Food Security & Malnutrition

• Module 4 focuses on food, soil, and pest management within environmental science.

Food Security

• Food security exists when a population has daily access to nutritious food for an active, healthy life.
• More than 1 billion people are involved in agriculture on 38% of the ice-free land.
• Despite a food surplus, one in six people globally does not get enough to eat
• Food insecurity reflects chronic hunger and poor nutrition.
• Poverty is the main cause of food insecurity, preventing people from growing or buying sufficient food.

Hunger and Malnutrition

• Chronic undernutrition stems from the inability to grow or afford enough food for basic energy needs.
• Most of the world's hungry reside in low-income, less-developed countries, relying on low-protein, high-carbohydrate diets.
• Chronic malnutrition results from insufficient protein and key nutrients, weakening individuals, increasing disease vulnerability, and impairing development.
• Vitamin A deficiency causes blindness in 250,000 children under 6 each year.
• Iron deficiency leads to anemia, causing fatigue and increasing the risk of death from hemorrhage in childbirth; affects 1 in 5 people who are typically women and children especially in less developed countries.
• The chemical element iodine is essential for proper thyroid function, which produces hormones that control body metabolism.
• Iodine deficiency can cause stunted growth, mental retardation, and goiter.
• Overnutrition happens when energy intake is higher than energy use, leading to excess body fat.
• Excessive calorie consumption and insufficient exercise contribute to overnutrition
• Both undernutrition and overnutrition share health issues like reduced life expectancy, higher disease susceptibility, and decreased life quality.
• Obesity plays a role in 1 in 5 deaths in the US because of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and forms of cancer, according to a 2013 study by Columbia University and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Food Production

• Three systems supply most of the world's food which includes: croplands, rangelands, pastures/feedlots, and fisheries/aquaculture
• Croplands produce rice, wheat, and corn, providing 77% of the world's food.
• Rangelands, pastures, and feedlots produce meat and meat products, while fisheries and aquaculture supply fish and shellfish
• Two-thirds of the world's population primarily eat rice, wheat, and corn due to affordability issues.
• Food specialization makes food systems more vulnerable to diseases and climate change
• Biodiversity helps to protect and replenish the soil and reduces the chance of losing most or all of the year's food supply to pests, bad weather, and other misfortunes.

Industrialized vs Traditional Agriculture

• Industrialized agriculture uses heavy equipment, capital, fossil fuels, inorganic fertilizers, and pesticides to produce single crops; practiced on 25% of cropland, producing 80% of the world's food
• Plantation agriculture grows cash crops in tropical less-developed countries like bananas, coffee, and sugarcane.
• Traditional agriculture uses human labor and draft animals to produce crops for the farm family's survival.
• Intensive traditional agriculture increases crop yields by increasing human/animal labor and using animal manure and water.
• Polyculture involves growing multiple crops on the same plot simultaneously, relying on solar energy and natural fertilizers.
• Polyculture reduces erosion, fertilizer, and water needs.
• Polyculture helps protect and replenish the soil and reduces the chance of losing most or all of the year's food supply to pests, bad weather, and other misfortunes.

Organic Agriculture

• Organic agriculture grows crops without using synthetic pesticides, inorganic fertilizers, or genetically engineered varieties
• Animals must be raised on 100% organic feed without antibiotics or growth hormones.
• Organic products must contain at least 95% organic ingredients
• Products labeled as "made with organic ingredients" must have at least 70% organic content.
• The term "natural" is often used as an advertising tactic.

Crop and Livestock Improvements

• Crossbreeding uses artificial selection to develop improved crop and livestock varieties.
• Traditional crossbreeding is slow, taking 15+ years, and can only combine traits from genetically similar species; varieties remain useful for 5-10 years typically
• Bioengineers use gene splicing to modify DNA, adding or deleting segments, to transfer genes between species.
• Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) can resist heat, cold, drought, pests, diseases, herbicides, and salty/acidic soil.

