To Conclude...

I hope you have all enjoyed my blog and that it has given you some food for thought! Throughout this blog we have seen the impact that the production of our food is having on our environment and how unsustainable our current practices are. Agriculture was one of the first human impacts on the earth, and throughout the anthropocene mankind has realized how we can use nature as a resource. The impacts of this have increased through the intensification of agriculture to feed our growing population. The human population has exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity, and as a result the earths natural resources are being over exploited.

Technical innovation may be able to solve the problem of our diminishing natural resources through harvesting phosphorous from urine etc. But the problem is much bigger than that, I personally don’t think that technology can solve the whole problem. We need to go back to basics and work within the earths environmental limits with more sustainable practices and to slow down our population growth to reach a population that the earths resources can sustain naturally. We need a complete change in the way we produce food. The Guardian article ‘Global food system must be transformed 'on industrial revolution scale’ highlights how we cannot continue as we are, as our current food system is failing.

Climate change is going to intensify this problem and make the solution even more challenging. A report from the government's futures thinktank Foresight states that ‘the global food system between now and 2050 will face enormous challenges, as great as any that it has confronted in the past… the food system needs to change more radically in the coming decades than ever before, including during the Industrial and Green Revolutions’. All solutions involve huge uncertainty therefore much more funding for research is needed and any decisions need to be highly scrutinized to try to make more sustainable decisions than created by the green revolution. Food production needs to be a much higher priority in political agendas worldwide. However, we also need deeper societal changes to combat the cause of the problem as sustainable agriculture cannot maintain our unsustainable lifestyles. 

So next time you sit down to eat, think about where your food has come from and the impacts it has had on our planet from the farm to your fork.