Download or read book The Violence of the Green Revolution written by Vandana Shiva and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Green Revolution has been heralded as a political and technological achievement—unprecedented in human history. Yet in the decades that have followed it, this supposedly nonviolent revolution has left lands ravaged by violence and ecological scarcity. A dedicated empiricist, Vandana Shiva takes a magnifying glass to the effects of the Green Revolution in India, examining the devastating effects of monoculture and commercial agriculture and revealing the nuanced relationship between ecological destruction and poverty. In this classic work, the influential activist and scholar also looks to the future as she examines new developments in gene technology.
Download or read book Red China s Green Revolution written by Joshua Eisenman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China’s future rapid growth. Red China’s Green Revolution tells the story of the commune’s origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China’s economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao’s collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping—not rural residents—who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China’s Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.
Download or read book Red Revolution Green Revolution written by Sigrid Schmalzer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-01-20 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1968, the director of USAID coined the term “green revolution” to celebrate the new technological solutions that promised to ease hunger around the world—and forestall the spread of more “red,” or socialist, revolutions. Yet in China, where modernization and scientific progress could not be divorced from politics, green and red revolutions proceeded side by side. In Red Revolution, Green Revolution, Sigrid Schmalzer explores the intersection of politics and agriculture in socialist China through the diverse experiences of scientists, peasants, state agents, and “educated youth.” The environmental costs of chemical-intensive agriculture and the human costs of emphasizing increasing production over equitable distribution of food and labor have been felt as strongly in China as anywhere—and yet, as Schmalzer shows, Mao-era challenges to technocracy laid important groundwork for today’s sustainability and food justice movements. This history of “scientific farming” in China offers us a unique opportunity not only to explore the consequences of modern agricultural technologies but also to engage in a necessary rethinking of fundamental assumptions about science and society.
Download or read book The Green Revolution written by Patrick Kilby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reviews the Green Revolution, starting with its inception and development from the 1940s to the 1970s, and leading to what is commonly referred to as a second Green Revolution in the 2000s. Building on the historical assessment, it draws insights for contemporary policy debates and demonstrates important lessons for the here and now. 'Green Revolution' refers to the technical measures employed to increase food (particularly grain) production, based mainly on improved seed varieties for higher yields and pest resistance. For it to be successful the Green Revolution often required land reform, investments in irrigation and fertilizer supply that were not available to women and marginal farmers. This book analyses three underlying principles that have guided green revolutions: the political environment in which they were set; how they contributed to both the successes and challenges the Green Revolution continues to face; and the systemic institutional barriers for access to these agricultural production advances, with a focus on how gender relations limit the inclusion of women even when they are the principle cultivators and farm managers. The book draws on experiences in Mexico, India and China, examining government policy, the role of the family farm, and key issues around the inclusion of women. In doing so, this book connects the history of the Green Revolution with contemporary policy debates on the developing world, particularly in relation to Africa and Asia, around foreign aid and agricultural research. It also specifically establishes that greater inclusivity for women and other marginalised farming communities will significantly enhance the effectiveness of these programs. Interlinking themes of development policy, gender, and agricultural research, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of agricultural development, food security, and sustainable development, as well as policymakers and practitioners working in international aid and agri-food policies.
Download or read book Seeds of Sustainability written by Pamela A. Matson and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeds of Sustainability is a groundbreaking analysis of agricultural development and transitions toward more sustainable management in one region. An invaluable resource for researchers, policymakers, and students alike, it examines new approaches to make agricultural landscapes healthier for both the environment and people. The Yaqui Valley is the birthplace of the Green Revolution and one of the most intensive agricultural regions of the world, using irrigation, fertilizers, and other technologies to produce some of the highest yields of wheat anywhere. It also faces resource limitations, threats to human health, and rapidly changing economic conditions. In short, the Yaqui Valley represents the challenge of modern agriculture: how to maintain livelihoods and increase food production while protecting the environment. Renowned scientist Pamela Matson and colleagues from leading institutions in the U.S. and Mexico spent fifteen years in the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, Mexico addressing this challenge. Seeds of Sustainability represents the culmination of their research, providing unparalleled information about the causes and consequences of current agricultural methods. Even more importantly, it shows how knowledge can translate into better practices, not just in the Yaqui Valley, but throughout the world.