Meat Production

• Meat and animal products provide high-quality protein and are a major food source.
• Global meat consumption will likely double by 2050 as incomes rise.
• Half of the world's meat comes from livestock grazing on grass in rangelands and pastures
• Half of the world's meat production concentrates animals in feedlots and cages in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOS)
• CAFO animals are fed grain, soybeans, fishmeal, and growth hormones to increase size quickly.

Fish and Shell Fish

• The world's third food-producing system consists of fisheries and aquaculture
• Fisheries involves the concentration of aquatic species that is suitable for commercial harvesting in a given area.
• Most marine catches are a result of Industrial fishing practices
• Aquaculture raises fish in freshwater ponds, lakes, reservoirs, rice paddies, and underwater cages
• Most aquaculture involves raising plant-eating species; farming meat-eating species is growing in developed countries.

Energy and Food

• Industrialized food production relies on fossil fuels for machinery, irrigation, fertilizers, and pesticides
• Fossil fuels are also used to process and transport food
• According to Peter Tyedmers, the world's fishing fleets use about 12.5 units of energy to put 1 unit of food energy from seafood on the table.
• Systems for producing, processing, transporting, and preparing food are highly dependent on fossil fuels, and together, they result in a large net energy loss.

Environmental Problems

• Industrialized agriculture protects biodiversity by using less land, but it also does have major environmental effects.
• Agriculture utilizes 70% of global freshwater, 38% of the world's ice-free land, emits 25% of greenhouse gases, and produces 60% of water pollution
• Experts are split on whether agriculture is sustainable due to all its harmful effects, however proponents say the benefits outweigh the harmful effects.

Improving Food Security

• Governments keep food prices low or subsidize farmers to stabilize production.
• The United Nations Children’s Fund's (UNICEF) indicate that nutrition-related childhood deaths could be prevented for $5-$10 per person thanks to simple measures.
• Nonprofit organizations work to improve food security and sustainable production
• Local food production and reduced food waste can increase food security.

Sustainable Food Production

• Reducing topsoil erosion through soil conservation is important for sustainable agriculture; land must have fertile topsoil.
• Methods to reduce topsoil erosion and restore soil fertility include: terracing, contour planting, strip cropping, and alley cropping.
• Terracing converts steeply sloped land into a series of broad leveled terraces that run across the land's contours.
• Contour planting plows and plants across a slope.
• Strip cropping alternates rows of a row crop with a cover crop.
• Alley cropping is the planting of crops in alleys between trees and shrubs.

Soil Management

• The fertile topsoil stores water and nutrients needed by plants making it a component of natural capital
• Topsoil renewal provides many ecosystem services
• Human activities that cause soil erosion can lead to loss of fertility, water pollution, and release of stored carbon.
• Soil pollution can occur when chemicals and pesticides emitted from Industrial and power plants, vehicles, etc.
• Desertification in drylands decreases topsoil potential due to drought/human activities.
• Irrigation increases farm productivity but can lead to soil salinization if mineral salts accumulate.
• The soil degradation process of soil salinization occurs when salts accumulate in the layers of soil with repeated irrigation.
• Overirrigation is a problem, and it can lead to waterlogging, which lowers the productivity of crop plants and kills them after prolonged exposure.
• Air pollution including clearing and burning forests to raise crops/livestock is a result of agricultural activities
• Over a quarter of human-generated emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), is a result of agricultural activities which ultimately affect the growing of crops in that area in the future
• Clearing of forest and grassland threaten biodiversity and the world's genetic library
• The biodiversity principle of sustainability could reduce the unsustainability of food production if agrobiodiversity is maintained

GMOs controversies

• It is argued that genetic engineering could help improve food security, which has caused controversy
• Potential GMO benefits are that they may need less fertilizer and are resistance to external factors
• Potential GMO drawbacks have unpredictable genetic/ecological effects and may disrupt the seed market and reduce biodiversity

Aquaculture Controversies

• Harmful environmental effects from aquaculture can limit the practice's potential
• 1/3 of all wild fish caught from the oceans is used to make the fishmeal and fish oil to feed farmed fish.
• Feeding fish in such a way may result in the depletion of populations of wild fish, thereby disturbing the marine food webs system
• If fishmeal and fish oil are used on farm-raised fish, this also results in the introduction of long-lived toxins that are picked up from the ocean floor like PCBs and dioxins from fish
• There is an ongoing debate whether these toxins are at high enough concentration to threaten those that eat the fish.
• Fish farms, especially those that raise carnivorous fish, also can produce large amounts of waste and can potentially disrupt gene pools of fish in close proximity in tanks.

