Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Since the 1970s, food consumption habits, especially in the developing countries,
have been moving toward heavily meat-based diets (Pinstrup-Andersen et al.
1999
).
This is projected to continue due to and is particularly exasperated through the
many relaxed trade barriers of many countries, concerning imported meat and
poultry (Delgado
2003
; Speedy
2003
). The underlying assumption that the world
should adopt Western meat-based food consumption patterns (Drewnowski and
Popkin
1997
; Gerbens-Leenes and Nonhebel
2002
; Imhoff et al.
2004
; Delgado
2005
; McAlpine et al.
2009
) calls for dramatic cereal crop yield increases relying
on the use of intensified agricultural practices. However, meat-based diets (Tilman
et al.
2002
), in contrast to grain-based diets (Carlsson-Kanyama and González
2009
; Godfray et al.
2010
), do not meet basic nutrition recommendations (Mancino
2005
; Wang et al.
2008
; United States Department of Agriculture
2009
). Instead,
they require the adaptation of current food consumption patterns (Smil
2002
;
Dietz et al.
2007
; Godfray et al.
2010
, p. 816; Aiking
2011
). In addition, the
health risks (Duchin
2005
) of meat-based diets offer sound reasons for revising
agricultural and food policy that focuses on the promotion of such a diet (Willett
et al.
1995
; Martínez-González et al.
2002
). Related meat production leads to
increased consumption of the limited natural resource of phosphorus (Cordell et al.
2009
). Intensive livestock production predominantly produced for a wealthy North,
provokes food insecurity through desertification, sea-level rise, increased extreme
weather occurrences, land shortage, etc. As a result it will dramatize societal and
political conflicts accompanied by a lack of food access (McMichael et al.
2007
).
Issues concerning food supply revolve not only around questions of production
and controlling post-harvest losses. On a global scale, a growing number of reports
express concerns about the ways in which the global “biotech agrofood system”
contributes to the creation of dependency of local food systems on seed material and
world market prices and the destruction of local economies (Hendrickson and James
2005
). Together with the climate change induced production crisis and the increase
of food prices (Trostle
2008
), ventures at the stock market (Wahl
2009
), food access
and food sovereignty particularly in the South, becomes insecure (Rosset
2003
;
McMichael
2009
).
In addition to high-input farming, special agricultural programs often promoted
by international and national agencies promise “new” approaches to feeding the
world (Setboonsarng
2006
).
1
The AGree program (AGree
2012
) for example,
promises to transform current food and farming by promoting a broad mix of
practices that are derived largely from the high-input practices. This approach,
commonly called integrated agriculture or ecofriendly intensification, is widely
practiced in Europe and “bridges” conventional and organic farming. The program
acknowledges the growth in organic and the popularity of local and regional food
systems activities (AGree
2012
), but the “path ahead” that it charts neglects the
potential contribution of organic farming to transforming current policies and
1
See former and latest reports for example:
http://www.saa-safe.org/
;
or,
www.feedthefuture.gov/
.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search