Unit: 3 - Food security Flashcards
What is food security?
Food security is the ability of human populations to produce food of sufficient quality and quantity. Such conditions for food security can be assessed on any scale, from a single household to a global scale.
What are the predicted figure of people going to exist in 2050?
It is estimated that by 2050 this figure will increase to 9.4 billion.
What should food production be?
Food production should be sustainable
What defines sustainability
Sustainability in food production can be defined as the ability of food systems to keep production and distribution going continuously without environmental degradation. It implies the ability to sustain the growth of food production to meet the demand for food in the future.
What are the three ways sustainable food should be produced, processed, and traded?
Sustainable food should be produced, processed and traded in ways that:
contribute to thriving local economies and sustainable livelihoods - both in the UK and, in the case of imported products, in producer countries;
protect the diversity of the environment for both plants and animals (and the welfare of farmed and wild species), and avoid damaging natural resources and contributing to climate change;
provide benefits for society, such as good quality food, safe and healthy products, and educational opportunities.
What is food security dependent on?
All food production is dependent ultimately upon photosynthesis.
What’s photosynthesis? and what’s the equation to represent it?
Photosynthesis is a chemical process that occurs in green plants which traps light energy and converts carbon dioxide and water into organic compounds, especially sugars, using the energy from sunlight and photosynthetic pigments in the green plant.
The summary equation for photosynthesis can be written as follows:
light
6CO2 + 6H2O → C6H12O6 + 6O2
carbon dioxide water sugar oxygen
what’s starch?
Starch is produced after photosynthesis when large numbers of sugar units join together. Starch is produced by all green plants as an energy store. It is the most common carbohydrate in the human diet and is contained in large amounts in such staple foods as potatoes, wheat, maize (corn) and rice. Most human food comes from a small number of plant crops (cereals, potato, roots, and legumes) which contain starch and other food groups.
what are the factors if the area to grow crops is limited?
If the area to grow crops is limited, increased food production will depend on factors that control plant growth. For example the breeding of higher yielding cultivars. This means producing plants with an increased yield, disease/pest resistance, higher nutritional values, physical characteristics suited to rearing and harvesting or the ability to thrive in particular environmental conditions.
What are some methods of protecting crops?
Methods of protecting crops from pests and diseases (for example through the use of pesticides) and reducing competition (for example through the use of herbicides) may also help to increase food production.
describe photosynthesis, go into detail on how light reacts with the plant, waste products, the purpose of photosynthesis(not just energy for the plants, but how we require it ourselves), and how it affects food chains(hint: what’s the bottom of the food chain always, and why)?
When light from the sun shines on a plant leaf, some of it is absorbed by special pigments (chemicals) in the leaf. These pigments use the energy from the sun to produce food in the process of photosynthesis. Photosynthesis takes place primarily in plant leaves and little to none occurs in plant stems. The process of photosynthesis takes place in chloroplasts in the leaf where photosynthetic pigments are located.
The most important photosynthetic pigment is chlorophyll. The chlorophyll molecules trap the energy from light to drive a series of chemical reactions. In photosynthesis, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and water are converted into organic compounds (especially sugars) along with the release of oxygen gas as a waste product.
The sugars and other compounds produced from photosynthesis are used for plant growth and other essential metabolic processes in plants. In addition to maintaining normal levels of oxygen, photosynthesis is the source of energy for nearly all life on earth. The production of food for plants to allow them to grow is referred to as primary productivity. This source of energy can be passed onto animals when they consume plant material in their food. Therefore, photosynthesis is ultimately the source of almost all the food on earth.
What is the most important pigment in photosynthesis?
The most important photosynthetic pigment is chlorophyll.
what are the main three factors of why prediction goals are not always achieved?
- Effects of climate change.
- New cultivars/crop plants may not have yielded increases.
- Lack of available, high-quality agricultural land.
what are the two raw materials for photosynthesis?
carbon dioxide, and water
what are the two essential materials for photosynthesis?
light(sunlight mostly), and chlorophyll
what are the two products of photosynthesis?
oxygen, and sugar
why does livestock produce less food per unit area compared to plants?
Livestock produce less food per unit area than plant crops due to loss of energy between trophic levels.
what are food chains?, and what do trophic levels represent in them?
A food chain represents a succession of organisms that eat another organism and are, in turn, eaten themselves. The trophic level of an organism is the position it occupies in a food chain. The number of steps an organism is from the start of the chain is a measure of its trophic level.
describe the first four trophic levels in a food chain
Food chains start at trophic level 1 with primary producers such as plants, move to primary consumers (herbivores) at level 2, secondary consumers at level 3 and typically finish with tertiary consumers or apex predators at level 4. Secondary and tertiary consumers which feed on meat can be described as carnivores.
How is energy gained from consuming used?
The amount of available energy available in a food chain decreases from one stage to the next. Some of the available energy goes into growth and the production of offspring. This energy becomes available to the next stage, but most of the available energy is used up in other ways:
energy released by respiration is used for movement and other life processes, and is eventually lost as heat to the surroundings;
energy is lost in waste materials, such as faeces.
How much energy is retained when an organism consumes?
10% of energy is gained, 90% is lost, example a plant has 100% energy, a herbivore that eats the plant only keeps 10% of the total energy
How can the efficiency of food production be improved?
The efficiency of food production can be improved by reducing the amount of energy lost to the surroundings. This can be done by:
preventing animals moving around too much;
keeping their surroundings warm.
is food production more efficient when the food chain is short, or long and why?
Food production is more efficient if the food chain is short. There are fewer trophic levels at which energy can be lost and therefore a higher percentage of energy is available to humans.
Why are shorter food chains more efficient?
One of the consequences of loss of energy at each trophic level is that shorter food chains are more efficient than longer ones, as more energy is available to the final consumer.
