Resource provision

Cambridge IGCSE Geography 0460 · Paper 2 Human Geography Syllabus: 2027, 2028 and 2029 Official syllabus points: 10.1.1 to 10.6.4

Topic 10 is the last of the five human topics examined on Paper 2. It is really two topics bolted together: food (10.1 to 10.3) and energy (10.4 to 10.6). Each half ends with its own detailed specific example, so you need two separate case studies, one country or area for food and one named country for energy.

Every extended question in this topic is marked on the same level ladder. Simple statements sit at the bottom, a named example lifts you into Level 2, and place specific detail, meaning real names, real figures and real dates, is what buys the top mark. Mark schemes on this topic print the instruction "Max 5 if no named or inappropriate example" again and again on the 7 mark questions, so a correct but placeless answer is capped by rule, not by the examiner's judgement. Learn the two examples in section 19 properly.

What is new for 2027. Several statements in this topic have no past paper behind them, because they did not exist before. The genuinely new material is: aeroponics, aquaponics and hydroponics named as farming types; global patterns of calorie intake; the globalisation of food supplies, both reasons and impacts; food insecurity as the organising idea in place of "food shortages"; an explicit evaluation of food aid; and energy surplus, deficit and energy security. Where you see the flag [new for 2027] below, treat the section as untested ground and prepare it from first principles rather than from a past paper. Two things have gone the other way: the old case study of a farm or agricultural system has been removed, and so has the whole water topic.

1. Farming types

Syllabus point 10.1.1 names eight farming types. They are listed by name, which means the examiner can ask you to define any one of them, or to identify one from a photograph, a map extract or a table.

The last three are [new for 2027] as named types. They were previously credited only as one of several methods of raising output, which is exactly how the 2022 and 2024 mark schemes list them, alongside terracing and glasshouses.

Getting the labels right

A farm carries more than one label at once. A single farm can be commercial, arable and intensive all at the same time. A past paper question that showed a photograph of a large cereal farm awarded the marks for arable, commercial and intensive together, so do not stop at one word when the question offers you three ticks.

Intensive and extensive are worth knowing even though the 2027 list does not name them. Mark schemes still use them freely, and a photograph question about a large cereal farm or a battery poultry unit is easier to answer with them.

• Intensive farming uses a large amount of input, of labour or of capital, on each hectare, and produces a high yield per hectare. Market gardening, battery poultry and rice paddies are intensive.
• Extensive farming uses a small amount of input on each hectare over a very large area, and produces a low yield per hectare but a large total output. Sheep grazing in upland Britain and cattle ranching on the Pampas are extensive.

Why mixed farming is popular

This has been asked directly, and the mark scheme is generous if you give real reasons rather than repeating the definition.

• If the crop fails the farmer still has the animals, and the other way round, so the risk is spread.
• Animal manure fertilises the crop fields, cutting the cost of bought fertiliser.
• Crop waste and fodder crops feed the animals, cutting the cost of bought feed.
• All types of land can be used: fertile flat soil for crops, thin or steep land for grazing.
• Work and income are spread through the year instead of arriving in one harvest.
• The farmer can switch between crops and livestock as demand and prices change.

2. Farming systems: inputs, processes and outputs

Syllabus point 10.1.2. A farm is treated as a system, exactly like the drainage basin in Topic 1.

Exam trap: irrigating is a process, but the water itself is an input. Fertiliser is an input, but applying it is a process. Mark schemes on this topic split hairs here, so classify by the verb: if the sentence describes an action, it is a process.

Physical factors and agricultural land use

The 2027 syllabus folds these into "inputs" rather than giving them a statement of their own, but the exam has asked about them constantly, including at 7 marks, so prepare them properly.

1. steep slope
2. machinery cannot be used and runoff strips soil nutrients
3. soil is thin and infertile
4. arable farming is uneconomic
5. the land is used for grazing sheep or goats instead.

Human factors

• Market access. Most farm produce is bulky, heavy or perishable, and moves in slow vehicles, so transport is expensive. Being near a market cuts that cost and lets the farmer sell fresh produce, which is why market gardening and dairying cluster around cities.
• Capital available for machinery, seed, fertiliser and irrigation.
• Labour supply and its cost.
• Government policy: subsidies, quotas, land reform, price guarantees.
• Technology and knowledge, including access to advice and to improved seed.
• Land tenure: whether the farmer owns the land, rents it, or farms a fragmented set of tiny plots.

3. Global patterns of calorie intake [new for 2027]

Syllabus point 10.2.1. Calorie intake is the amount of food energy a person consumes in a day, measured in kilocalories, written kcal. It is also one of the development indicators named at syllabus point 8.1.1, so the same data serves two topics.

A typical adult needs roughly 2,000 to 2,500 kcal per day, and the exact figure rises with body size, with physical activity and in cold conditions. The world average dietary energy supply is now a little under 3,000 kcal per person per day according to FAO food balance sheets, which is more than enough in total. The problem is distribution, not global quantity.

