The Environmental Cost of Unsustainable Food Production

Current conventional and industrial agricultural practices, such as commercial-scale mono-cropping of corn, rice, wheat and soy, created a large gap between agriculture and the sustainable management of the environment and our natural resources (King, 2012). Associated with these are the issues of poverty and food security for the struggling “Third World” which is currently experiencing the worst effects brought about by climate change, overpopulation, and overexploitation of natural resources due to the demands of economic development (Padmavathy & Poyyamoli, 2011). While the aim is to provide the world’s exponentially growing population with a sustainable food supply, the problem still lies on the dependence on energy derived from fossil fuels to produce a large amount of food in the least amount of time (Hosking, 2008). Newly discovered energy reserves and alternative sources of energy, such as biofuels from land-intensive crops and shale oil extracted by fracking, merely delay our ascent to peak oil (Rhodes, 2012). 

Advances in technology led to the mechanization of agricultural labor and the rural-urban migration resulted in half of the world’s population residing in cities (Rhodes, 2012). This led to more inefficient and unsustainable energy consumption manifesting in the form of pollution from increased use of transportation and increased carbon footprint from importation of processed food products (Hosking, 2008). A globalized economic paradigm encourages exports from least industrialized nations in exchange for mere, sometimes unjust, profit from imports made by most industrialized nations (Veteto & Lockyer, 2008). It is within this complex global context of capitalism and conventional (or industrial) agriculture that our human-environment relations are compromised and become unsustainable (Veteto & Lockyer, 2008). Unfortunately, most government agencies, private and multinational corporations, and academic institutions currently operate and exist within this context (King, 2012). 

 Real sustainability of food production requires the systematic integration of social, environmental, and economic concerns from local, national to international levels of policy-making (Holland, 2004). To truly address the sustainability of food production, a paradigm shift is needed—a shift from an economic to an ecological paradigm (King, 2012).