Food As A Resource

IB Geography 11 Chapter 4 – Food as a resource Key terms Green revolution  Technological development in the 1960s  Purpose: to increase crop productivity to feed developing countries’ growing population  2 categories of development o Breeding new plant varieties o Modern agricultural techniques (chemical fertilizers, herbicides, irrigation, mechanization)  Began in Mexico in 1944  continued in India and Pakistan in the 1960s  Dr. Norman Borlaug led the program  Criticism: o Terminator seeds o Profit over people o “Playing God” (morality) o Environment o Activist Vandana Shina Starvation  Not getting enough food to sustain vital organs  Leads to death over enough time Malnutrition  Consuming fewer nutrients and calories, and less protein than needed to maintain long-term health  Result of insufficient diet  LEDCs: lack of food  MEDCs: obesity Chronic hunger  Long-term Periodic hunger  Short-term  Caused by factors such as drought, famine, war, conflict or political upheavals Agri-business  Large corporations involved in farming Crop substitutions  Corporations, with the help of the World Bank, convince subsistence farmers in LEDCs to restructure their economy: o Abandon food production, switch to commercial production of non-food crops  Crops: cocoa, cotton, cut flowers, asparagus, strawberries, grapes, etc.  Pros: o Helped farmers in MEDCs sell their surplus, get money

o Good for the corporations o Good for consumers in MEDCs  Ideally: o Farmers sell products on world market o Use money to buy food o Have surplus  Problems: o Prices for exports often don’t meet expectations o Farmers can’t buy as much food as they had previously grown themselves o Farmers are trapped because of contracts to corporations, and loans o Formerly self-sufficient countries (e.g. Sudan, Ethiopia) are now facing malnutrition Food aid  Pros: o Important when there are natural disasters  Cons: o Hindering the development of the commercial food growing industry in LEDCs in the long run o Local farmers can’t sell their products if MEDCs give food away cheaply or for free Productivity  Increases when less land per person produces more food per person  Amount of agricultural output a piece of land can yield High yielding crops  Genetically engineered to shorten growing cycle, enabling double cropping and even triple cropping of farmland  More resistant to disease  HYVs: high-yielding varieties  Especially wheat and rice  Between 1955 and 1995, India more than tripled its food production Irrigation systems  Artificial application of water to soil  Increased between 1981 and 1994  Especially Bangladesh (17%-37%), Nepal, North Korea Chemical pesticides and fertilizers  Increase farm productivity  Side-effects on biophysical environment  Iceland uses the most fertilizers Mechanical technology  Enables small number of people to achieve tasks that used to require a huge workforce  Largest increases of use of tractors from 1987 to 1997 in South Korea (903%), Indonesia, Burkina Faso, Indonesia Agricultural workforce

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Number of people around the world in agriculture is decreasing Farm amalgamations: neighbors or corporations buy farms and enlarge them to make the use of machinery easier Increased productivity