The broad pattern

• Highest intake: high income countries in North America and Western Europe, and some high income countries elsewhere, typically well above 3,300 kcal per person per day. Over consumption, obesity and food waste are the issue here, not shortage.
• Middle: middle income countries such as China, Brazil and much of North Africa, where intake has risen fast in the last thirty years.
• Lowest intake: low income countries, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, and in parts of South and Southeast Asia. Some fall below 2,200 kcal per person per day, and conflict affected states fall lower still.

Reasons for the variation

Exam trap: a high average calorie intake does not mean nobody is hungry. National averages hide inequality inside the country, which is exactly the same criticism made of GNI per head at syllabus point 8.1.2.

4. The changing global production and consumption of food

Syllabus point 10.2.2. The examiner wants reasons for change, so write causes, not just a description of the graph.

Why global food production has risen

• The Green Revolution. From the 1960s, high yielding varieties of wheat and rice, notably the IR8 rice variety released in 1966, combined with fertiliser, pesticide and irrigation, multiplied yields in India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Mexico.
• Mechanisation, allowing one worker to farm far more land.
• Irrigation, bringing dry land into production and allowing two or three harvests a year instead of one.
• Fertiliser and pesticide, raising yield per hectare and cutting losses to pests and disease.
• Selective breeding and genetic modification, giving higher yielding, disease resistant and drought tolerant crops and faster growing livestock.
• More land farmed, through clearing forest, draining wetland and irrigating desert margins.
• Better storage, transport and refrigeration, cutting the share of the harvest lost after it is picked.

Why global food consumption has risen

• Population growth. More people simply eat more food.
• Rising incomes in middle income countries, so people eat more and eat better.
• Dietary change, above all the shift towards meat and dairy. This raises demand far more than the headcount suggests, because it takes several kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of meat.
• Urbanisation, which shifts people from growing food to buying it, and towards processed and convenience food.
• Biofuel demand, which diverts maize and sugar cane away from the food supply.

1. incomes rise in middle income countries
2. diets shift towards meat and dairy
3. several kilograms of grain are needed per kilogram of meat
4. demand for cereals rises much faster than population
5. world grain prices rise
6. the poorest households can afford less food than before.

5. Strategies and techniques used to increase food supply

The syllabus lists this twice, at 10.2.3 and again at 10.3.3, once as a global strategy and once as a response to the challenges of food supply. Learn it once and use it in both places. This is the single best rewarded list in the topic, because mark schemes award one mark for naming a method and a second for explaining why it increases output.

Marks note: a mark scheme asking why increasing food imports is not a sustainable strategy credits exactly these points: people cannot afford imported food, imports add to debt and to a balance of payments deficit, imports can be cut off in a war or a political dispute, and home production never develops. Sustainability in this topic means a strategy that keeps working after the money and the aid stop.

6. Reasons for the globalisation of food supplies [new for 2027]

Syllabus point 10.2.4. Globalisation of food means that food is increasingly produced in one country and eaten in another, so that a supermarket in a high income country stocks the same products all year round regardless of season.

• Cheaper, faster transport. Containerisation, refrigerated shipping, air freight and bulk carriers cut the cost of moving food a long way.
• Refrigeration and controlled atmosphere storage, which keep fruit, meat and fish saleable for weeks.
• Consumer demand for out of season and exotic produce, so buyers want strawberries in winter and mangoes in a temperate country.
• Trade liberalisation: lower tariffs and quotas, and trade blocs and agreements.
• Lower production costs abroad, especially land, labour and a climate that allows year round growing.
• Transnational corporations and supermarket chains organising global supply chains and contracting directly with growers overseas.
• Communications and technology, allowing an order, a payment and a shipment to be tracked in real time.
• Migration, which creates demand for the foods of the migrants' home country.

7. The impacts of the globalisation of food supplies [new for 2027]

Syllabus point 10.2.5. Sort the answer into social, economic and environmental, and remember the syllabus definition that impacts can be positive and/or negative and act at a range of scales. An answer that is only negative is an incomplete answer.

A worked example to use. Kenya grows green beans, mangetout and cut flowers around Lake Naivasha for export by air to European supermarkets. The trade earns foreign currency and employs tens of thousands of people, many of them women in paid work for the first time. Against that, the crops are irrigated from a lake in a semi-arid country, the produce is air freighted, and growers are paid on contracts they do not set.

1. supermarkets in high income countries want produce out of season
2. they contract growers in low and middle income countries with the right climate
3. export horticulture expands
4. foreign currency and wage jobs arrive
5. but land and water shift from local food crops to export crops
6. and the country becomes dependent on the price a distant buyer chooses to pay.

8. The human and natural factors negatively affecting food supply

Syllabus point 10.3.1. The 2027 wording asks for human and natural factors, so an answer that gives only drought and flood cannot reach the top. Past mark schemes are explicit that both sides are needed when both are asked for.

