The need of conserving farmland to meet the demand for food
1995
Daoutopulos, G. | Pyrovetsi, M. (Aristotle Univ., Thessaloniki (Greece))
Increasing food production to feed the millions of hungry people added to the world population each year remains a critical issue of concern for many governments and international organizations. Several courses of action have been proposed to meet the needs for food: increase the amount of land under cultivation; increase the yields on currently cultivated acreage; increase the output from oceanic fisheries; reduce post-harvest losses; put on the demographic brakes; preserve the farmland under cultivation. The present paper focuses on the first and last propositions and explores the potentialities and risks associated with each of them in an effort to tackle the food problem. The objectives are four-fold: a) to explore the impacts placed upon presently cultivated land from erosion, salinization, desertification, overgrazing, residential, recreational and industrial development, and other ecologically unsound land use practices, b) to call the attention for the devastated consequences of careless and short-sighted land use practices, c) to examine the possibilities of bringing more land under cultivation to meet the increasing demand for food, and d) to stress the importance of the human capital as the main resource input in the production of more food. Although the authors are not pessimistic about our ability to meet the food requirements, they do not espouse the solutions that rely on technocratic assumptions. Even if solutions can be provided by the science and resources can be mobilized to put forward the necessary projects, their success can be strongly questioned when an equal attention has not been paid on the need for social, structural and institutional change in those societies where increases in food production are mostly needed.
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