Current Agricultural Issue

Introduction

Recent attentions to the threat of global environmental change tend to focus on the possible effects of environmental change on agriculture and implications for global and regional food security. From a policy perspective, however, it is also important to understand the extent to which agricultural activities may contribute to global environmental change and the extent to which policies to prevent, mitigate or adapt to environmental changes, may themselves affect the agriculture and hunger. These two issues are likely to become especially important when making decisions not only about how to reduce the amount of human disturbance environment, but also about how to improve food security and environmental quality in the richer world of the future.

Discussion and Analysis

Current Issue Agriculture

Mankind has to rely solely on hunting, fishing and gathering for food production for most of the two million years of its existence. Agriculture domestication of plants and animals have appeared only about 10.000 years ago, roughly coinciding with the period as a wide climatic and environmental fluctuations and the acceleration of population growth in the order of 0.1 percent per year (Hassan p90). Whether the development of agriculture was the impetus for more rapid growth of population or on its own response to population growth and the environment remains a contentious issue. For example, the anthropological evidence, including indicators of nutritional status derived from skeletal remains suggests that the health of hunter-gatherers is usually better than the next farmer in the same region (Cohen 1990; Cohen and Armelagos p99).

One explanation for this observation is that agriculture and related technological and social innovation may have emerged initially as a means to compensate for unreliable or reducing the resource base associated with population growth, environmental fluctuations, or both. I mean, this "stress" model of the origin of agriculture suggest that hunger and changing conditions may have helped stimulate the development and adoption of agriculture, although in the short term agriculture is apparently subject to less output per unit labor costs than hunting and gathenng (Hasan, 1981, Matthews et al 1990.).

An alternative view is not widely held by anthropologists, is that the domestication of plants and social and cultural innovations, such as sedentary lifestyle was not among those exposed to stress, and between the hunter-gatherer populations that resources and energy in the experiment. Environmental and other stresses, leading to famine, therefore, it would be an obstacle to agricultural development. As a model of ...