Global Food Security (005GSID)

30 credits, Level 6

Spring teaching

Achieving food security for 10 billion people while reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture is a major challenge of the next century.

In this module, we will discuss papers on the multiple dimensions of this challenge, including the biophysical, economic, nutritional, socio-political, and institutional.

We will take a global perspective on the issues, drawing upon both global-scale research as well as case studies from different regions of the world to understand the geography of agricultural production, its environmental footprint, and of malnutrition.

Key topics include:

• global change and sustainable agriculture
• what is food security?
• globalisation: the economics, finance and trade of food
• impact of climate change: mitigation and adaptation potential of agriculture
• farm management: soil-water-fertilizers
• livestock
• emerging issues in food security: biofuels, GMOs, labels, diets, urban agriculture, organic agriculture, permaculture.

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 300 hours of work. This breaks down into about 33 hours of contact time and about 267 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2024/25. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum.

We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.