Daily Archives: April 20, 2022

Food Security and Sustainable Agriculture

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As the population of the world continues to grow, this increases the demand for food. For every person that is born, it’s another mouth to feed and eventually another family to feed. Also, it’s important that the food being served to the public is safe to eat and good for health.

The main goals of food security and sustainable agriculture are to improve the global supply chain, decrease food losses and waste, and ensure that all who are suffering from hunger and malnutrition have access to nutritious food.

In 2012 world leaders met at the Conference on Sustainable Development and agreed that everyone has the right to have access to safe nutritious food, adequate food, and to be free from hunger. At the conference, the UN Secretary-General created and launched a Zero Hunger Challenge which called on governments, civil society, faith communities, the private sector, and research institutions to work together to end hunger and eliminate the worst forms of malnutrition.

The goals of the Zero Hunger Challenge are: to make sure there are zero stunted children under the age of two, 100% of people have access to adequate food all year round, make sure that all food systems are sustainable, there is a 100% increase in smallholder productivity and income, and that there is zero loss or waste of food.

These are big goals that can be accomplished over time. Some important math that is important for accomplishing these goals is the use of the rate of change. This is important to calculate how fast the population of the world is increasing or decreasing. To calculate the rate of change two important pieces of information is needed. The first is the amount of change that occurred and how long in terms of the time it took for that change to happen. The formula is the average amount of change divided by the amount of time required for the change to happen. This is a good way to calculate how much the population of the earth changed in one day, week, month, or year. Once these numbers are determined they will give a good idea of how much food needs to be produced and distributed.

https://sdgs.un.org/topics/food-security-and-nutrition-and-sustainable-agriculture

Wasting Food and Its Impact

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Composting is a practice employed by gardeners and farmers in which they replenish and enrich the soil with leftover yard/food waste. In addition to enrich the soil and helping plants grow, composting reduces the emissions of methane. This is due to the fact when left in landfills, organic waste generates methane. By separating out organic waste into compost, a significant amount of methane emissions are reduced. Composting also promotes soil’s water retention, which in turn means there is less water waste.

In 2018, an estimated 2.6 million tons of food was composted, which is the equivalent of one person composting .42 pounds of food per day. However, since composting isn’t part of peoples’ daily routine (everyone has a garbage can, but how many people have a composting bin?), we waste about 1.4 billion tons of food. Americans waste the most food annually at a whopping 80 billion pounds. Our food waste could be significantly reduced if we began implementing a steady routine of composting. Normalizing and standardizing composting would reduce the size of landfills as well as improve the agricultural climate.

Before the COVID pandemic, 35 million Americans had food insecurity. Today,  50 million Americans have food insecurity. With over 80% of food waste coming from households and restaurants, there is such a real difference we could be making to reallocate food waste either to those in need and with food insecurity, or to compost facilities to add to long term improvement.

 

https://www.rts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/RTS_Food_Waste_Guide_2021.pdf

https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/reducing-impact-wasted-food-feeding-soil-and-composting