Title: Agriculture >> globalEDGE: Your source for Global Business Knowledge
Headings: Agriculture: Background
Agriculture: Background
Industry Composition:
History:
Leaders:
Trends:
Major Issues:
Future Outlook:
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Content: Major Issues: The rapid growth of the world’s population has caused an increase in demand for food production. This has come with many problems. Many people complain about the negative environmental impacts of large-scale cultivation, such as soil salinization, the loss of ecosystems as they are turned into arable land, air pollution from burning fossil fuels for farm machinery and from the vast numbers of livestock, land pollution from fertilizers, and reduction of diverse biomasses to a select few species of flora and fauna that the industry has deemed profitable. As interest in biofuels continues to grow, expect the price of crops used to produce these fuels to increase as well. Finally, there are concerns about increased usage of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). GMOs pose a threat to local crops, both by the risk of farmers not using local crops anymore and by potential cross pollination with these crops, and can give too much pricing control to the creator of these seeds due to their patent protection. GMOs also allow for cheaper agricultural products, however; which is a huge issue with commodity prices on the rise recently. This increase in commodity prices impacts the agricultural industry in two ways: