Population 4.3

Question 1

What is food security?

Answer 1

• the state of being with reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food.

Question 2

What are the causes of food shortages?

Answer 2

• Soil exhaustion from over-cropping and monoculture leads to low crop yields.
• Drought leads to a lack of sufficient water for crops to grow.
• Floods can destroy crops.
• Pests eat or destroy crop yield.
• Disease impacts both crops and farmers’ ability to work.
• Low capital investment means farmers cannot improve their machinery to increase output.
• Uneven distribution of resources.

Question 3

What are the consequences of food shortages?

Answer 3

• Undernourishment: leads to lesser of an ability to work which can cause further shortages.
• Famine: death due to a lack of food is usually a result of a natural disaster.
• Aid dependency: when aid agencies provide free food to countries in need, farmers not affected by famine are unable to sell their food.

Question 4

Case Study: The Green Revolution

Answer 4

• The process in the 1960s spread modern agricultural technologies around the world, changed the amount of food that can be produced, improved food security, and turned previously food-scarce countries into exporters of crops.
• During the 1960s, new strains of seeds known as high-yielding varieties were developed by scientists which produced higher yields of crops including maize and rice.
• As a result of the green revolution and also the help from the development of rice and wheat, yields were able to increase by 40% in 5 years
• New seeds meant that the productivity and efficiency of growing crops increased as more crops could grow on approximately the same area of land with a similar amount of time and effort.
• Despite the population increasing by 100% and food production rising by 150% from 1961 to 2008, the conversion of farmland into agricultural land only had to increase by 10%.
• Development of fertilisers and pesticides.
• Machines such as combine harvesters were bettered meaning farm work became easier and faster.

Question 5

What is carrying capacity?

Answer 5

The maximum population size that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment.

Question 6

Examples of countries with overpopulation and underpopulation

Answer 6

Over - Bangladesh

Under - Australia (3 people per km squared)