Transcript Y10GeU2A3 Farm issues Jan21PP

Unit 2A Production
Agriculture
Coping with change
Today we are going to look at a mixture
of changes and developments
• Until the 1970s European agriculture was fading
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– many people left their small farms and moved
to the cities where they earned more. Large
areas of France, Germany and Italy were being
abandoned.
So one of the first things the European Union
did was to formulate the Common Agricultural
Policy (CAP). This set out to support small
farmers and make sure the countryside
continued to be worked.
Food security – a modern theme – was a worry
back then.
During in wartime Europe, lack of food security
had been a major problem
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CAP
The CAP had five founding aims:
To Increase productivity
Give a fair standard of living for farmers
To stabilise markets
To provide regular food supplies
To ensure reasonable prices for consumers
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How did they do this?
• The price support mechanism
• The Council of Ministers of the EU sets a target
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price that farmers should receive for each
product.
They also set prices at which the EU will
intervene:
A floor (or ‘intervention’) price – if prices fall
below this level, the EU intervenes and buys
some of the product to stop prices falling
further.
A ceiling (or ‘threshold’) price – if prices rise
above this level, the EU will allow imports of the
product, so encouraging prices to fall back
towards the target.
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How did they do this?
• The structural policy
• Price support alone is not enough, especially for
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very small farms. The CAP therefore provides a
number of other sources of support for
agriculture.
These include:
Aid for farms facing specific problems; for
example hill farms can obtain extra grants.
Aid to encourage farmers to modernise or
diversify; for example, there are grants for
some forestry schemes
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Did they succeed?
• Farmers could stay on the farms rather than
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abandoning them and moving to the towns. In
particular in the ‘difficult’ areas
Europe did produce much of its own food
Farmers did prosper and were able to invest in
their farms because they knew they would get a
reasonable price for their produce.
Food prices in the shops did not go up and down
too much. In fact consumers got good value
But ……
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We don’t
grow
sugarcane.
Why was
there too
much sugar?
What happened?
• This was the result!
What do
you think
the overproduction
of cereals
were
called?
What do you think the overproduction of olive oil was called?
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There were huge silos in the UK
• These contained many tonnes of grain, produced
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on huge cereal farms in the East of England – the
minimum prices and subsidies applied to all farms
– and the large English estates invested in
cutting down hedges (which they were paid to do
under improvement grants), larger machines and
increased fertilizer and pesticides.
All of which meant that they produced ever
more grain that was bought by government at a
guaranteed price.
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Elsewhere in Europe
• Poor quality wine was produced in vast
quantities and was again bought up by
government – hence the wine lakes.
• Milk production also exceeded national
needs and the result was stored in ‘butter
mountains’. Cheap butter was handed out
to those on benefits, just to try and get
rid of it.
• The milk was dried and was used in
industry in food production or passed to
developing countries as part of aid
packages.
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Obviously this could not go on …
• …as it has led to overproduction
• CAP had to be reformed:
• In 1991, arable farmers were paid to take up to
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20% of their land out of production – this was
called ‘set-aside’.
Milk over supply was tackled by giving dairy
farmers a quota – if they produced more than
they were allowed then they were penalised.
Pollution caused by stubble burning was banned.
Farmers of unviable units were paid to retire
early.
Farmers were paid extra to behave in
environmentally sensitive ways
Subsidies were reduced
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Obviously this could not go on
• Since 2000, further changes have taken place –
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direct subsidies are being reduced still further –
they will soon go.
A good thing in many ways – for instance hill
farmers are no longer encouraged to overstock
as they are not paid per animal but per acre –
this will give many overgrazed hillsides a chance
to recover.
Countryside stewardship grants are coming into
place, e.g putting back hedgerows!! as they are
environmentally friendly. Leaving unploughed
edges to fields which have not pesticides applied
all allow plants/animals corridors to exist in.
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Diversification
• Putting redundant building to different uses as
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workshops or holiday cottages – grants are
available to help and planning conditions are
relaxed – development outside the town and
village ‘envelopes’ are generally discouraged – but
farm diversification is treated as an exception.
Starting up farm shops, pick-your-own, Farmer’s
markets and other retail mechanisms
Growing willow or other non-agricultural crops is
encouraged/helped – alternative fuels.
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Review:
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What is CAP?
What was it trying do?
How did it set about doing it?
What was the downside?
When were the 2 major CAP reforms?
What was done in the first reform?
What happened in the 2nd major reform?
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Use these words to help you answer
these questions
• Beef mountain
• ceiling price
• Countryside
• Intervention price
• Overgrazing
• Price support
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Stewardship
Direct subsidies
Diversification
Food security
mechanism
Quota
Set-aside
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Genetic Modification
What is genetic engineering?
• Ever since farmers settled down in one place,
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they have picked out the best seeds to do the
job to save for next year. As a result we have
rice, wheat and potatoes which are bigger
versions of their wild cousins.
This selective breeding has been honed, so that
there has been deliberate breeding of useful
traits, both in plants and animals, to obtain
traits that are useful in particular circumstances
E.g. sheep – you get lowland types that do well on
flat land – they produce more meat/wool etc
Or highland types that are more surefooted,
hardier, better at giving birth in difficult
circumstances.
