Agriculture is the science and art of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in cities. The history of agriculture began thousands of years ago. After gathering wild grains beginning at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers began to plant them around 11,500 years ago. Pigs, sheep and cattle were domesticated over 10,000 years ago. Plants were independently cultivated in at least 11 regions of the world. Industrial agriculture based on large-scale monoculture in the twentieth century came to dominate agricultural output, though about 2 billion people still depended on subsistence agriculture into the twenty-first.
In the 80s and 90s, there was widespread media coverage of the problem of hunger in some countries, and the world was shown scary footage of hungry children on television. Although the countries where they lived were usually overpopulated and had dictatorial regimes in power.
The world's population has grown decently, but despite this, the problem of hunger in some countries has practically disappeared. And no, they did not start to engage in efficient agriculture or their population decreased, they just began to be fed more efficiently by developed countries.
Another more curious trend in the world is the growing number of countries that cannot feed themselves from their agriculture. Moreover, not only the number of these countries is growing, but also the share of agricultural products that are imported by overpopulated countries in this sense. And also there are such strange projects as the lease of huge tracts of land for agriculture by large private companies from Asian countries in Africa or Latin America.
Agricultural performance varies dramatically across countries. In European and Western countries, as well as in highly developed Asian countries, it is incredibly effective, while in African and some Asian countries, its effectiveness has practically not changed over the millennia. Moreover, no one wants to change it's condition.
In innovation business, agriculture remains one of the most popular topics, from vertical farming to irrigation systems in the desert. Declaring that they will solve the problem of hunger in the world, on which if you travel, you will see huge areas of unused agricultural areas. And as one capitalist said, the problem is not in world hunger, but in the pockets (money) of these very hungry people.
Russia, being the Soviet Union, imported wheat from the United States, although now it exports more than America itself. My grandmother told me that the Soviet Union grew enough grain, but could not process it. As a result, problems with food supply was added to the economic collapse of the USSR, which served as the main driver for the collapse of the USSR, however, like the Russian Empire, the predecessor of the USSR 100 years ago.
The newborn problem of agriculture is methane. The previous with GMO now is less observed in media. The thing that they made a methane from cows a problem and probably it will a next big fight for environment. Livestock expansion is cited as a key factor driving deforestation and will contunier growing.
And the last one. Trump insist China to buy production from American farmers. But we know that chinese that live in America and eat American food became more fat. That means that if China buy American farmers products, chinese will become more fat and can't effectively work, decreasing the quality and rising the price of chinese goods all over the world. Even some of them will be so fat that can't attent there job at factories daily. And eating the American food they will like America and hate China, that also happened with soviet people in soviet Union in 80s. Yea and of course America will be great again.
S.S.