Impacts of off seasonal farming

Authors Avatar by georgejr (student)

George Agbakoba

The world food supply as of this year is currently trying to support just over 7 billion people. However, the number of humans is estimated at current projections for 2050 to reach up to 10.5 billion people. Although the food production has reached a vast 3 billion tons of food a year, enough to feed each and every person across the world, it is estimated that approximately 30% of this food produce is completely wasted, which equates to nearly 1.3 billion tons a year of food gone. Primarily, consumers in rich nations are the ones found to waste a combined 222 million tons a year, measuring to as much as all the food produced in sub-Saharan Africa alone. These damning facts do however bring much needed attention to a larger, unfailing habit of our modernized world, and that is the idea of excess. As seen in many developed modernized nations across the world, it is a belief that just having seasonal produce, whether potatoes to green beans, sold in its usual growth season is not satisfactory, but rather have seasonal crops and vegetables to be produced every season of the year even if the consumer demand is not high. It is vital for consumers in these developed nations to have access to any type of produce at any time of the year. Now more than ever, there is mounting pressure on the job of many developing nations to support the growing demand of seasonal food products and many have to adapt to environmental limitations to ensure that their produce meets the growing global demand of off seasonal produce.  

Many developing nations, of which act as the basis for crop production for the food superhighway, have had to find more and more sustainable farming methods over the past several years to just keep up with this global demand in farm produce.  However, increasing food production by 70% in the next 40 years may prove harder than it was to raise them by 150% in the previous 40 years. The main reason in many views stem from problems with yields. The global growth in yields has been slowing down, from about 3% a year for staple crops in the 1960s to around 1% now. However, there have been some developing nations which have resorted to the most sophisticated of methods to not only keep up with the global demand, but also remain locally and globally competitive at the same time. One example is that of Egypt, producing one of the thirstiest of crops grown in its arid deserts, and that is potatoes.

Join now!

 There has been a big aspiration for just this one vegetable, and the government of Egypt even hopes to increase potato production in the country by 60% over the next 10 years, planning to increase both consumption and export sales, which will feed the country’s hungry citizens and ravenous global economy. Even before the recent UN attention for widespread hunger in its country, the vegetable had been moving into a spot of importance in Egypt over the last 20 years and especially the last five. Today, potatoes are the country’s number one vegetable export. Egypt ranks among the top ...

This is a preview of the whole essay