Environmental Concerns are not at Cross Purposes to Farm Justice/Food Security

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-282-8_4How to use a DOI?

Keywords

farm justice; farm equity; farm sustainability; sustenance farming; food security; food sovereignty; food supply chain; hunger; wasting hunger; environmental concerns

Abstract

Hunger in America is unimaginable. There appears to be food everywhere, just buy it. Unfortunately, many sections of our country have subsets of the population without the means to buy, store and prepare nutritious food. From Appalachian hollers to inner city neglected areas to homeless and disenfranchised individuals (not all-American soldiers who come back from frontlines are living the American Dream). Especially after COVID and the looming worries of recession, many households are moving in together to afford the necessities of life. Many mortgaged homes and rental units are looking at eviction notices and people are complaining that food (one of the most basic necessities) is too high while farmers are not doing enough to produce more, cheaper food. Food security and farm justice are not opposed to each other, but it must come in a sustainable fashion not compromising the environment. The current big farm/industrial farm model is unsustainable. Slash and burn, moving to new untouched acreage and over-producing the land no long can be the normal way of farming. Many farmers agree but the support from officials, consumers and even academia is often not there to help many farmers make the transition to more environmentally friendly practices. Issues facing farmers and consumers include hunger, wasting hunger, just pay, under production to preserve the farm, natural cycle of regeneration, how food security works, and marketing. Other considerations which diminish farmers’ income include transportation, storage, labor, bio-security control and legal restrictions and regulations. Farmer markets should help drive agricultural production, food hubs and food deserts to provide food locally, economically, at a reasonable price for the support of the farmer and good of the community.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Cynthia Rice
AU  - Buddhi Gyawali
AU  - Marion Simon
AU  - Whitney Maynard
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/11/22
TI  - Environmental Concerns are not at Cross Purposes to Farm Justice/Food Security
BT  - Proceedings of the National Conference on Next-Generation Sustainable Technologies for Small-Scale Producers (NGST 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 21
EP  - 27
SN  - 2468-5747
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-282-8_4
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-282-8_4
ID  - Rice2023
ER  -