On Securing Agriculture

Gone is the generation when agriculturists were just hunters and gatherers. Nature provided them food and shelter. Gone also is the generation when agriculturists just concentrated mainly on the procedures of producing volumes of harvests the conventional way. Now? – The generation of agriculturists producing volumes of harvests aided with non-conventional technologies vis-à-vis an immense budget because of the effects not only of climate change but also of greed.

In securing enough food amid climate change, agriculture is urged to focus on both adaptation and mitigation measures.

Agriculture is currently banking on the development of resilient crop varieties that are either drought or flood tolerant and identifying heat and disease tolerant breeds of livestock and poultry including the development of vaccines against diseases. Perking up the digestibility of feeds and fortification of nutritional ingredients to minimize enteric gas emission and waste management is also highly in progress. And not to forget the high finances on water harvesting technologies. These situations are now leading to an expensive but must-be conservation and protection of natural and indigenous animal and plant genetic resources. Adding up works of science that either “has or without a human face” like gene reworks that sometimes slip away from science protocols either to cushion negative effects of climate change and further increase the extent of food production despite hot issues or speculations on the long term consequences or just to merely satisfy selfish desires.

Agriculture now runs and manipulates nature to provide food for the human race. However, there are several reasons that regardless of a huge surplus of food production, food insecurity is still a vast problem having over a billion people around the world going hungry each day. There are the distribution of food within a country being a political issue, land deals wherein rich governments and corporations are buying up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies, an industrial development model based on large-scale, export-orientated agriculture tied to international competition, self interest and stock market which when a reorientation towards more localized, smaller scale and sustainable agriculture will allow a situation of an always available food on the plate and the undermining of commercial seed varieties of local seed systems. These are just a few of the numerous reasons agriculture is flossing up with.

Food security though is an intricate topic, standing at the crossroads of various disciplines agriculture being the central concern.