Chapter 13: Food, Soil Conservation, and Pest Management

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Chapter 13 Food, Soil Conservation, and Pest
Management
We are nine meals away from anarchy. Lord
Cameron of Dillington

• March 2009

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Food Security
Today we produce more than enough food to meet
the basic nutritional needs of every person on
the earth.
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Food Security

• every person in a given area has daily access
  to enough nutritious food to have an active and
  healthy life.
• Impediments to national food security
• Poverty
• War and corruption
• Harmful environmental effects of agriculture
• Climate change

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Nutrition

• To maintain good health, people require
  macronutrients and micronutrients in their diet.
• Chronic undernutrition (hunger) people cannot
  grow or buy enough food to meet their basic
  energy needs
• Malnutrition people who are consume a diet
  deficient in protein, calories, and/or other key
  nutrients
• Usually a low protein, high carbohydrate,
  vegetarian diet
• Affects 1 in 6 people in developing countries
  mostly children

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Nutrition

• Micronutrient deficiency Underconsumption of
  even small amounts of nutrients with necessary
  health benefits or essential functions in the
  body
• 1 in 3 suffer from vitamin or mineral deficiency
• Vitamin A increased susceptibility to childhood
  diseases/ blindness
• Iron anemia, fatigue, infection, increases
  likelihood women die in childbirth
• Iodine goiter, proper metabolism

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Famine

• a severe shortage of food in an area
  accompanied by mass starvation, many deaths,
  economic chaos, and social disruption.
• Causes
• Crop failures
• Drought
• Flooding
• War
• Other natural disasters

Sudan famine, 2000
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Overnutrition

• occurs when food energy intake exceeds energy
  use and causes excess body fat.
• Consequences of overnutrition
• Greater incidence of disease and illness
• Lower life expectancy
• Reduced quality of life
• Disproportionate expenditure of capital
• 93 of Americans fall into this
  category