5.11 Challenges of Contemporary Agriculture

A genetically modified organism (GMO) has had its DNA changed in a lab, often by adding a gene from another species. Common examples are corn and cotton that make their own insecticide (Bt crops) and soybeans and corn that tolerate a weed killer. Most U.S. corn, soybeans and cotton are now genetically engineered.

Major scientific reviews, such as the U.S. National Academies' 2016 report, found no evidence that approved GM foods are riskier to eat than conventional ones. The ongoing debates are mostly about other issues: the cost of patented seed and farmers' dependence on a few companies, weeds that have evolved resistance to the herbicides used with GM crops, loss of crop diversity, and labeling. Some countries, especially in the EU, restrict GM crop cultivation.

Aquaculture is farming fish, shellfish and seaweed. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in 2022 farmed aquatic animals outweighed wild-caught ones for the first time, at about 51% of the total. Aquaculture eases pressure on wild fish, but it can pollute water, spread disease to wild fish, and destroy coastal mangroves, as shrimp farming has in parts of Southeast Asia.

Similar trade-offs run through modern farming: heavy fertilizer and pesticide use, falling groundwater, soil loss and shrinking biodiversity.

• Urban farming: growing food in cities on rooftops, vacant lots and community gardens, as in Detroit.
• Community-supported agriculture (CSA): customers pay a farm up front for a share of each season's harvest, which shares the farm's risk.
• Organic farming: growing without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, usually at higher cost and price.
• Value-added specialty crops: products processed or labeled to earn more, like jam instead of berries, or Champagne, a name that EU law reserves for sparkling wine from that French region.
• Fair trade: certification that guarantees farmers a minimum price and better working conditions, common for coffee, cocoa and bananas.
• Local food: buying food grown nearby, through farmers markets for example, to support local farms and cut transport.
• Dietary shifts: as incomes rise, people tend to eat more meat and dairy, as in China over recent decades, which takes more land and feed. Some people are moving toward plant-based diets.

The world grows enough calories to feed everyone, yet FAO estimated that about 8.2% of the world's people, roughly 673 million, faced hunger in 2024. The causes include:

• Lack of access: food insecurity means not having reliable access to enough safe, nutritious food, often because of poverty. A food desert is an area, often low-income, where fresh, healthy food is hard to reach. USDA's common measure is living more than 1 mile from a supermarket in a city, or more than 10 miles in a rural area.
• Distribution problems: poor roads, storage and markets mean food spoils or never reaches people. Conflict blocks food deliveries.
• Adverse weather: droughts, floods and heat waves, made more frequent by climate change, destroy harvests.
• Land lost to suburbanization: farmland at the edge of growing cities is paved over (6.11).

Where food-processing plants and markets locate, economies of scale, distribution systems and government policies all shape what farmers grow and earn. A meatpacking plant or ethanol refinery can determine what crops make money across a whole region.