Natural factors

• Drought, the single most quoted cause. Rainfall fails, crops wither, pasture dies, livestock die.
• Flooding, which drowns crops, washes away topsoil and destroys stored grain.
• Tropical storms, which flatten crops, kill livestock and destroy roads and stores.
• Pests, notably desert locust swarms, and animals and insects that eat the standing crop.
• Crop and livestock disease, which can destroy an entire harvest or herd.
• Infertile, thin or exhausted soils, and soil erosion which removes what fertility there is.
• Desertification on the desert margins, taking farmland out of use permanently.
• Volcanic eruption, tsunami and landslide, destroying farmland in one event.
• Climate change, making rainfall less reliable and heat stress more common.

Human factors

• Poverty. Farmers cannot afford seed, fertiliser, tools or irrigation, and consumers cannot afford to buy food that exists in the market.
• War and civil conflict. Crops are destroyed, farmers are displaced or conscripted, roads are mined or blocked, and aid cannot reach the people who need it.
• Corruption and poor governance, diverting food, money and aid.
• Cash crops for export grown on land that once grew food for local people.
• Rapid population growth, so output per person falls even when output rises.
• Poor distribution and transport, so food rots in one region while another goes short.
• Loss of farmland to urban growth, industry, housing and tourism.
• Land fragmentation, leaving plots too small to be economic.
• Debt, tariffs and inflation, so the country cannot afford to import and the household cannot afford to buy.
• Lack of education about rotation, storage and soil conservation.

1. prolonged drought
2. crops fail and pasture dies
3. households eat their seed grain and sell their livestock
4. they have nothing to plant next season
5. the shortage continues into a second and third year even if the rains return.

9. The problems caused by food insecurity [new wording for 2027]

Syllabus point 10.3.2, and the wording matters. Food insecurity means not having reliable access to enough safe and nutritious food for an active, healthy life. It is a broader idea than the old "food shortage", because it includes people who eat today but do not know whether they will eat next month.

The syllabus asks for problems in countries at different levels of development, so contrast the two, which the old question wording never demanded.

In low income countries

• Malnutrition, meaning a diet lacking protein, vitamins or minerals, causing kwashiorkor, marasmus, anaemia, rickets and blindness from vitamin A deficiency.
• Stunting and wasting in children, which is permanent if it happens in the first years of life.
• Starvation and famine, and a rise in the death rate with a fall in life expectancy.
• Weakened immunity, so ordinary infections become fatal.
• Children cannot concentrate at school or stop attending, so education and future earnings suffer.
• Adults become unproductive, so output falls and the shortage deepens.
• Desperate farming: overgrazing, overcultivation and deforestation as people try to squeeze more out of the land, which causes soil erosion and desertification and makes the next harvest worse.
• Outward migration to cities, to camps or across borders.
• Rising food prices, so the poorest are priced out first.
• Conflict over land, water and food, and dependence on overseas food aid.
• Government spending diverted from schools and clinics to emergency relief.

In middle and high income countries

• Food insecurity here is usually about cost and access, not national shortage. Households on low incomes rely on food banks and buy cheap, energy dense food.
• Hidden hunger: enough calories but too few micronutrients.
• Obesity and diet related disease rising alongside food insecurity in the same population, because the cheapest calories are the least nutritious.
• Food deserts in poor urban neighbourhoods where fresh food is not sold nearby.
• Political pressure and cost when world prices spike, since these countries import heavily.

1. food insecurity
2. adults are weak and children miss school
3. labour productivity and future skills fall
4. household income falls
5. the family can afford even less food
6. the insecurity becomes permanent rather than seasonal.

10. An evaluation of the role of food aid [new for 2027]

Syllabus point 10.3.4. The command word is evaluate, so a list of what food aid is will not do. You need both sides and a judgement.

Three types to distinguish

The case for food aid

• It saves lives immediately in a famine, when nothing else acts fast enough.
• It prevents the permanent damage of childhood malnutrition.
• School feeding raises attendance, especially for girls, and improves learning.
• Food for work builds terraces, roads, wells and irrigation, so the aid leaves an asset behind.
• It stops distress selling of livestock, tools and land, so households can recover.
• It stabilises prices and reduces conflict and mass migration.

The case against, and the problems

• It treats the symptom, not the cause. It does nothing about drought, soil erosion, poverty or war.
• Dependency. Long running free food discourages people from farming.
• Cheap or free food undercuts local farmers, so the next harvest is smaller and the country needs more aid.
• It can be diverted by corruption or captured by armed groups, and used as a political weapon.
• Distribution fails where roads, ports and storage are poor, or where conflict blocks access.
• Imported food may not match local diet or culture, and may arrive late or in the wrong form.
• It costs a great deal to ship, and the money might buy more if spent on local purchase or on irrigation.

How to write the judgement. Food aid is necessary and effective in an emergency, where it is the only thing that works and where the alternative is death. It is a poor long term strategy, because it does not touch the causes and can weaken the local farming it is meant to replace. The strongest answers argue for the middle position now taken by most agencies: buy the food locally or regionally where markets are working, use cash transfers rather than shipped grain where food is available but unaffordable, and tie relief to longer term schemes such as food for work and social protection so that it builds capacity rather than replacing it. Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme, described in section 19a, is the standard example of aid turned into a predictable, work based safety net rather than an annual emergency appeal.

