The Future of Food Supply and Agriculture

Technology is created by the comparatively small and smart human brain, which has changed the landscape, redefined natural resources and even diversified the food human being rely on. Over the past 30 years, there is a significant progress in solving global food shortage issues. However, with an increasing of the population and resource demand, there is multiple new challenges in current food system, such as irrational food distributions, loss of famers, increasing food costs for some countries, and waste resources. Therefore, many countries are trying to deal with a series of food issues in order to achieve sustainable development goals for the global, especially in improving technologies.

Some people think there are various advantages of technology for food supply, and even technology affects positively future food supply, but opponents believe that some new technology will influence negatively future food system. Some people think technology is shaping the future of agriculture and food supply. In the past, when human being relied heavily on a rather limited source of food, the weather and temperature anomalies posed a threat to the yield of the crops and the health condition of livestock, not to mention unpredictable climate change. However, the terrible past is no longer the case today.

First, genetically modified food is accepted by growing people. Genetically modified foods are organisms which have new genes added from other organisms. Then, those organisms have new certain traits, such as “herbicide resistance, pest resistance, and increased nutritional value”. In addition, some fishes, rice, meet are also often modified to increase the quantity by adding some proteins to help them grow. Because of using genetically modified methods, a great number of countries increase yield productivity to feed more people.

Second，using new technological machine, like drones, might release food supply’s pressure. Usually, farms span large distances and it might need many farmers to monitor the productive condition of these areas. Due to more and more people prefer to move to city rather than living in countryside, also taking into new occupation instead of farmers, there is a large issue of lacking of farmers around the world. Therefore, using drones is becoming a popular alternative to replace traditional labor, like farmers. For example, when a farm needs to people to check where the crops or plants disease or damage, human being might spend lots of time to find them out, but using drones can save time and more accurately release fertilizer and pesticides, or take some picture to farm managers. To some extent, using new techonomic machine can improve crops condition and quickly transport growing information to people to increase corps or food supply in order to raise the economic benefits for farmers.

However, there are some opposed options towards technology. Some people aim at high quality life so that they focus on the food safety and they usually eat green food, organic food. Moreover, they refuse genetically modified food, since they find that GMO might have bad allergic reaction, might lower lever of biodiversity, and might decreased antibiotic efficacy. Totally, those people think genetically modified food might not be safe to eat, because it is a new type of food, and there is not 100 perfects to inform people that is healthy and safe for people’s bodies. Genetically modified seeds are patented products, and in order to buy them, the customer must sign a few agreements for using by suppliers or creators. Second, some farmers think if they use new technologic machines to replace human being to work, it might increase produce cost, and then people would like to choose lower price of crop or food, and then those food supply will not increase.

Personally, I suppose those statement should try to find a balance between both of two. I do not believe that we need to decide or choose one side as for our own standpoints on technology. However, there is no doubt that using technology on agriculture or food supply has more positive effects for human being. Unfortunately, everything has two sides, so that using technology also bring some issues on food supply simultaneously. Finally, I strongly think that the important thing is that how technologically changed food can function in the world and what we should address the issues if there are some dire consequences arise towards discussing the future of agriculture and food supply.

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