However there is a ‘But ….’ to selective breeding.
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What is genetic engineering?
• You interbreed between 2 individuals (plants or
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animals) which have 2 particular traits that you
wish to combine. You may have to produce many
offspring just to get one or 2 with the desired
traits – and there is no guarantee that their
offspring will have these traits –
E.g. Small blond person marries tall dark one –
and you can get any combination of small, medium
and tall with fair, blond or in between. Take 2
tall fair ones and likely as not some of their
children will be dark and short!
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What is genetic engineering?
• This where the genetic engineers come in.
• They find out which gene does what – not necessarily in
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the plant they want to change – and take that gene and
put it into cells which they then use to make seeds of the
plants/animals.
The major use of GM so far that is widely used
internationally is known as the Roundup system. Roundup
is a pesticide. You make your grain/soya resistant to
roundup. Then once the crop is growing you hit the whole
field with roundup and all the pests are killed but the
crop is unaffected. Because you can go in hard, you only
have to go in once – they say – reducing pesticide use and
cutting back on fuel (huge tractors use a LOT) and labour
costs. These seeds are also designed to be high
producers.
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What is genetic engineering?
• The added ‘they say’ is there because, it
has been shown that over time, the weeds
develop their own resistance – could be
the resistant genes get out into the wild
maybe? And the extra yield does not hold
up either – not without more fertilizer.
• That said, most of the maize, soya, oilseed
rape and cotton produced in the Americas
are now GM.
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What is genetic engineering?
• But there are worries about loss of genetic
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diversity.
In New Mexico many local varieties of chillies
are grown – the biggest producers in each area
are those best adapted to the climate and soil of
that particular place – and they are all hand
picked.
A biotech organisation is proposing to develop a
chilli which can be machine harvested – a huge
saving on labour costs
But – all those local varieties would be lost.
Also, a machine would just pick – it would not
know which ones were just ripe and those that
would need more time to reach their best.
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The African Green Revolution
• As mentioned before, GM specialists say they are the
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only ones who can save Africa.
They say they can produce drought resistant seeds,
seeds that withstand salt in the soil, among other
wonders that are needed to meet the challenges of
global warming. However they have been talking drought
resistance for some years – but we have not seen any yet!
But to be fair, work on producing ‘golden rice’ is
underway in Asia. This rice had been genetically modified
to produce vitamin A. It is a shortage of vitamin A that
causes widespread childhood blindness. All intellectual
rights on its development has been waived – this means
the farmers do not have to pay a premium and they can
save seed from year to the next and re-use.
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What are possible future uses of
biotechnology?
• Thus far we have pesticide resistant seeds that
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can reduce the use of pesticides and have an
increased yield
Also there are crops that are resistant to insect
pests or viruses.
Both these are helpful to farmers but have no
direct benefit to consumers.
However a few fruits and vegetables that have
been developed have a longer shelf life – this is
good for consumers but are as yet very small
scale.
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The future??
• While taking new land into agriculture is seen as
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environmentally negative, lots of land is
currently not used as it is too salty or too
alkaline.
A salt tolerance gene from mangroves has been
identified, cloned and transferred to other
plants. The transgenic plants were found to be
tolerant to higher concentrations of salt.
This gene from a bacterium has also been used
to generate salt-tolerant transgenic maize plants
Such genes are a potential source for developing
cropping systems for marginalised lands.
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The future??
• Following on from golden rice, another
research project in the pipeline is adding
iron to rice.
• Iron, largely found in meat and eggs and
some green vegetables, is very short in
many poorer diets.
• It causes anaemia and still births and has
been identified as a contributing factor in
over 20% of maternal deaths in Asia and
Africa.
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Can GMs reduce environmental impact?
• Many crops have developed as part of a system
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of ploughing and weeding. This leads to soil
erosion and soil nutrient loss.
In more traditional environments, minimum till
has long been employed and is now spreading
across the world, both in MEDCs and LEDCs, but
many of the currently used crops are not well
adapted to it.
The roots structure needs to be changed as the
soil will be harder and root diseases are more
common than in tilled environment.
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GM medicines?
• Research into the potential for GM technology to
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produce vaccines and pharmaceuticals in plants.
This could allow easier access, cheaper production, and
an alternative way to generate income in LEDCs.
Vaccines against infectious diseases of the gastrointestinal tract have been produced in plants such as
potato and bananas
Another appropriate target would be cereal grains. An
anti-cancer antibody has recently been expressed in rice
and wheat seeds that recognises cells of lung, breast and
colon cancer and hence could be useful in both diagnosis
and therapy in the future
Such technologies are at a very early stage in
development
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Why do people worry about GM foods?
• There are 2 main areas that concern those
who are against GM or transgenic
modification:
• Potential human health impacts, including
allergens, transfer of antibiotic resistance
markers, unknown effects
• Potential environmental impacts, including:
unintended transfer of trans-genes
through cross-pollination, unknown effects
on other organisms (e.g., soil microbes),
and loss of flora and fauna biodiversity
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Homework
• Using this website:
• http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/antenna
/futurefoods/
• And any others you like,
• Take a view on whether GM foods are a
good thing or not.
• Make a 3-slide presentation to support
your view.
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