11. Managing desertification and soil erosion

Syllabus point 10.3.5, and again the command word is evaluate, and again the syllabus adds including sustainable.

The two problems defined

Soil erosion is the removal of topsoil by wind or by running water, faster than it can be replaced.

Desertification is the process by which land in semi-arid areas becomes desert like, losing its vegetation, its soil fertility and its ability to support farming.

Causes

1. too many livestock on dry grassland
2. grass is eaten and trampled faster than it regrows
3. roots no longer hold the soil and the surface is left bare
4. wind and rain strip the topsoil
5. less vegetation means less transpiration and less local rainfall
6. the land dries further and desertification advances.

Effects

On the natural environment: vegetation is damaged or destroyed; soil becomes infertile and is eroded; gullies form; rivers and reservoirs silt up; habitat is lost; biodiversity falls and species disappear; sand encroaches; dust storms increase; rainfall patterns change.

On people: loss of farmland and falling yields; food shortage and famine; loss of drinking water and longer journeys to fetch it; livestock die; income and livelihoods lost; malnutrition and disease; conflict over the remaining land and water; outward migration, often to cities; and greater vulnerability to the next drought.

Marks note: the mark scheme for a 7 mark desertification question printed a stricter cap than usual: "MAX 5 if no references to places where desertification is occurring" and "MAX 6 if only one reference to a place". One named place is not enough on that question. Learn at least two, for example the Sahel belt south of the Sahara and northern China around the Gobi margin, or Angola and Nigeria if you prefer the countries the exam has actually printed.

Strategies and techniques for managing the problem

How to write the evaluation. The large, top down schemes are visible and attract funding but are hard to sustain. Africa's Great Green Wall, launched by the African Union in 2007 and intended to run about 8,000 km across the Sahel from Senegal to Djibouti with a target of restoring 100 million hectares by 2030, has delivered far less than the target and has shifted from a literal wall of trees to a mosaic of local land restoration projects. The small, cheap, local techniques have the better record: zaï pits and stone bunds in Burkina Faso, revived and spread by local farmers from the 1980s, restored tens of thousands of hectares of abandoned land at almost no capital cost, because farmers built and maintained them themselves. The judgement to write is that sustainable management works with existing farmers, uses local labour and materials, needs no imported technology and therefore survives the end of the funding, but it acts slowly and cannot on its own reverse a regional advance of the desert.

12. Types of energy

Syllabus point 10.4.1 lists the types by name, in three groups, and the third group is a deliberate trap.

Renewable

Non-renewable

• Fossil fuels: coal, gas and oil. Formed over millions of years from buried organisms, burned to raise steam or drive turbines. Finite, and the main source of carbon dioxide emissions.
• Nuclear. Uranium atoms are split in a reactor, releasing heat which raises steam. It emits almost no carbon dioxide in operation, but uranium is a finite resource and the waste is radioactive for thousands of years.

Fuelwood, which can be either renewable or non-renewable

This is the statement the syllabus goes out of its way to make, so the exam can ask it. Fuelwood is renewable if trees are replanted and cut no faster than they regrow. It becomes non-renewable when it is cut faster than it regrows, which is exactly what happens around growing settlements in dry regions, and is a direct cause of deforestation and desertification.

Why fuelwood matters. A past mark scheme on the importance of fuelwood credits: it is used mainly in low income countries and in rural areas; it may be free to the user; it needs no expensive technology or grid connection; it is the fuel for heating and cooking; it can be sustainable if managed; in some areas there is little wood left; and it can be sold at the roadside as charcoal for cash.

13. Reasons for the increasing global production and consumption of energy

Syllabus point 10.5.1.

• Population growth. More people need light, heat, cooking and transport.
• Economic development and industrialisation. Factories, mines and construction use enormous amounts of energy.
• Rising incomes, so households buy fridges, air conditioning, televisions, phones and cars.
• Urbanisation, which brings people onto a grid and into an energy intensive way of living.
• Transport growth, both private cars and freight, and air travel.
• Electrification, extending the grid into rural areas that previously had none.
• Technology, including data centres, computing and the electrification of heating and vehicles.
• Mechanisation of farming, which substitutes fuel for labour.
• Global trade, which moves goods over long distances.

1. a country industrialises
2. factories, mines and construction demand power
3. wages rise and households buy appliances and vehicles
4. the grid is extended into rural areas
5. energy consumption per person rises alongside total population
6. national energy demand grows much faster than population alone.

The relationship with wealth. Mark schemes reward a clear link between GDP per person and electricity use per person: in richer countries more people can afford electricity, more devices are owned per household, more homes are connected to a better grid, more secondary and tertiary workplaces use power, and transport is more likely to be electric. Poorer countries lack the money, the technology and the skills to generate and distribute electricity. The relationship is positive but not perfect, and the anomalies are worth naming: an oil exporting state with a small population uses a great deal of energy per person, and a wealthy service economy with efficient buildings uses less than its income would suggest.

