A REFLECTIVE ESSAY: FOOD SECURITY: WHY IS BIODIVERSITY IMPORTANT?
Alde, Kristine Demi
2NU01
May 9, 2022
Looking at things at this point, our world is slowly dying and it seems that there are no changes
even though people are aware of the world’s condition right now. One of the most prevalent problems
that we are still facing right now is food insecurity. It roughly affects more than 30% of the world
population and has been continuously climbing from its number. Now, for us to survive on a daily basis,
we have what we call “biodiversity”. It provides us ecological life support wherein it offers a functioning
ecosystem that helps in supplying clean air and water, oxygen, pollination of plants, and many ecosystem
services. So, what is the connection or relationship of food insecurity/security to biodiversity? For us
people to access sufficient, safe, and nutritious food, we need to attain different kinds of resources from
our biodiversity— for consumption and production. Now, we know that as the human population keeps
increasing and extra resources are being consumed, our biodiversity is at peril more so and the
“solution” implemented is not that much of help also.
The article I’ve read titled “Food security: why is biodiversity important?”, tackles the connection
between agriculture and biodiversity; activities that have devastating effects on biodiversity, different
challenges to biodiversity-friendly agriculture, the relationship between biodiversity and food security,
and what we humans must do to strengthen connections between agriculture and biodiversity and how
it can help achieve food security. From my observation and the things I read, it is clearly evident that the
current state of biodiversity is rapidly declining which means food and agriculture resources are also at
risk. Some of the contributors to its destruction were mentioned in the said article (Food security: why is
biodiversity important?) and it explained well how/why it happens or affects the biodiversity. The
challenges of biodiversity-friendly agriculture are related to population growth, climate change, gender
inequity, tenure, and agriculture investment. It was stated that to sustain the needs of approximately
nine billion people by the year 2050, conversion must take place by turning a billion hectares of natural
habitat into agricultural production and diet must be changed into meat consumption. Because of this
action, I have found that this is a threat to the reduction of food security. Food security does not mean
that having food on your plate is already okay, for example, this high demand for meat only shows food
insecurity as it does not provide sufficient meals for a “healthy lifestyle”. An increase in meat
consumption also leads to biodiversity loss because of the increased economic wealth and trends
towards urbanisation. Aside from that, increased production of meat and dairy products contributes to
the rise of greenhouse gas emissions which is largely a bad effect on our climate change. Moving on,
noting the climate change, it is surprising to know that it also added to the reason why we have food
insecurity. The question is, how? It is not news that we humans did a lot of harmful activities that
damage our environment and instigate the existence of climate change. We cut a ton of trees, consume
a large amount of fossil fuel (burning it also), and many more. Because of that, we are now experiencing
extreme and unpredictable weather which then affects our crop yields. People especially those who are
in developing countries will be deprived of access to food and cannot afford to purchase also because of
the sudden price changes (increase).
There are a lot of topics or issues mentioned in the articles I agree on and it somewhat gives me
also new insights into how badly we are in a situation now. Due to our greediness be it politically,
socially, or economically influences, we are now facing a dying world and we still are still doing not
enough to restore it. Conservation and restoration of ecosystem and knowledge from biodiversity
science and agricultural research are what we needed to do now.
