Food Security

Understanding Phase of Food Security

What is food security?

Food security  is being able to get food easily and afford food that caters for people’s dietary needs and their food preferences.

There are three pillars to Food security:

Food availability: To make sure that there are sufficient quantities of food available on a consistent basis.

 Food access: having sufficient resources to obtain appropriate foods for a nutritious diet.

 Food use: appropriate use based on knowledge of basic nutrition and care, as well as adequate water and sanitation.

Such as in the boarding house of Founders at Bishops it would be effected heavily on if there was a flood or drought to occur in South Africa or Western Cape. Why? Because obviously it would affect the ability for farmers to grow their crops. To  be specific the most immediate effect on food security droughts and floods have, is on crop production and which will effect a bulk food sector such as the food company which run Bishops’s catering service, meaning that the farmers will most probably raise their prices due to farming shortages which will make the food more expensive for us to buy.

Poor farming practises

More people tend to need food so farmers need to increase their crop yields. The most efficient way to produce more crops for food is by monoculture.

Monoculture: Is the planting of one single crop over a large area every year.

This has a few advantages which are:

-Farmer can control the growth of unwanted plants

-It reduces the interspecific competition of plants for nutrients, space and sunlight.

-And it is more profitable to grow large amounts of one kind of crop.

What makes monoculture farming bad to food security is if it is not managed properly. It can cause many pests to enter the fields as they target the handful of crop they can feed off. But then the farmers use pesticide to kill the pests, the bad thing about this is that the pesticide is not biodegradable, which means they pass down to kill other organisms in food webs. Therefore it reduces the biodiversity.

(This also decreases the organic quality of the crop we receive.)

Alien Plants and the reduction of agricultural land

Alien species are organims that people accidentally or intentionally introduce into a habitat where they do not occur naturally. An alien plant is only a problem  when it is invasive.

The problem we would face in founders is that the alien plants on the lawn in the quad, called weeds are a problem which have to be dealt with every few days or else they will spread over the whole lawn and not let the grass grow.

Loss of wild varieties

 

This illustration shows the different types of vegetables and the quantity of the different types of vegetables a century ago to 80 years later. What do we see? Well there is  a massive decrease in the population of vegetables. This is due to diseases and pests that so many family’s have been decreased significantly throughout 80 years. For example the worst being potato blight, this disease destroyed many farmers’ whole crop in a very short time. Ireland my homeland was effected the worst by this.

The loss of wild varieties threatens our food security in the boarding house because maybe sometime soon we wont be able to grow enough vegetables for us to eat as the families of vegetables keep on decreasing in huge amounts.

Genetically Engineered food

A genetically engineered food comes from an organism that has had characteristics added to it from other species that are not related. A good example of this would be that the wheat grown in South Africa contains a gene from a bacterium that makes it poisonous to insects.

Honestly I think that we really don’t need genetically engineered food. Because I don’t think they are safe enough for us to eat and food securtiy can be improved in other ways such as by encouraging natural genetic diversity in food plants by using the diverse gene pools of both wild and scientifically bred varieties.

Therefore it shows that most of the food we eat in Founders is genetically engineered and is it really as healthy as we really think?

Wastage

One way to improve food security is to stop the wastage of food. This is one of the biggest problems in todays world. According to the World Environment Day, approximately 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted each year on earth. Just take a moment to imagine how much that is.

Wastage from eating in Founders

People who have limited incomes usually do not waste food but people who have higher incomes arguably waste food because they can afford to.

In founders a lot of food is wasted through out each meal which takes place. The catering company wastes about a third of the food  that they put on the plates for the founders’ boys.

Looking at the amount of food which gets wasted after each meal to compared to the amount of recycling which takes place is really not surprising. As we know from what I’ve said about the food wastage in founders, recycling is just about on the same level. Founders being the biggest boarding house and boys being boys. When there is not a choice to throw recyclable waste into a recycle bin in each dorm…the mess begins. There is a garbage can in each dorm but there is only 2 sets of plastic, paper and tin recycle bins in the whole of Founders. There, is another thing which could be looked at.

Biomimicry

Due to the fact that there are going to be a lot of mulching in Founders house in the quad and in the grade 11 quad. Also in the founders quad the grass is watered with sprinklers during the day when most of the evaporation takes place which is quite stupid and not very environmental.