ENVIRON 201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Intensive Farming, Clean Water Rule, Food Security
6 Mar 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Section: our reliance on the natural world section ii: our lunch. Our food system: most complicated system we have studied, arguably most emotionally charged, because food is inherently intertwined with culture and economy. How do we feed 9 billion people in 2050: what happens as developing nations become wealthier, meat consumption increases. Food production outpaces population growth: most cases of malnutrition/hunger not result of lack of food - problems with distribution, economic, and socio-political issues. Spread to the developing world in the 1940s: high-yield wheat, rice, corn, major advancements in, synthetic fertilizers, extract nitrogen from air and convert it to solid form to use as fertilizers, chemical pesticides. Intensified agriculture saved millions from starvation: turning india into a grain exporter, rich farmers with lots of land benefited, poor farmers were driven off the land into cities. Downsides of green revolution: requires high energy input oil, seed, fertilizer (fossil fuels, not for poor/small sized farmers.