14. Energy surplus, energy deficit and energy security [new for 2027]

Syllabus point 10.5.2.

• A country has an energy surplus when it produces more energy than it consumes, so it can export. Examples include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Norway, Australia and Canada.
• A country has an energy deficit when it consumes more than it produces, so it must import. Japan, South Korea, Germany, India and most of Western Europe run deficits.
• Energy security means having a reliable, affordable and uninterrupted supply of energy. A country is energy secure when it can meet its demand without depending on a supplier it cannot control.

What makes a country energy secure or insecure

Global pattern to describe. Fossil fuel reserves are unevenly distributed: oil is concentrated in the Middle East, Russia, the United States and Venezuela; coal in China, the United States, India, Australia and Russia; gas in Russia, Iran, Qatar and the United States. The countries that consume the most, by contrast, are the large industrial economies, so the geography of production and the geography of consumption do not match, and energy moves across the world in pipelines and tankers. That mismatch is the whole reason energy security is a political question.

1. a country imports most of its gas through a single pipeline
2. a political dispute or a conflict interrupts the supply
3. there is no alternative source and no storage
4. prices spike and industry is rationed
5. the government responds by diversifying the energy mix and building domestic renewable capacity.

15. Variations in the types of energy used

Syllabus point 10.5.3 asks about variation within a country and between countries at different levels of development. Both halves are needed.

Between countries

Within a country

Variation inside one country is a favourite of the data response questions, and Australia has been used for exactly this. The reasons are the same but at a smaller scale:

• Physical geography varies by region. A mountainous, wet state generates HEP; a flat sunny state generates solar; a coalfield state burns coal.
• Resources are where they are. Power stations are built on or near the coalfield, the gas field or the river.
• Population and industry cluster, so demand is concentrated in a few places while generation is spread out.
• Regional government policy can differ within a federal country.
• Grid connection: remote communities off the grid use diesel generators or standalone solar.

16. The advantages and disadvantages of different energy sources

Syllabus point 10.6.1, which explicitly says including renewable and non-renewable. This table is the highest yielding single page in the topic.

Marks note: a question that asks for benefits and disadvantages will cap each side. One wind power mark scheme reserved a maximum of three marks for the benefits and three for the disadvantages out of five, so a one sided answer loses marks it could have had for free. The same applies to a "for and against nuclear power" question, which reserved two marks for each side.

17. Strategies and techniques used to increase energy supplies

Syllabus point 10.6.2. Note the direction of this statement: increasing supply, which is not quite the same as managing it in 10.6.3.

• Develop new fossil fuel fields, including offshore drilling, deep water fields, tar sands and shale gas by fracking.
• Build new power stations, whether coal, gas or nuclear.
• Build large renewable schemes: dams for HEP, wind farms onshore and offshore, solar farms, geothermal fields, tidal barrages.
• Small scale and decentralised generation: rooftop solar, micro hydro, solar mini grids and biogas digesters for villages the grid does not reach.
• Import energy, by pipeline, tanker or interconnector cable from a neighbour.
• Extend and modernise the grid, cutting transmission losses and connecting new regions.
• Energy storage: batteries at grid scale, and pumped storage that uses spare power to pump water uphill and releases it at peak demand.
• Research and development, including hydrogen and improved battery chemistry.
• Government incentives: subsidies, feed in tariffs and guaranteed prices that make private investment in renewables worthwhile.

18. An evaluation of the strategies used to manage energy supplies

Syllabus point 10.6.3, which again says including sustainable. Managing supply is not only about producing more. Half the marks lie in reducing demand, and a candidate who writes only about building things is missing that half.

Reducing and managing demand: conservation and efficiency

How to write the evaluation

Group your judgement rather than listing. Fossil fuels are reliable, cheap and already built into the grid, but they are finite and they are the main cause of enhanced global warming and of air pollution. Nuclear power supplies large, steady, low carbon output and is not weather dependent, but it carries very high construction and decommissioning costs, an unsolved waste problem and a level of public opposition that has closed programmes in several countries. Renewables are sustainable, have almost no running cost and cannot run out, but most are intermittent, need backup or storage, need the right physical conditions and cost a great deal to build.

The strongest answers make three moves. First, that no single source solves the problem, so a diverse energy mix is itself the strategy, because it protects against both intermittency and political interruption. Second, that reducing demand through efficiency and conservation is usually cheaper per unit than building new capacity, and is the most genuinely sustainable option because it removes the need for the energy rather than finding a new way to supply it. Third, that what is realistic depends on the country: a low income country with no grid may gain more from decentralised solar mini grids and improved cooking stoves than from a national programme it cannot finance.

19. Detailed specific examples

Syllabus points 10.3.6 and 10.6.4 each require one detailed specific example. That is two separate case studies. Cambridge does not name them, so you may use different ones, but each must cover the bullet points listed in the syllabus. The examples below meet those bullets. Learn names, dates and figures, because mark schemes describe Level 3 as needing "locational details, specific details, statistics, dates".

