When my dad started an egg farm in the French countryside, I got up close and personal with
all the hard work and logistics that go into agriculture and farming in ways I’d never
experienced before. And 700 new feathered friends.
Small farms like ours are just one part of today’s agricultural world which spans everything
from giant, 1500-plus acre complexes to the backyard or balcony food gardens many of us
grow for ourselves.
We’ve got a lot of different systems, because hunger has been something humans have been
trying to address since... well forever. And along the way we’ve developed dozens of
different ways to grow food, and countless ways to prepare food.
And yet in the 21st century, many people don’t have enough food or know where their next
meal will come from. With all of our advances in technology, access to food is still uneven.
Food insecurity, or the lack of access to enough nutritious food that meets dietary
needs and cultural preferences to lead active and healthy lives, is a messy problem. But
from global to local scales, geographers can make a difference by recognizing the various
forces at work influencing access to that food.
I’m Alizé Carrère, and this is Crash Course Geography.
INTRO
As geographers we like to ask why something is happening here and not someplace else,
and after literally thousands of years of agricultural innovation, we’ve learned there
isn’t one answer to why places experience hunger.
A place like what’s now called Chad, or even Ethiopia, experiences hunger largely
due to ongoing political and ethnic conflicts. These conflicts disrupt the ability of farmers
to carry out food production and humanitarian food aid from being accessible.
But somewhere like Puerto Rico or New Orleans in the US might experience short-term hunger
because of disasters like hurricanes. Events like bad weather and shipping bottlenecks,
or anything that disrupts the global distribution of food to an area, also contribute to short-term
problems with food access.
Studying these issues is part of agricultural geography where we work on understanding how
agricultural ideas diffused around the world, like we discussed in our episode on diffusion
and language.
We’re also trying to understand how food production and access are arranged across
space, which involves so many other things like all of the physical processes, culture,
economics, and politics that influence what foods we eat and how we access it.
And to do this agricultural geography work, maps can provide clues and be useful tools.
Maps like this one illustrate just how far reaching serious hunger can be. It also shows
us that lower income countries often have higher rates of food insecurity, which has
led to assumptions over the decades about the ability of the people there to grow food.
But geographers dig deeper and bring in additional context. These are also places with colonial
legacies that have disrupted traditional agriculture systems. But we know that people in places
with food insecurity can feed themselves if the infrastructure for food production and
distribution is left intact.
For instance, the indigenous peoples of what’s now called North America were able to feed
themselves for 1000s of years. But more recently, traditional ways of eating have been systemically broke.
There are now efforts like Dream of Wild Health to help rejuvenate traditional
knowledge about traditional foods, many of which have been reduced or eliminated in the landscape.
In fact, it’s easier to see that there’s nothing inherent to places experiencing serious
hunger if we compare the map of global hunger with the spread of agriculture around the world.
Much like there are cultural hearths, there are also centers of origin or hearths of domestication,
which are places where certain plant and animal species were plentiful enough to allow domestication.
Every part of the world has something it’s domesticated, or started growing and breeding
intentionally, because every place in the world had to invent ways to feed the people
who lived there. Domestication was part of the first agricultural revolution that established
agriculture as a human activity. We talked about potatoes and bananas, but every food
we’ve ever eaten or natural fiber we’ve ever worn has a center of origin.
The use of certain crops and livestock as food or fiber are innovations that diffused
out of those centers. In particular, after Christopher Columbus and other colonizers
arrived in what we now call the Americas, a fresh wave of relocation diffusion picked
up and moved foods and agricultural ideas to new places.
We call this wave the Columbian Exchange, which involved food and other items moving
around the world through triangular trade, which is named for the triangle-ish shape
it forms on a map.
Enslaved people were moved to the Americas to grow food and textiles, like sugar, bananas,
and cotton. Those raw goods were moved to Europe to be manufactured. And some of what
was manufactured went back to African leaders in exchange for more enslaved peoples.
To enable this triangle of trade -- and all the wealth it was creating for the European
and eventually North American merchant class -- meant that colonists changed local systems.
So for example, food production in the Caribbean and Central America went from the relatively
reliable, but difficult subsistence models where people grew food mostly for their own
consumption and that of their community, to export models, where food mostly left the
area to be consumed outside of the community.
And the legacy of the Columbian Exchange, slavery, and trianglular trade lives on today
and touches even the most basic aspects of our lives!
Just take dietary staples like pizza -- which is an Italian dish featuring tomatoes native
to the Andes region, like what we now call Peru. And wheat, which is native to places
around the Fertile Crescent like what we now call Turkey, but which is grown throughout the world.
So as geographers examining hunger, we might wonder what else about agriculture in these
places has changed.
Globally there were additional innovations in agriculture, like the second agricultural
revolution, that coincided with the industrial revolution. This is when more and more machines
started being used for all aspects of farming, from planting to harvesting.
Before machines, agriculture relied on polyculture, meaning growing more than one crop at a time.
