In recent times there has been an increase in awareness of the downsides associated with industrial agriculture. The loss of soil, inefficient water and resource usage, toxic chemicals, poorly regulated GMO’s, and the inhumane environments for animals. With such a long list of skeletons, it’s no wonder that a range of movements to shift away from this system have… Read more »
Awareness key to understanding and grappling with a lot of the dense and complex issues surrounding the world food system. Many people make an effort to eat locally-produced sustainable meats and organic vegetables, generally avoiding beef that has racked up many “food miles” and genetically modified produce, because the alternatives are automatically “bad” or “unsustainable.” These kinds of hard line… Read more »
Politics and land are an inseparable combination. Humans, from the dawn of agriculture to modern day, have viewed land as property to be acquired and controlled. In the pre-Civil War US, a political party called the Free-Soil Party (1848-54) ran on a platform opposing expansion of slavery and also called for free land to be given to those who would settle… Read more »
In sharing the ancient practices used to harvest rain in India’s Golden Desert, and the ‘unwritten bylaws’ that have protected this supply for centuries, Anupam Mishram reminds us that violent conflict is not inevitable in the face of resource scarcity—humans can and have responded with collaborative ingenuity. Similarly, Gidon Bromberg of Eco Peace Middle East suggests that protecting the planet… Read more »
In his Ted Talk, Tristam Stuart uses biscuits to illustrate the devastating reality of food waste from farm to table. Each biscuit represents a portion of the food at harvest. Stuart starts with ten biscuits and ends with four. The other six are tossed for cosmetic reasons, used for animal feed and trashed in supermarket dumpsters. He chastises the system… Read more »
Effective irrigation is very important to efficient farming. Using too much water can carry off soil nutrients and fertilizer in water runoff. By using only enough water for the crop to grow, less fertilizer can be applied. There are some interesting alternatives to nitrogen based fertilizer being studied now. One of the ones I found most interesting was an experiment… Read more »
With an ever expanding world population and the impending threat of another world energy crisis, food production is in a precarious situation. Food production has been able to keep up with the population due to nitrogen based fertilizers and other technological innovations upping the yield of staple crops. Unfortunately, these innovations are incredibly dependent on fossil fuels and can cause… Read more »
The world food system is complex, intricate, and interacts with many factors (i.e. political, environmental, climate, etc.). It isn’t a simple solution to provide equitable food for all. One underlying theme throughout the past lessons is desire for power. Affluent countries hold a lot of power because of their access to advanced technology, ability to produce agriculture, and access to… Read more »
Hunger is in effect a systemic issue. Our media over simplifies it to a lack of food or resources when we must in-fact look at a broader system that changes how and why there is hunger in a world where we have enough food to feed everyone. There are an assortment of complex variables at play. First we see… Read more »
On February 6th, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched and landed the Falcon Heavy rocket. One of the purported goals of SpaceX is to “make life multiplanetary,” locating and extracting resources in space. What happens when we apply the lessons of the biofuel boom and the 2008 world food crisis to SpaceX? This massive investment of earthly resources may not yield… Read more »