19a. Food supply and food insecurity: Ethiopia

The syllabus requires factors affecting food supply, causes of food insecurity, problems caused by food insecurity and strategies and techniques used to increase food supply, for a named country or area.

The setting. Ethiopia is a low income country in the Horn of Africa with a population of roughly 126 million in 2023, making it the second most populous country in Africa. Agriculture provides around a third of GDP and employs roughly two thirds of the workforce, and the great majority of farmers are smallholders working plots of about one hectare, mostly by hand and mostly dependent on rain rather than irrigation. That combination, a very large rural population farming small rain fed plots, is the reason a failure of the rains becomes a national emergency.

Factors affecting food supply

• Natural: rainfall failure. Ethiopia depends on two rainy seasons, the short belg rains and the main kiremt rains. The El Niño event of 2015 and 2016 produced the worst drought in about fifty years, and successive failures of the rains between late 2020 and early 2023 gave the Horn of Africa five consecutive failed rainy seasons, the longest such run on record.
• Natural: relief and soil. Much of the highland is steep, and centuries of cultivation and grazing have stripped the topsoil, so soil erosion is severe and yields are low even in a good year.
• Natural: pests. A major desert locust upsurge from late 2019 into 2021 stripped crops and pasture across the Horn of Africa.
• Human: conflict. The war in Tigray from November 2020 to November 2022 displaced farmers, destroyed harvests and stores, and blocked the movement of both commercial food and aid into the region.
• Human: population growth, which divides the same farmland among more households each generation and pushes cultivation onto steep and marginal land.
• Human: poverty and lack of inputs. Most smallholders cannot afford fertiliser, improved seed or irrigation, so yields stay low and there is no reserve to carry into a bad year.
• Human: infrastructure. Poor rural roads mean produce cannot reach markets, and relief cannot reach remote districts.

Causes and problems of food insecurity

• Millions of people required emergency food assistance. In early 2016, at the peak of the El Niño drought, the government and the United Nations put the number needing emergency food aid at about 10.2 million people, on top of the millions already covered by the safety net programme.
• Livestock deaths on a very large scale during the 2020 to 2023 drought destroyed both the food supply and the savings of pastoralist households, since herds are the family's wealth.
• Malnutrition, stunting and wasting in children, with long term damage to health and to schooling.
• Displacement, as households left drought hit and conflict hit districts for towns and camps.
• Overgrazing, overcultivation and cutting of trees for fuel as households tried to survive, which worsened soil erosion and made the following season's harvest smaller still.
• Price rises for staple grains, which pushed food out of reach even for households that were not farming.

Strategies and techniques used to increase food supply

• The Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), launched in 2005, is the central strategy. Instead of an annual emergency appeal, chronically food insecure households receive predictable cash or food transfers, and most of them work in return on public works: terracing hillsides, digging water harvesting structures, planting trees and building rural roads. It has covered roughly 8 million people, making it one of the largest social protection programmes in Africa. It is the clearest example in this topic of food aid converted into a sustainable, asset building scheme.
• Soil and water conservation. Terracing, stone bunds, check dams and area closures, where degraded hillsides are fenced off from grazing so vegetation can recover, have been carried out at large scale, much of it through PSNP public works.
• Afforestation. The Green Legacy Initiative, launched in 2019, has planted very large numbers of tree seedlings. The government reports figures in the billions, though independent verification of survival rates is limited, so treat the headline number with care and quote the policy rather than the total.
• Irrigation schemes, both small scale river diversion and larger schemes, to reduce dependence on the rains.
• Improved seed, fertiliser and extension services, delivered through one of the largest agricultural extension worker networks in Africa, with a national push for wheat self sufficiency using irrigated lowland production.
• Early warning systems using rainfall and market monitoring, so relief can be pre positioned before a famine develops rather than after.
• Emergency food aid and cash transfers from the World Food Programme and non-governmental organisations during the worst years.

Evaluation. The strategies that build assets, the safety net public works, terracing and area closures, are the sustainable ones, because they leave behind terraces and recovered hillsides that keep working after the programme ends, and because they are built with local labour and local materials. Emergency food aid remains necessary when the rains fail entirely, but it treats the symptom, and it has to be repeated. What no strategy inside Ethiopia can fix is the conflict and the rainfall, which is why food insecurity has persisted despite two decades of investment.

1. the rains fail for a second consecutive season
2. smallholders have no harvest and no seed grain left
3. they sell or lose livestock and cut trees for charcoal to raise cash
4. the hillsides are left bare and topsoil is eroded
5. the next harvest is smaller even if the rains return
6. food insecurity becomes chronic rather than seasonal.

19b. Energy: China

The syllabus requires the energy mix, the impacts of the different types of energy being used and the strategies and techniques used to manage energy supplies, including sustainable, for a named country.

