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Food Supply and Population Growth - Factors and Effects by @arinzegod12

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arinzegod12
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2 years agoSteemit4 min read


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The human population has increased in the past few years to a staggering level with a record of over 7 billion people. This has become a foremost concern even though brilliant minds like Elon Musk would disagree stating rather that the human population has been on a decline and depopulation is a threat to human civilization. Now what we are about to learn is how this ever increasing human population affects our food supply. So we will be looking at Food Production, Population Growth and Food Supply.

Food Production


Humans feed on crops and livestock which is where our food comes from. Between growing crops and rearing livestock the former is more efficient. For food production to be fruitful it need stable land that is is land suitable for agriculture. Thus by improving agricultural yields food production is increased.


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Since the later part of the nineteenth century agricultural land has been decreasing due to industrialization and urbanization. Lots of lands was taken away to build factories, offices, big city construction. This means that an increase in urban area to accommodate the population boom swallowed rural agricultural lands leading to decrease in Food Production.

To increase food production we have to conserve land that is for cultivation and not use it for other purpose, maintaining soil fertility by manuring, fertilizing, crop rotation and converting arid lands to fertile land for cultivation by irrigation. This has been fine successfully in some countries countries. However it is not easy to irrigation desert land. Also more agricultural lands can be obtained by clearing forests or tropical jungles.

Population Growth and Food Supply



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In the late 1980's the human population was put at an estimation of 5 200 million people and was projected to hit 6000 million by the year 2000. Currently the world population is estimated at over 7billion people on the planet. Where does this lead us?

A third of the worlds population reside in developed countries. This population of people have enough and adequate food and make use 3/4 of goods in the world to maintain their standard. While the 2 800 million people of the population living in the tropics live in poverty and rarely have enough to eat and when they do it is not sufficient thus lacking the required diet this leads to malnourished. This makes the situation alarming.

The danger is that in third world countries the population is growing at a very rapid rate, which is alarming because the resources are not sufficient or enough to carry for this booming population and this would make food shortage problem more acute. Also in this developing countries more people are living the rural areas for big cities which in turn affects food production. Thus the government is now faced with the issues of;

i. Controlling population growth

ii. Solution to Food Shortage

It is estimated that the population of the world is growing at a rate of 1.7 percent per year. Two factors affecting population growth are;

i. Increase in Birth Rate

ii. Decrease in Birth Rate

The birth rate is higher than the death rate, this means more people are born than people that die. This increases the population rapidly and this is because improvement in science has helped prolong and improve human living.

Conclusion


A boom in human population has resulted a lot of problems with production of sufficient food for the rapid growing population being the most urgent. In developed countries they have found ways to ensure that the food produce is equal or more than the population however the case is the difference in developing continents like Africa where enough food is not produced to carter for the explosive population. To most people in this continent getting good to satisfy their hunger is a big problem.

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