Why The Challenge For Sustainable Food Needs To Be Met And Answered
Sustainable food represents one of the greatest and most important challenges facing the human race today. Along with clean air and water, nothing is so important to our fragile life form. The human race desperately needs to solve the issues of sustainable food if it is to survive, and improve the quality of life on this planet. Of course, defining sustainability is not quite so simple. The basic definition is that a process needs to be able to continue for an indefinite amount of time, and can therefore use no resources which cannot be replaced.
The issues with food are complex, and go beyond issues of the environment. We live in a world where many go hungry, and yet this is not because of any inherent lack of resources on our planet. Corruption, waste and war all play their part in creating famine conditions in which so many innocent people live and then die. On the other hand, the developed world suffers from an epidemic of obesity, leading to high rates of premature death from degenerative diseases. We, as a species, are doing an absolutely terrible job of managing both ourselves, and our resources.
There are a great many issues which affect the sustainability of food, and many peripheral considerations which also affect the impact on the environment. One of the most important of these consideration is that the transportation and importing of food leads to a huge emission of fossil fuels. If the world's transportation system was run on electricity from renewable sources, then this consideration would be a far smaller one. As it is, it is much better for everyone if more locally grown food is eaten. Locally grown food is also more likely to be organically grown, which is the only truly sustainable way of producing food.
In determining whether or not a food production project is sustainable, it is necessary to consider the effect of the production on the soil and the environment. There are tragic examples in history of monoculture leading to a depletion of nutrients in the soil to such an extent that massive crop failure occurred, resulting in famine and wholesale loss of life. Making sure that soil nutrients, nitrogen and water are replenished is the most important element in creating a sustainable food program. Diversity is a vital concept in getting the best use out of land resources.
It is also important to consider social conditions as well as environmental and financial. Only when all three considerations come together do you get a project which is truly sustainable. If you have a fair trade project which functions to the best advantage of everyone involved, then the three aspects reinforce each other and the project becomes truly sustainable. In the case of food, the only limiting factor is the amount of land available, but that will only become a factor when the land we have is used to its optimum potential. Until then, we have much work to do in creating systems to produce sustainable food.
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