The energy mix. China is the world's largest producer and consumer of energy and the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide. Its mix is dominated by coal, which supplied roughly 55 to 60 per cent of primary energy and around 60 per cent of electricity generation in 2023, down from around 70 per cent of primary energy in the early 2010s. Oil and gas make up most of the rest of the fossil share, largely imported. Alongside that, China has built the largest renewable fleet in the world: it is the largest producer of hydroelectric power, the largest installer of solar and wind capacity, and in 2023 it installed more solar capacity in one year than the rest of the world combined, taking its total installed solar past 600 GW. Nuclear power supplies a small but rapidly growing share, under 5 per cent of electricity.

The single landmark is the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, completed in 2012, with an installed capacity of 22,500 MW, the largest power station in the world by capacity.

Impacts of the energy being used

Coal

• Environmental: the dominant source of China's carbon dioxide emissions, and therefore a major contributor to enhanced global warming. Sulphur dioxide causes acid rain, which has damaged forests, soils and buildings across southern China.
• Social: severe urban air pollution, with fine particulates causing respiratory and cardiovascular illness. The worst smog episodes in Beijing and the northern industrial cities closed schools and grounded flights.
• Economic and social: coal mining employs very large numbers of people, and mine accidents have killed thousands. Mining subsidence and spoil damage farmland.
• Positive: coal is domestic, abundant and cheap, so it gave China energy security and powered the industrial growth that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.

Hydroelectric power

• Positive: the Three Gorges scheme generates very large amounts of low carbon electricity, controls flooding on the Yangtze which had killed hundreds of thousands over the previous century, and improves navigation so larger ships can reach Chongqing.
• Negative, social: about 1.3 million people were displaced by the reservoir, and towns, villages and archaeological sites were flooded.
• Negative, environmental: the reservoir traps sediment, so land downstream receives less fertile silt and the coastline is eroding; river ecology changed and species including the Yangtze river dolphin declined; the weight of the reservoir has been linked to landslides and to seismic activity along the valley sides.

Wind and solar

• Positive: no emissions in use, no fuel cost, and a domestic manufacturing industry employing large numbers of people and exporting worldwide.
• Negative: the best wind and solar resources are in the sparsely populated west and north, notably Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Xinjiang, while demand is on the eastern seaboard, so long transmission lines are needed and some output was wasted for years because the grid could not carry it. Large solar farms take land, and manufacture is itself energy intensive.

Nuclear

• Positive: reliable low carbon baseload; Negative: high cost, waste disposal, and public concern after the Fukushima accident of 2011.

Strategies and techniques used to manage energy supplies

• Targets. In 2020 China announced that its carbon dioxide emissions would peak before 2030 and that the country would reach carbon neutrality by 2060.
• Massive renewable build out, with world leading annual additions of solar and wind capacity, supported by state investment and by guaranteed prices.
• Ultra high voltage transmission lines to carry power from the wind and solar regions of the west and north to the industrial east, which is the technical fix for the mismatch between where the resource is and where the demand is.
• Nuclear expansion, with a continuing programme of new reactors on the coast.
• Closing small, dirty coal plants and replacing them with larger, more efficient units, and fitting flue gas desulphurisation to cut acid rain.
• Air quality action plans in the major cities, restricting coal burning, moving heavy industry out of urban areas and switching household heating from coal to gas and electricity in northern cities.
• Electric vehicles, with subsidies, purchase incentives and charging infrastructure making China by far the largest electric vehicle market in the world.
• Energy efficiency standards for industry, appliances and buildings, and targets for energy use per unit of GDP.
• Pumped storage and grid scale batteries, to deal with the intermittency of wind and solar.
• Import diversification, through pipelines from Central Asia and Russia and long term liquefied natural gas contracts, so that oil and gas supply does not depend on a single route.

Evaluation. China shows both what works and what the limits are. The renewable build out is real and enormous, and it has driven down the global cost of solar panels and turbines, which is a benefit far beyond China. Efficiency standards and the shift of household heating away from coal have visibly improved urban air quality. But coal still supplies the majority of electricity, new coal plants continue to be approved to guarantee supply through demand peaks, and the intermittency of wind and solar is precisely why coal is retained as backup. The honest judgement is that a country of this size cannot switch mix quickly without risking energy security, so the strategy is addition rather than replacement: renewables are being built faster than anywhere else, while the coal fleet is being made cleaner rather than removed.

1. demand for electricity grows faster than renewable capacity can be added
2. coal generation is retained as reliable backup for windless and cloudy periods
3. emissions stay high even as renewable capacity breaks records
4. so grid scale storage and transmission, not generation alone, become the real constraint on the transition.

20. Fieldwork links for Paper 4

Paper 4 is now called Geographical Investigations, and farming has appeared in it directly. A past investigation compared land use, inputs and outputs on two farms in different parts of the United Kingdom, using tables of input costs and outputs.

Hypotheses this topic supports

• The physical geography of the local area affects land use on the farms.
• Two farming systems have the same input costs and the same outputs. (This one is set up to be false, which is the point.)
• Energy use per household varies with the type of housing in the local area.
• The use of solar panels in the local area has increased over time.

