From the day that Adam and Eva were born, we know that agriculture is important. But a lot has changed in since then. Not only towns and cities began to grow, but so did knowledge, arts and technological science. The question nowadays is whether we should grow food or flowers on fertile ground.
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Now that the basic need was settled down, we started to gain knowledge and began to use technique to develop ourselves. Resulting in what we experience nowadays. In everyday culture agriculture plays his own role. Human’s could not ignore agriculture since they were in close connection to it. There wasn’t even a opportunity to be far away from certain area’s were food was grown. One of the consequences of being far away could be starvation.
Nowadays we almost forget about this fundamental need. We are now that far away from food that we need the technologies to store and transfer food. The connection of some people with food is minimum and by these people the importance of agriculture is sometimes overlooked, even though it is an everyday need to eat and drink.
In contrast to the respect that we had for food in the past, we nowadays deal with food insecurity. Even though, we notice a huge different in parts of the world for the amount of food we have available. In 88 countries a population of 800 million people worldwide suffer from deficient diets.
In addition we could say that agriculture is still important, but on the other hand transportation and storage have become even more important. Why? Basically because the population of people is growing worldwide. The ‘Population Reference Bureau’ indicates that a number of 250.000 people are added every day to the estimated 6.9 billion.
Fertile land is crucial for growing types of food like grain and rice or can be used to let animals graze on it. But even though there is hunger and this fertile land is more scarce than ever, the western world uses large areas of this fertile land to grow flower bulbs. As long as there is money in growing flower bulbs, people will continue.
Besides that, we haven’t even spoken about the food that is wasted by people. A British study determined that 6.7 tons of food, or about one third of the food brought, is thrown out in the United Kingdom every year. This could be an example of the difference that we face in the way we respect food nowadays compared to the past. Where farmers have to work hard to get the food in high quality, others just throw it away like it is nothing.
By Bart Weel
