4.8 Activity: What are the links between food systems and biodiversity?

 

The impacts that food systems have on biodiversity

Increasing demand for food availability is causing food system to impact the biodiversity.  According to google search, 5 billion hectares of global land area is used for agriculture in the bid of producing food, whereas the IPBES assessment report revealed that 75 percent of the Earth’s land and 66 percent of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions, highly connected to food production, Sara Carlson (2020). The IPBES assessment mentioned that the agricultural crop production has increased by about 300 percent since 1970, meaning more forests and soil biodiversity and water resources are lost due to land conversion for food production.  The 30% global food waste also indirectly lead to biodiversity loss

Impact biodiversity loss has on food system.

Biodiversity contributes immensely to food system-production in diversely ways, however, loss of biodiversity would threaten food security. As land degradation is living more than three billion people worldwide with decreased crop and livestock production affecting the food system (Le et al., 2016)

According to Antunes et al 2012, the nutritional quality of food crop would reduce because of loss of soil biodiversity and this will impact the survival of small scale farmers that cannot easily afford micronutrient.

The IPBES assessment report revealed the important of loss of pollinators that will reduce the global crop production by $235-577 billion.  

The marine and terrestrial biodiversity loss is crucial, as billions of people around the world depend directly on wild species for food and sale. Sara Carlson (2012), About three billion people depend wild-caught fisheries for their protein intake and livelihoods, about 10 percent of the global population could face deficiencies of micronutrients like zinc, iron, and vitamin A and fatty acids like DHA omega-3 if fish catch declaim (Golden et al., 2016

 

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