Methods to be able to describe

• Land use mapping. Walk a defined route with a base map and record the use of each field or plot against a prepared key.
• Farm questionnaire or interview with the farmer, covering inputs bought, processes carried out month by month, outputs sold and costs. Pilot the questions first.
• Repeat visits in different seasons, because a single visit shows only the processes happening that week. Mark schemes credit exactly this: make more visits, visit in different seasons, or observe the farmer at work.
• Secondary data: farm accounts, government agricultural statistics, rainfall and temperature records, and online sources.
• Soil sampling for texture, moisture and pH at fixed points across a field, using the same depth each time.
• Household energy questionnaire, recording appliances owned, insulation, heating fuel and any solar panels.

Reliability points that earn marks

• Ask the same questions in the same order at every site, or the answers cannot be compared.
• Use a large enough sample: two farms is a small sample and the conclusion should say so.
• Repeat measurements and take averages.
• Record the date and the weather, because farm processes and energy use are both seasonal.
• Be honest about bias: a farmer may not want to disclose real costs, and a questionnaire respondent may overstate how green their household is.

21. Common exam mistakes

• Giving no named example on a 7 mark question. The mark scheme caps you at 5, and on the desertification question it caps you at 5 for no place and at 6 for only one place.
• Naming a country but giving no detail inside it. Level 3 needs figures, dates or specific locations within the place.
• Answering "human and natural factors" with only one of the two.
• Writing only the disadvantages of a fuel when the question says benefits and disadvantages. Mark schemes reserve marks for each side.
• Confusing inputs with processes. Water is an input; irrigating is a process.
• Confusing food shortage with food insecurity. Insecurity is the wider idea, and it exists in high income countries too.
• Saying that renewable energy is free. The fuel is free; the construction is very expensive, which is exactly why many countries do not use it.
• Treating fuelwood as simply renewable. The syllabus states it can be either, and the reason is the rate of cutting against the rate of regrowth.
• Confusing hydroponics (water and nutrient solution), aeroponics (roots in air, misted) and aquaponics (fish plus plants in one loop).
• Listing energy management strategies without any mention of reducing demand. Conservation and efficiency are half of 10.6.3.
• Naming a strategy without saying how it works or giving any drawback, on a question that says "evaluate".
• Writing only the negative impacts of the globalisation of food. The syllabus definition of impacts is positive and/or negative.
• Treating the two detailed examples as one. Points 10.3.6 and 10.6.4 require a food example and a separate energy example.
• Quoting an energy statistic without a year. Energy mixes change fast, and a percentage with no date invites the examiner to doubt it.

22. Quick revision

• Farming types named by the syllabus: subsistence, commercial, arable, pastoral, mixed, aeroponics, aquaponics, hydroponics.
• Farm as a system: inputs (physical and human), processes (the verbs), outputs (products, profit and waste).
• Physical factors shaping land use: temperature, rainfall, relief, aspect, soil, drainage.
• Calorie intake: an adult needs roughly 2,000 to 2,500 kcal a day; the world average supply is a little under 3,000; the lowest intakes are in sub-Saharan Africa. The problem is distribution, not global total.
• Food production rose through the Green Revolution, irrigation, fertiliser, mechanisation and breeding. Consumption rose through population, income, meat eating and urbanisation.
• Strategies to raise food supply: irrigation, fertiliser, HYV and GM seed, mechanisation, terracing, greenhouses, hydroponics and aeroponics, aquaculture, land reform, education, reducing post harvest loss. Imports are not sustainable.
• Globalisation of food is driven by cheap transport, refrigeration, demand for out of season produce, trade liberalisation and transnational corporations.
• Factors hurting food supply: natural are drought, flood, storms, pests, disease, poor soil; human are poverty, war, corruption, cash crops, population growth, poor distribution.
• Food insecurity causes malnutrition, stunting, higher death rates, lost schooling, overgrazing and overcultivation, migration and conflict.
• Food aid saves lives in an emergency but does not treat the cause and can undercut local farmers. Local purchase, cash transfers and food for work are the better long term forms.
• Desertification and soil erosion come from overgrazing, overcultivation, deforestation, downslope ploughing and drought. They are managed by afforestation, contour ploughing, terracing, stone bunds and zaï pits, cover crops, controlled herd size, efficient irrigation and alternative fuels.
• Renewable energy: biomass, geothermal, HEP, solar, tidal, wave, wind. Non-renewable: coal, gas, oil, nuclear. Fuelwood is either, depending on the rate of regrowth.
• Energy demand rises with population, industrialisation, income, urbanisation, transport and electrification. Electricity use per person rises with GDP per person.
• Energy security means a reliable, affordable, uninterrupted supply. A diverse mix and domestic production raise it; dependence on one fuel, one supplier or one route lowers it.
• The mix a country uses depends on physical conditions, domestic reserves, wealth and technology, government policy, existing infrastructure and level of development.
• No single energy source is best. The strategy is a diverse mix plus demand reduction through efficiency and conservation.
• Two detailed examples required: one country or area for food supply and insecurity, one named country for energy.
• A named example is worth two marks. Place specific detail is worth the top mark.

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