Nowadays we have a busy life in megacities engaged with cars
and technology, oftentimes we don’t have time to think about our feeding and
health. Why feeding is less important than work, smartphones, cars, etc.? Dalai
Lama said “Man, because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then
he sacrifices money to recuperate his health…” when asked what surprise him
most about humanity. Every day we eat! Our life depends on food! Therefore
agriculture is very important not only to human feed but to take care of the
nature and economically.
The first important function of agriculture is human feed
and the most famous function, because we know which we need to eat to survive.
But in this part have much others characteristic. In agriculture we can produce
health food, with less calories, with more vitamins and break the American
habit to eat fast-food and caloric things. Fast foods and processed foods have
more sodium, calories, Trans fat and sugar, therefore these things can develop
diabetes, obesity, diseases and others problems to human health according to
Clay McNight in his text “Healthy Food vs Fast Food”. Besides we can develop
good food to our herd. When we take care and treat correctly, we can produce
good meat and more food to feed the population. According to United Nations
World Food Programme one in eight people do not have access to enough food to
be healthy, Asia is the continent with most number of hunger (two third of the
total). Researchers have been worked in indoor farms to stay close to the big
hunger areas like Dubai, Qatar and Abu Dhabi said Tafline Laylin in her text “A
Hunger for Solutions”.
Another important function in agriculture is all which
involving the nature. “The Mother Nature” as we call! We can’t grow without
think in protect her. In the 21st century we start to hear this word
more than other centuries due to greenhouse and deforestation. So, researchers
worked to figure out alternative sources of biofuel in order to decelerate the
effect of greenhouse gases and which one don’t aggress the earth. Countries
like Brazil and U.S.A. have been produced biofuel using sugarcane, corn
respectively and another types of material as industrial waste. But that is not
the only way to protect the nature, we can use less products in the crops to
control pests or weeds. Every year products are developed to protect plants and
no affect the landscape, for example pesticide which kill only the pests and it
don’t devastates the bees. “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe
then men would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more
pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” It is a famous
phrase by Albert Einstein.
A third important function in agriculture is economy. The
agriculture is the most important source of money in countries as Brazil, where
agriculture corresponds to 5.5% to GNP according to Wikipedia and indispensable
in U.S.A. and European Union. Among the world’s largest companies many of these
work in agriculture like Monsanto, Bayer, John Deere, BASF and much others.
This companies work to develop seeds with high technology, each seed have a lot
of researches to found the better gene to transform in a great and productive
plant; also advance products to plant protection to avoid problems with the
nature and human health; fertilizers according to a kind of soil, crops or
country and trucks and machines to different operations and situation like pesticide
application or harvester of eucalyptus.
From these information we can see how agriculture became
important and necessary to the whole society, in several areas. So, we must
develop the agricultural full potential in all aspects, uniting technology to
sustainability with the intention to increasingly reduce the world hunger
without harming nature.