Cirencester, United Kingdom

Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security

Language: English Studies in English
University website: www.rau.ac.uk
PG Certificates or Diplomas
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of land and breeding of animals and plants to provide food, fiber, medicinal plants and other products to sustain and enhance life. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in cities. The study of agriculture is known as agricultural science. The history of agriculture dates back thousands of years; people gathered wild grains at least 105,000 years ago, and began to plant them around 11,500 years ago, before they became domesticated. Pigs, sheep, and cattle were domesticated over 10,000 years ago. Crops originate from at least 11 regions of the world. Industrial agriculture based on large-scale monoculture has in the past century become the dominant agricultural method.
Food
Food is any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for an organism. It is usually of plant or animal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is ingested by an organism and assimilated by the organism's cells to provide energy, maintain life, or stimulate growth.
Food Security
Food security is a condition related to the supply of food, and individuals' access to it. There is evidence of granaries being in use over 10,000 years ago, with central authorities in civilizations including ancient China and ancient Egypt being known to release food from storage in times of famine. At the 1974 World Food Conference the term "food security" was defined with an emphasis on supply. Food security, they said, is the "availability at all times of adequate world food supplies of basic foodstuffs to sustain a steady expansion of food consumption and to offset fluctuations in production and prices". Later definitions added demand and access issues to the definition. The final report of the 1996 World Food Summit states that food security "exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life".
Security
Security is freedom from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) from external forces. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems, and any other entity or phenomenon vulnerable to unwanted change by its environment.
Sustainable Agriculture
Sustainable agriculture is farming in sustainable ways based on an understanding of ecosystem services, the study of relationships between organisms and their environment.
Agriculture
If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out.
Attributed to John Maynard Keynes by Hutton, Will (November 2, 2008). "Will the real Keynes stand up, not this sad caricature?". Guardian. Retrieved on 2009-02-05. 
Agriculture
But let the good old corn adorn
The hills our fathers trod;
Still let us, for his golden corn,
Send up our thanks to God!
John Greenleaf Whittier, The Corn-Song: Quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), Lemma "Agriculture" p. 18-19.
Agriculture
E'en in mid-harvest, while the jocund swain
Pluck'd from the brittle stalk the golden grain,
Oft have I seen the war of winds contend,
And prone on earth th' infuriate storm descend,
Waste far and wide, and by the roots uptorn,
The heavy harvest sweep through ether borne,
As the light straw and rapid stubble fly
In dark'ning whirlwinds round the wintry sky.
Virgil, Georgics (c. 29 BC), I, line 351. Sotheby's translation.
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