But polyculture is also labor intensive, and it’s difficult to use machines to harvest
crops in a polyculture arrangement. So to make efficient use of machines, like tillers,
planters, and combines, crops needed to be grown as monocultures, or just one crop in
a field, because it’s easier to plant and harvest them mechanically.
And this eventually led to more focus on commercialization and commercial agriculture, meaning focusing
on varieties, or types of plants, that are easy to harvest in large quantities and of similar quality.
So theoretically, agriculture was getting more efficient and more food should’ve been grown.
These were significant changes, and as geographers, we want to understand what causes technology
to change. And why the real world can be vastly different from our theories.
Right after World War II much of the world was trying to recover, and there was a lot
of fear around famine and hunger. Specifically, there was a deep concern that places with
high population growth would face famines that would perpetuate global war and conflict.
This is an example of how Western researchers at the time were thinking in Neo-Malthusian
terms, or thinking that people in low-income places were to blame for large population
numbers that would stress food sources, rather than our agriculture systems being able to adapt.
So finding a way to feed the world became a major effort that led to the third agricultural
revolution, which included the Green Revolution along with those other commercial changes.
During the Green Revolution, researchers in North America and Europe focused on cross-breeding
different varieties of seeds to create faster, stronger, and more pest-resistant crops. And
the results were, well, revolutionary. New hybrids of crops like corn, rice, and wheat
had amazing increases in crop yields, or how much of a crop is harvested.
But, the new hybrid seeds required more attention, like large amounts of water and fertilizers.
They also firmly established the practice of using commercial seeds, and these changes
were also often part of development programs. So, like we saw last time, countries like
India received a lot of focus to address hunger and any political instability that could come
from that hunger, with mixed results.
So having a lot of food certainly helps address hunger, but even if there’s a lot of food,
there are still concerns about long-term reliability of all that food.
For instance, despite how many cereal options you might find in the cereal aisle of an American
grocery store, they’re all made with the same types of wheat, corn, and rice. Through
the spread of commercial agriculture and hybrid and genetically modified seeds, the diversity
of foods humans eat has actually declined, especially in the last 100 years.
It’s estimated that wheat, rice, and corn provide roughly half of all of the world’s
calories. And some researchers estimate about ¾ of our calories come from just 12 plant
and 5 animal species! That’s not a lot of food diversity when we realize there are over
200,000 known edible plants.
And many agricultural scientists think this is a consequence of the technological innovations
that have continued from the Green Revolution into the agricultural Genetic Revolution,
where seeds have been genetically modified in a lab rather than bred and collected by farmers.
And there are concerns that reduced biodiversity in our food means less adaptability to changing
climates. So even with all the technological innovations of different agricultural revolutions,
our efforts to feed the world are ongoing.
Many researchers and geographers studying different scales have realized that global
hunger is less about whether there is enough food, and more about asking what keeps people
from accessing food?
Some of it is just economic. Those who don’t make much money can’t afford as much food
or have to select whatever is cheapest.
But this has gotten complicated, especially as large agribusiness corporations are taking
over everything from seed development to selling the final product. Because of their size,
they’re able to access more resources and produce cheaper food than small farmers trying
to feed their families ever could.
But though the food might be cheap, food processed in many of these factories still add to many
issues around nutrition and access. For instance, processed foods are often fairly cheap, but
we can see a change in texture, quality, and even the nutritional value of the food, and
those changes can be positive -- like a longer shelf life -- or negative, like removing nutrients.
Even in places with good overall food access, food insecurity can be an issue when we zoom
into the local level, whether in an urban or rural place. Food deserts are areas that
lack access to full-service grocery stores, and often especially lack access to fresh
fruits and vegetables. And lack of access can range from a lack of physical stores,
to a lack of transportation to the stores that do exist.
So to fully understand the nature of hunger, as geographers we look at the cultural and
political factors in addition to the economic factors.
For example in Black or Indigenous communities in the United States there have been systemic
efforts to stigmatize foods that were important culturally, to discourage the sharing of agricultural
knowledge, and to keep people from accessing land to grow food.
So understanding that hunger and food access are about more than just the number of people
in a place and whether or not we can buy food can help us create more food secure and equitable societies.
Ultimately, what we’ve seen today is that just like the rest of the Earth, agriculture
is a dynamic innovation. The food on your plate has a geographic story, from its ancestral
home to who grew it to how it was packaged to sell to you. That story crosses through
colonial and market based relationships and even the price you are charged for that food
is related to political and economic systems worked out in the 20th century.
And while how we access food is a lot of agricultural geography, how we use the land food is grown
on is its own story, which we’ll get to next time!
Many maps and borders represent modern geopolitical divisions that have often been decided without
the consultation, permission, or recognition of the land's original inhabitants.
Many geographical place names also don't reflect the Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples languages.
So we at Crash Course want to acknowledge these peoples’ traditional and ongoing relationship
with that land and all the physical and human geographical elements of it.
We encourage you to learn about the history of the place you call home through resources
like native-land.ca and by engaging with your local Indigenous and Aboriginal nations through
the websites and resources they provide.
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Geography which is filmed at the Team
Sandoval Pierce Studio and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want
to help keep all Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.