Summary of Pages 1086-1090

In some of the developing countries, it was discovered that there were limitations to the amount of industrializing they could do, and therefore they began to take a renewed interest in agriculture.
Why had agriculture been neglected in the first place??
Agricultural economy=colonial servitude
Low food prices squeezed agriculture and farmers
Too many obstacles to industrialized agriculture: farms too small and fragmented, peasants too stubborn to change their ways, landless laborers and peasants who had to work the land had no incentives to work harder, land reform was needed, and this was too radical of a measure (often brought violence and civil war).
Most countries had plenty of food before the mid-1960s and the US always sent cheap food to countries whose crops had failed.
HOWEVER, then, people started to worry that with population increase there wouldnt be enough food to go around. What did they do to counter this??
They made hybrid seeds to grow in tropical climates and to produce higher yields. For example, "miracle rice" produced 2-4 crops per year.
This transformarion of agriculture in poor countries became known as the GREEN REVOLUTION:
At first, it only benefitted only those that could afford irrigation and fertilizer investments, but it eventually started to help others, especially in China under Deng Xiaoping. In addition, though, it really only spread and took root in places where peasants owned a substantial amount of the overall land. For this reason, it failed in Latin America for the most part, because 3-4% of the population owned 60-80% of the land. Also, it did not really spread in drier regions like Africa, as there wasn't really any extensive irrigation. Africa is better suited for dry farming and farming of root crops, whereas the Green Revolution was more geared toward irrigation and farming of grain.
Currently, there are some fears about genetically modified crops:
It is unknown as to what effects they can have on the body
They could cause a loss of biodiversity (if all plants are the same, all are suceptible to the same pests and climate changes, so the entire crop would fail instead of only some if disaster struck.)
Corporate ownership of different seeds meant farmers would be dependent on a few multinational businesses. since seeds could only be used for one year, they would have to keep returning to these companies for a new stock
Gap between rich and poor would widen: as genetically modified foods became cheaper and more accessible to poor, rich would move on to buy "healthier" organic, chemically-free foods.