Farming and Famine

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Food, Famine and Farming

21st May 2008

        Not only has this unit taught me that all farming techniques have a good side and a bad side, but it has also taught me that same principle in general living. For example; fertiliser and pesticides may be the answer to increase yield and keep away pests, but at the same time it can seep through the soil, destroying all in its path and eventually, pollute local streams. What we strive for in the farming industry is to find a way to increase yield, eradicate food shortage and promote farmers in a way that is not harmful to other walks of life e.g. the local streams discussed above. This brings me onto GM crops; the closest we have gotten to this dream goal.

        GM crops – adapting the biological process of crop growth by introducing the characteristics of one living organism to another. At the beginning of this topic, I thought to myself that this could well be the answer to the farming commerce’s prayers. Surely by being able to improve crops to make them immune to their environment and by increasing their size would make a major contribution to eradicating famine all over the world? With people around the globe dying of starvation, don’t GM crops offer better accessibility, less labour to farmers and more volumes of food for the poor, how can anyone think twice about there assurance of the benefits of GM crops. In the next lesson, I thought twice. I though, what if the world became so dependent on GM crops that if a self-inflicted super weed wiped the crops out, it would take the farming trade down with them? What if a certain crop was poisonous to certain animals, will that not hurt the food chain devastatingly? Do we really know the long-term health issues about these artificial crops we are producing by their masses? The last question really worries me and all of man-kind could sway on the answer, imagine, a GM crop designed to end poverty killing off thousands because of our lack of scientific knowledge. For me, that is enough to completely forget the prospect of GM crops until we have more knowledge or have another alternative to the farmer’s ‘dream’. Again, we continue to endeavour to find a method of farming without a disastrous disadvantage. What really worries me is the lack of patience, and more so the power of the companies behind GM crops, that could easily see the crops on the market with their money and supremacy over the rest of the industry. To invent a method of farming that disregards location and the environmental characteristics would set the world free of famine, but I hope that we are as patient as we need to be to find this unknown method.

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        With ‘big-wig’ supermarkets buying out farmer’s land and time, it’s either the labour or the distribution industry that will soon plummet to an all-time low. With supermarkets in competition with one another, and farmer’s trying to survive the industry, we search for a compromise between both poles of the trade to try and make both ends happy. Maybe supermarkets providing their suppliers with bigger and better machines, which will help the farmers to make more money and the supermarket to have more stock to sell on. Again, a disadvantage of that would be that farms turn into mega farms, eradicating ...

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