Food and Agriculture - Coursework Example

Agriculture - the domestication of both plants and animals - was invented in about 8500 BC. (Hirst, 2011); since then, agriculture has come a long way, and both the quantity and productivity of arable land around the world have increased exponentially. 

This progress is due to improvements in irrigation methods, use of pesticides and insecticides, cycling of crops, widespread use of fertilizers, and development of high-yield strains of crops (Wienhold, Power, Doran, 2000). For example, one of the first major breakthroughs in global food production came during the 1960s in India, when a high-yield variety of wheat was introduced, resolving India’s decade-long food crisis (Turk and Bensel, 2011, ch. 3).

However, agricultural and food practices have a significant impact on the environment and contribute to water, air, and land pollution (Turk and Bensel, 2011, ch. 3). Nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer runoff into rivers and lakes lead to eutrophication and suffocation of fish, and pesticide residues in water pose a human health risk if consumed. Soil erosion gives way to dust storms, and methane gas produced by livestock contributes to global warming. Overirrigation of fields leads to waterlogging and loss of arable land, as has happened in Punjab, India. Deforestation is carried out to clear land for farming, eventually resulting in increased soil runoff, decreased rainfall, and loss of soil fertility. Overfishing has led to a decline in the number of many fish species, such as the shark, to dangerously low levels.

Natural disasters, attributed to global warming, have also had a significant impact on global food production. Among recent examples, a severe drought in China in the winter of 2011 severely damaged the wheat crop (Bradsher, 2011), and a flood crisis in Australia has followed a decade of water shortage, exacerbating the hardships faced by farmers (Belford, 2011).

While a portion of previously productive land has been lost to the unsustainable farming practices described above and to climate change, the global population has continued to increase at a dramatic rate - in the past 200 years, the human population has grown from approximately one billion to almost seven billion (Turk and Bensel, 2011, ch. 3). This has led to agflation – in increase the price of food commodities - and driven billions of people around the world into poverty. It has also increased the pressure on science to develop ways to increase global food production, spearheading research to develop even higher-yielding, more nutritious strains of crops through genetic engineering (GE). The first GE crops were introduced in the mid-1990s in the United States, including soybean, cotton, and corn. These crops significantly lowered the cost of production. Today, about 70% of all processed food in the U.S. contains some GE product. However, significant concerns raised by critics regarding the safety of these crops hamper their global acceptance. For example, the concern is that the gene from GE crops could enter wild plants.

The concerns that I have regarding the safety of the food I eat include the possible harm to my health by the presence of chemical pesticides in fish and vegetable food items, the possible risks of the GE component in my food, and the pollution that is produced during the production and shipping of my food.