Restoring soil fertility

• Soil fertility best practices include covering the soil with vegetation, topsoil conservation and adding organic or inorganic fertilizers
• Organic fertilizer consists of animal manure, green manure: vegetation plowed into topsoil, and compost: broken down matter.

Soil salinization reductions and desertification

• Solutions include reducing irrigation, more effective irrigation methods, switching to salt-tolerant crops, flushing soil, reduce the amount of crops for a short period (stop growing crops for 2-5 years and install improved drainage systems.
• Desertification can be mitigated by reducing population growth, overgrazing, deforestation, and destructive forms of planting and irrigation processes
• Deserficiation can be restored with increased tree planning and planting of other plants to help anchor topsoil

Agriculture Solutions

• Sustainable aquaculture will protect mangrove forests and better manage waste- especially polyaquaculture where aquatic plants can maintain themselves and the reduction of aquaculture species into the wild.
• Shifting away from grain based animal proteins such as beef/pork and towards poultry and plant-eating farmed fish can shift operations to CAFOs that use chicken manure to fertilize the soil.
• Agriculture can focus more on high yield polyculture practices, using organic fertilizers, crop rotation and water efficient crops.
• Shifting to these practices can also lower previous harms such as soil erosion, water and pollutions, and gas emissions.

Pest Management

• Pests interfere with human welfare by competing for food, invading homes, destroying materials, and spreading disease
• Common species of plants (weeds), animals (mostly insects), fungi, and microbes cause the greatest damage to crops we grow
• Monoculture cropping and chemical use disrupts natural pest population balances, requiring other protection methods

Synthetic Pesticides

• Synthetic pesticides control undesirable organism populations.
• Pesticide types include insecticides (insects), herbicides (weeds), fungicides (fungi), and rodenticides (rodents).
• Pesticide persistence reflects how long they stay deadly.
• Proponents cite saving human lives, increasing food supply, raising profits, fast action, and low health risks (when used properly) as benefits.
• Biopesticides are safer chemicals derived from plants which is an advantage
• The usage of Genetic engineering is also being used to develop pest-resistant crop strains and crops that produce biopesticides.

Pesticide Drawbacks

• Genetic resistance and financial burdens for farmers are results of pesticide usages.
• Pesticide usages kills off natural pest control.
• Pollution, harm to wildlife, and threats to human health are additional risks of pesticide usages.

Alternatives to Synthetic Pesticides

• Using cultivation practices or rotating crops will trick and starve pests
• Providing homes for pest enemies and the usage of plant diversity can reduce losses for pests.
• Genetic engineering speeds up pest- and disease-resistant crop strain development
• Biological control involves importing natural predators, parasites, and disease-causing bacteria and viruses for pest regulation
• Using sex attractants to lure animals into traps.
• The use of Insect hormones disrupts an insect's normal life cycle so it does not reach maturity.
• Crop rotation, mechanical cultivation, hand weeding, and cover crops and mulches are all types of synthetic herbicide usages.

Integrated Pest Management (IPM)

• Integrated pest management (IPM) uses coordinated techniques.
• IPM’s goal reduces economic damage in crops
• Crop rotation to disrupt infestations, biological/cultivation controls, and small amounts of synthetic insecticide applications only after the detection of economically damaging are implemented.
• IPM can reduce fertilizer and irrigation water inputs and pests will be attacked less often and with lower doses of pesticides; helps promote pollution prevention

IPM Drawbacks

• IPM requires expert knowledge.
• Methods developed for a crop in one area may not apply in another.
• Initial costs may be higher; widespread usage has been hindered because of of lower costs with government subsidies.