34 Introduction

About Module 6

Food and agriculture are important for one simple reason: Everyone eats. Without food, we could not survive, let alone do anything else. And there are a lot of people around the world – more than seven billion. This means that there is a lot of agriculture going on in order to produce a lot of food. Finally, there are concerns about whether our agriculture can persist into the future. All this means that food and agriculture are crucial aspects of sustainable development around the world.

In this module, we are going to learn some major facets of food and agriculture as they relate to sustainable development and other important individual and societal issues. We’ll see how food is produced and how it affects both our health and the natural environment. We’ll consider a variety of ethical and policy issues raised by food and agriculture. And we’ll consider how agriculture can be sustained into the future.

What will we learn in Module 6?

By the end of Module 6, you should be able to:

• discuss what industrial agriculture is and the social and environmental impacts that it has;
• explain the unique issues raised by the use of livestock animals;
• describe connections between food-agriculture systems and nutrition;
• discuss major societal issues in food choice and policy.