Читать книгу The Atlas of Food - Erik Millstone - Страница 20

Environmental Challenges

AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY has increased over the past 50 years, but the adverse environmental impacts of those changes have often not been included in commercial prices and so have been mostly tolerated or ignored. It is now clear that the pollution, soil degradation, and loss of habitat and biodiversity caused by current methods of food production and transport are going to make it difficult for current levels of productivity to be maintained or improved on in the future. In an attempt to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, crops are being grown for biofuels, to substitute for fossil fuels. This is proving ecologically counter- productive, however, and is diminishing the amount of food produced worldwide. Soil degradation caused by wind or water erosion, nutrient depletion, chemical pollution or salinization is a problem in all regions of the world, with an assessment in 1990 concluding that a quarter of the soil used for growing crops or grazing livestock showed signs of degradation. Ongoing research using satellite imagery to assess changes in productivity indicates that productivity declined on 12 percent of all land between 1981 and 2003. The study of soils and their degradation is increasingly being recognized as a key issue in the context of food production, and of climate change, with an evaluation of the work of the Food and Agriculture Organization concluding, in 2007, that conservation of lands and soils should be given greater priority. There is considerable scope for reducing waste, pollution and soil degradation, as well as the use of energy and water in the food chain. Social and technological changes could enable many of those problems to be addressed, with some forms of land degradation reversed, and the rate of progression of others slowed. International co-operation is essential, however, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, make food production systems more ecologically and economically sustainable, and to extend educational and economic opportunities to poor people in developing countries, to allow them

Deforestation

The increasing demand for agricultural land is contributing to the destruction of rainforests around the globe. While tropical timber is the immediate product of this deforestation, around two-thirds of the cleared land is subsequently used for pasture, and a third for arable farming, much of it managed by large companies responding to an increase in meat and dairy consumption worldwide, and a growing market in soybean and oil palm products. While attention has been turned to losses in the Amazon and Congo forests, Indonesia has lost a quarter of its forest, and the Philippines a third. Because the soils in rainforests are generally shallow and low in nutrients, they are susceptible to erosion, which quickly leaves the land unsuitable for agriculture and leads to further deforestation.

3 Unequal Distribution

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