Key Terms

📖 Key Terms

Food security — When all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs for an active and healthy life. Has four pillars: availability, access, utilisation, and stability.

Food insecurity — The state of being without reliable access to sufficient, affordable, nutritious food. Affects approximately 828 million people despite the world producing enough calories to feed everyone. Root causes are unequal distribution, poverty, conflict, and climate change.

High Yield Variety (HYV) crops — Crop strains engineered or selectively bred to produce far more grain per plant than traditional varieties. Central to the Green Revolution. Require more water and fertiliser inputs than traditional varieties, creating resource trade-offs.

Agroforestry — Farming system that intentionally integrates trees and crops (or livestock) together on the same land. Mimics natural forest structure. Maintains biodiversity, improves soil health, and sequesters carbon, while producing food and other products.

Fairtrade — A trading partnership aimed at achieving greater equity in international trade. Farmers receive a guaranteed minimum price above the commodity market floor, plus a community premium. Aims to improve livelihoods in LICs and promote sustainable farming practices.

Irrigation — The artificial supply of water to farmland. Agriculture accounts for 70% of all global freshwater withdrawals. Increases yields in dry regions but can deplete groundwater, cause soil salinisation, and create long-term vulnerability to water scarcity.

Food miles — The distance food travels from the place of production to the final consumer. A crude measure of food system sustainability — more meaningful is total carbon footprint across the whole production system, not just transport.

The water-food-energy nexus — The interconnection between water, food, and energy systems such that pressure on any one creates pressures across the others. Growing more food requires more water and energy; producing more energy may use water and land that would otherwise grow food.

Subsistence farming — Farming primarily to feed the farming family, with little or no surplus for sale. Contrasts with commercial farming (producing crops or livestock for sale). Most of the world's 500 million smallholder farms are primarily subsistence-oriented.

Monoculture — Growing a single crop species on a large area of land repeatedly over time. Maximises short-term yield efficiency but reduces biodiversity, depletes soil nutrients, and creates vulnerability to disease (one pathogen can devastate the entire crop).