The focus on this week's reading was food security, with a specific view on California and Mexican farmers. I wanted to focus on how else food security has been impacted, especially our more controversial industrial farming.
Food security means that all people have reliable access to enough safe and nutritious food to live healthy lives. It’s not just about producing large amounts of food but also stability, affordability, nutrition, and long-term sustainability. That first point is something that industrial farming claims to solve, therefore fixing the rest. Is that the case, though?
Industrial farming, also known as intensive agriculture, focuses on producing as much food as possible using machinery, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and large-scale monocultures (growing one crop over huge areas). In the short term, this system has significantly increased food availability. By producing high yields of crops like corn, wheat, and soybeans, industrial agriculture has helped lower food prices and supply growing populations.
However, food security isn’t only about quantity, it’s also about long-term stability. Industrial farming can weaken food security over time. Growing a single crop repeatedly reduces biodiversity and makes farms more vulnerable to pests, diseases, and climate shocks. If one disease spreads through a monoculture, entire harvests can fail. Heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides can also degrade soil and pollute water, reducing the land’s future productivity. These weakening environmental factors have also led to lower yields since the introduction of industrial farming.
Another issue is nutritional security. Industrial systems often prioritize a few staple crops, which can lead to diets high in calories but low in variety. True food security requires access to diverse and nutritious foods, not just cheap calories. Yes, we could feed our current world population with the amount of calories we produce, but are we covering the nutritional needs?
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