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Impact of agriculture to the global environment
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While the world’s farmers produce enough food to feed the planet, one-third of the food produced for human consumption is not really consumed. Globally, there exists up to 1.3 billion metric tons of uneaten food very year. And in addition to that, growing and transporting that food is estimated to create 3.3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year, which makes wasted food one of the world’s largest emission contributor.
Around the globe, 1.6 billion people have no access to refrigeration at all. In developing countries, food fails to make the journey from producers to consumers simply due to issues such as lack of refrigeration.
In the United States, wasted food is a 165 billion dollar problem. America wasted 33.79 million tons of food in 2010, an average Americans wastes 209 to 254 lbs of edible food each year. But fortunately, with the advance technology and resources we have today, there are a multiple solutions that can help decrease the amount of wasted food in the world.
Solution 1 - FreshPaper
One low-tech aid called FreshPaper have the ability exten...
Humans are damaging the planet to live comfortably, we must change the way food is distributed worldwide, support local farmers and switch to a healthier diet in order to stop global warming. The current global has been getting better for us humans over the years, from eating bread and eggs 3 times a day in the XV century, now we can eat better than the kings of those times, however the much of the food in not healthy and the global food system still fails in getting food to every individual in the planet and in addition it contributes to the destruction of our world. Ms. Anna Lappe explains how the food system contributes to around 1/3 of the global warming issue in her essay “The Climate Crisis at the End of Our Fork”, while a group of Plos one explains the issues about the export and import of food growth over the last 50 years in the
As Americans, we waste more food than many countries even consume. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, “The average American trashes 10 times as much food as a consumer in South east Asia” (Hsu). That is about equivalent to eating 10 meals to a consumer in South East Asia’s one meal. We throw away our left over food just because we are done ea...
Shifting back to a more locally sourced food economy is often touted as a fairly straightforward way to cut externalities, restore some measure of equity between producers and consumers, and put the food economy on a more sustainable footing.” (source E). The long-distance transportation of food uses a profligate amount of fuel and exploits cheap labor in the process. It can greatly assist the environment to buy from local sources by making the carbon footprint of food production lesser and saving natural resources such as oil.
Refrigeration is the process of cooling down a space or thing below normal environmental temperature. Food preservation is vital in today’s day and age. From the meats to the dairy, everything needs to be kept at room temperature, cold, or frozen. People even like to make themselves cold and frozen by using air conditioning. But, it does make you wonder “how” and “when”. How did refrigeration become such an important invention and how did people survive without it? When did our ancestors realize it takes the cold to keep their food preserved and looking fresh? We now have fridges that have an automated ice machine and touch screens.
According to Roni Neff, Marie Spiker, and Patricia Truant, up to 40% of all food produced in America is thrown away (Neff, Spiker, & Truant, 2015, p.2). This wasted food is worth hundreds of billions of dollars that is lost each year in the United States alone, and creates many threats to our country. Food waste is an important and widespread issue in the United States because most of the food thrown away is perfectly fine, it could be used to feed the hungry, and the waste hurts the environment.
Roberts believes that “food is a solution, a cause for joy and positive energy” (Roberts, page 18). Most of the time, it is more costly to waste the food than to use the food as a tool, which can bring new opportunities. As the example he provides in the book, Will Allen, a gardener from the US, uses spent grain as an opportunity to make compost for sale and to heat his own greenhouses using the heat generated from the composting process (Roberts, page 21). This way, he has also helped find an effective way to dispose of used food rather than treating it as trash which is actually not cheap to manage. Hence, Roberts concludes that there are so many hidden resources in the world, which can be used to work with food to create opportunities and to benefit the society, economy and environment while saving money (Roberts, page
People infrequently think about the amount of land it took to produce the foods they eat, however livestock and the land used to grow food for livestock accounts for approximately one-third of the Earth’s ice-free land (Cowspiracy). Animal agriculture, mainly cattle ranching, is also responsible for 90% of Amazon rainforest destruction (Hyner). According to Cornell University, “Each year an estimated 41 million tons of plant protein is fed to U.S. livestock to produce an estimated 7 million tons of animal protein for human consumption.” Therefore it takes about 5 times the amount of crops to produce animal products compared to the equivalent amount of plants. Eating more plant-based foods uses much less land than animal-based foods, thus causing less destruction to
As public attention focuses on the impact of policy changes on the climate, we may overlook an important contributor to the climate crisis: our food systems and the daily food choices we make. It may sound hyperbolic that our roast beef sandwich is contributing to environmental degradation of the planet. But mounting evidence of the impact requires our attention and action as global citizens. And each of us can do something about it, today, by taking what we eat as seriously
As the world population grows and consumption per person increases, the demand for food is rising. To an extent, fossil fuels have made an increase in food production achievable, but the finite supply is rapidly depleting. Over the last 50 years, global food production has tripled (Mosier et al. 2004). Despite this, an estimated 870 million people were undernourished in 2010-2012 (FAO 2013) while in 2008, 5...
In order for us to maintain our lives, we need to consume food to supply nutrient-needs for our bodies. As the global population increased, the demand for food also increased. Increased population led to mass production of foods. However, even with this mass production, in under-developed countries, people are still undernourished. On other hand, in developed and developing countries, people are overfed and suffering from obesity. In addition, the current methods of industrial farming destroy the environment. These problems raised a question to our global food system. Will it be able to sustain our increasing global population and the earth? With this question in my mind, I decided to investigate the sustainability of our current global food system.
consumption and even further.” Our current global food system is not sustainable. It does not
I have chosen the topic of food waste and the impact on the environment. I will discuss the ridiculous amount of food that is wasted each year and the staggering amount of waste that could be avoided just by planning ahead, and purchasing from farmer’s markets and avoiding the main stream supermarkets who set such high standards on the aesthetic of produce that tonnes are wasted for no reason other then shape.
Food waste is defined by food that is lost, wasted, or discarded and is caused through a few different processes. Food is wasted through many different ways at farms, grocery stores, and in homes. Over 40% of the food in the United States, specifically, goes to waste and 97% percent of this waste goes straight to landfills. The main issue with food waste is that the majority of food is being wasted unnecessarily. In stores, food is often thrown out because it does not meet specific standards that dictate what may be desirable to consumers. This issue of food picking is important as foods are not always being thrown away because they have gone bad, but because they have appearances that do not seem attractive. If we hope to lessen the environmental impact we have as a result of the mass
The ability to create an action plan that would provide enough “sustainability food for the future” gives off a very powerful message that we must change the way we perceive the world around us. To start viewing the earth as an “island” the natural resources the earth provides are slowly deteriorating right before our eyes. Population growth has exceeded the earth's capacity to sustain the growing demand for food. There have been warnings that seemed like “whispers” but now the earth, our island is speaking “loudly” and now is showing the damage our carelessness has caused. The Political of Sustainable Consumption and Production (PSC) has become more involved in the growing issues surrounding food consumption and production “because of its impact on the environment, individual and public health, social cohesion, and the economy (Reisch L., 2014).
...veryday foods require a lot of energy and release a lot of greenhouse gases to produce. This is the reason we should stop wasting the foods, consume less meat, and eat more locally grown food.