ABSTRACT
The basis of the modern food system has involved major human
interventions into natural ecosystems, and their fundamental redesign
from complex and diverse habitats to agro-ecosystems often
characterised by monoculture production. Such transformations have
taken place in terrestrial (land-based) ecosystems to produce annual and
perennial crops and livestock, as well as in coastal, estuarine and
freshwater ecosystems in order to create highly productive aquaculture
operations providing fin-and shellfish. This transformation of natural
ecosystems got under way even before the development of agriculture
around 12,000 years ago, when bands of hunters used fire to flush out
their prey. Yet it is with the emergence of agriculture, when humans first
planted, deliberately and consciously, a seed, tuber or cutting with the
expectation that it would grow and produce a multiple of the original,
that the composition of ecosystems began to be actively manipulated.
