lift the veil from the hidden world of food.
Humans are damaging the planet to live comfortably, we must change the way food is distributed worldwide, support local farmers and switch to a healthier diet in order to stop global warming. The current global has been getting better for us humans over the years, from eating bread and eggs 3 times a day in the XV century, now we can eat better than the kings of those times, however the much of the food in not healthy and the global food system still fails in getting food to every individual in the planet and in addition it contributes to the destruction of our world. Ms. Anna Lappe explains how the food system contributes to around 1/3 of the global warming issue in her essay “The Climate Crisis at the End of Our Fork”, while a group of Plos one explains the issues about the export and import of food growth over the last 50 years in the
In the Introduction, Patel outlines some of the major issues he addresses in the ten chapters of his book. The most important of them being: the abundance of food in the world vs. the starvation that is evident in countries such as India and Mexico, reduced prices on crops and how farmers compensate by working harder and producing more, and how the number of people involved in the food economy is gargantuan compared to the number of people who actually make decisions and control what happens in our global food system.
Take, for example, that livestock agriculture and the plant-based agriculture specifically used for feeding that livestock utilizes 30 percent of land on Earth. With crops in high demand to feed the many animals that are slaughtered or otherwise used by humans, it's been found that the soil has lost a great deal of its nutritional value and has eroded to the point that, in the United States, nearly 33 percent of topsoil is diminished.
In order for us to maintain our lives, we need to consume food to supply nutrient-needs for our bodies. As the global population increased, the demand for food also increased. Increased population led to mass production of foods. However, even with this mass production, in under-developed countries, people are still undernourished. On other hand, in developed and developing countries, people are overfed and suffering from obesity. In addition, the current methods of industrial farming destroy the environment. These problems raised a question to our global food system. Will it be able to sustain our increasing global population and the earth? With this question in my mind, I decided to investigate the sustainability of our current global food system.
The corporate food industry has changed the way we eat, both negatively and positively. Food production, up until the late 20th century, had depended on the relationships between the farmers and the consumers. With the revolutionary methods of fast food and the adaption of factory methods, the majority of farmers had been replaced with large multinational corporations. Subsequently, there were both environmental and political consequences. Industrial agriculture has created many issues related to habitat destruction and pollution of both water and land. Many creative solutions to farming have been created to partially solve these issues.
Every time human beings pursue new ways to feed themselves, there are some concerns in different areas. The concerns are in terms of causing food shortage for other human beings, destroying the natural environment, and most important is eating unhealthily. Eating ethically refers to the environment conservation, which makes the sustainable loop in cultivation. The industrial food chain is universal across the world, and the pollution from it is uncountable so that the environmental pollution relates everyone’s life qualities. Due to people’s expectation to eat healthy and convenient, the pollution has become such a serious problem around world. Most Americans strive to eat healthy; however, an attempt to feed such a big population causes environmental
As the turn of the twentieth century approached, the livestock industry became increasingly more powerful than ever before, and meat became much more affordable for working class families (Best). That was, until Francis Moore Lappé’s book, Diet for a Small Planet was published in 1971, and exposed the grave danger that the meat industry set upon the environment and specifically the earth’s land (Best). With a population that grows as rapidly as the human civilization does, it is imperative that changes are made to ensure habitat conservation for years to come, and it seems that a vegetarian diet is the way to help. Livestock farms and land to grow feed for those animals has taken the space of some of earth’s most wonderful resources, using up recreational land, wildlife habitat, and wilderness. The average American diet consists of 270 pounds of meat each year, and that rounds up to approximately 20 acres of land (Vidal). Livestock is said to take up 30% of dry land on earth, and 80% of the agrarian land within the United States. Becoming a vege...
Normally, whenever we see an open field, that land is probably used for raising cattle. The world now harvests more crops to feed animals than to feed humans. Talking about the usage of water to raise animals, it takes an excessive amount of water just to grow crops to feed animals, cleaning farms and also the drinking water for animals. “Animal agriculture water consumption ranges from 34-76 trillion gallons annually” (Pimentel). Huge amount of water is required just to produce 1 pound beef. Then, you can imagine how much water we can save by going vegan. Whenever we talk about global warming, climate change, we always think transportation like car, airplanes and all other forms. But in reality, “Animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the combined exhaust from all transportation” (Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations). From here, we can see that animal agriculture is much more responsible for the degradation of the environment. The level of deforestation is reaching its peak as the number of animals is proportional to its feed. “Animal agriculture is the leading cause of species extinction, ocean dead zones, water pollution, and habitat destruction” (Wilcove). The chemical fertilizers used to grow feed crops mix into the fresh air and as a result, pollution increases. Due to excessive deforestation, species are also losing their habitat. The more we demand meat, the more environment
In order to promote sustainable policy, there must be an incentive to implement change. If any part of the food chain (i.e. producers, suppliers, processors, etc.) cannot keep up with the public demand of food, the food system is unproductive. Although progressive policy might possess the correct intentions, it must be physically and economically feasible. Ironically, contemporary food systems already produce mass amounts of food, but have zero nutritional value or are quite expensive. As a result, we see a dichotomy between production and consumption; both are issues that are addressed by the food policy initiatives in the last section. However, critiques of policy change would argue that our food system is too entrenched in mass production
In 2014, nearly 400 million fewer animals were killed simply from people consuming less meat (Andrei). This spared anywhere from 800 million to over a billion acres from deforestation. With the plant-based movement becoming more and more popular, every vegan can save 1,100 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 sq ft of forested land, and 20 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent PER DAY (“The Facts”). Adopting a plant-based diet would also not only decrease pollution, but help and support the environment by allowing disrupted ecosystems to become regulated again. Oceans would become repopulated back to normal rates, and lands that were formerly used for agriculture would once again become habitats for wild
There are those that believe our planet has reached its maximum capacity to sustain humanity and we need to reduce our population to rectify it. It is also said that our planet is well capable of providing both the nutrition and caloric needs for humanity, both now and into the future as well. Regardless of where one’s opinion of the facts fall between these two arguments, global food security is not where it should be. Uneven development could be argued to be a cause of this. But it is not the only issue affecting the planet.
One of the reasons for loss in biodiversity is alteration of habitats. A habitat is the natural environment in which a species of living organism lives. If the habitat of a species is changed, it will cause the species to die or migrate to other places where it can find its natural habitat. There are many ways in which the habitat of plants and animals can be altered. One of them is land use changes. Since the beginning of human life, human beings have been changing land use for farming. Large areas of forests have been cleared by humans to increase the area of farming to satisfy their growing needs. Many biodiversity-rich landscape characteristics have been lost due to intensive farming (Young, Richards, Fischer, Halada, Kull, Kuzniar, Tartes, Uzunov & Watt, 2007). For example, traditional farming was replaced by private farms in Europe after the First World War causing an immense change in land use patterns. Another major proble...