Download or read book The Green Revolution in the Global South written by R. Douglas Hurt and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A synthesis of the agricultural history of the Green Revolution The Green Revolution was devised to increase agricultural production worldwide, particularly in the developing world. Agriculturalists employed anhydrous ammonia and other fertilizing agents, mechanical tilling, hybridized seeds, pesticides, herbicides, and a multitude of other techniques to increase yields and feed a mushrooming human population that would otherwise suffer starvation as the world’s food supply dwindled. In The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences, R. Douglas Hurt demonstrates that the Green Revolution did not turn out as neatly as scientists predicted. When its methods and products were imported to places like Indonesia and Nigeria, or even replicated indigenously, the result was a tumultuous impact on a society’s functioning. A range of factors—including cultural practices, ethnic and religious barriers, cost and availability of new technologies, climate, rainfall and aridity, soil quality, the scale of landholdings, political policies and opportunism, the rise of industrial farms, civil unrest, indigenous diseases, and corruption—entered into the Green Revolution calculus, producing a series of unintended consequences that varied from place to place. As the Green Revolution played out over time, these consequences rippled throughout societies, affecting environments, economies, political structures, and countless human lives. Analyzing change over time, almost decade by decade, Hurt shows that the Green Revolution was driven by the state as well as science. Rather than acknowledge the vast problems with the Green Revolution or explore other models, Hurt argues, scientists and political leaders doubled down and repeated the same missteps in the name of humanity and food security. In tracing the permutations of modern science’s impact on international agricultural systems, Hurt documents how, beyond increasing yields, the Green Revolution affected social orders, politics, and lifestyles in every place its methods were applied—usually far more than once.
Download or read book Green Revolution written by Ben Lowe and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2009-11-19 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are facing planet-sized challenges. Climate change and environmental crises can be pretty immobilizing, and we can fall into the temptation of thinking that we can't make a difference. But it's not just about what we can do on our own to make a difference. It's about what we can do when we mobilize together as a movement and combine for community action. Activist Ben Lowe calls the present generation to come together and care for the earth in a way that recent generations have not. Telling real-life stories of community organizing on college campuses across the nation, Lowe shows us that little things can make a big difference when we all work together. We now have an opportunity to show the world what it looks like when Christians care for the planet God gave us, so that future generations can live sustainably. This is our moment. This is our issue. Come join the green revolution.
Download or read book After the Green Revolution written by Gordon R. Conway and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Green Revolution' of the 60's and 70's produced immense gains in food cereal production in the Third World. But there are huge problems in the 'post-revolutionary' era: farmers with small or marginal holdings have benefited less than wealthier farmers; intensive mono-cropping has made production more susceptible to environmental stresses and shocks. Now there is evidence of diminishing returns from intensive and intensively chemical agricultural production. What is needed is a new approach, equally revolutionary, but different in its ideas and style. The authors set out what they mean by 'sustainable' agriculture in the new era and look at the effects of international economic restraints and of national policies on the kind of development they see as necessary. They chart a path for sustainable livelihoods for Third World farmers enmeshed by forces outside their control. They describe methods of evaluating and resolving the tough trade-offs all levels of intervention, from international trade down to the individual farm. This book cannot provide all the answers, but it does indicate what international conditions we need to be aware of, what national policies we need to advocate and what approaches at the local level we need to adopt to ensure the goal of agricultural sustainability. Originally published in 1990
Download or read book An African Green Revolution written by Keijiro Otsuka and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-22 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the usefulness of the Asian model of agricultural development for Africa, where, even before the recent world food crisis, half the population lived on less than on dollar a day, and a staggering one in three people and one third of all children were undernourished. Africa has abundant natural resources; agriculture provides most of its jobs, a third of national income and a larger portion of total export earnings. However the levels of land and labor productivity rank among the worst in the world. The book explains Africa’s productivity gap and proposes ways to close it, by examining recent experience in Africa and by drawing on lessons from Asia.
Download or read book Food S Frontier written by Richard Manning and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-10-29 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses how recent developments in agricultural research will affect different cultures in the future.
Download or read book The Green Revolution Revisited written by Bernhard Glaeser and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2010-11-29 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Green Revolution – the apparently miraculous increase in cereal crop yields achieved in the 1960s – came under severe criticism in the 1970s because of its demands for optimal irrigation, intensive use of fertilisers and pesticides; its damaging impact on social structures; and its monoculture approach. The early 1980s saw a concerted approach to many of these criticisms under the auspices of Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). This book, first published in 1987, analyses the recent achievements of the CGIAR and examines the Green Revolution concept in South America, Asia and Africa, from an ‘ecodevelopment’ standpoint, with particular regard to the plight of the rural poor. The work is characterised by a concern for the ecological and social dimensions of agricultural development,which puts the emphasis on culturally compatible, labour absorbing and environmentally sustainable food production which will serve the long term needs of developing countries.
Download or read book The Next Green Revolution written by James E. Horne and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2001-08-22 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors define sustainable agriculture as "the umbrella term for approaches to agriculture that are environmentally friendly, profitable, and fair to farmers and ranchers." One of Horne's positive solutions to agribusiness-as-usual is to pay farmers to implement sustainable practice, rather than pay them later to clean up pollution or compensate for overproduction. Horne's eight goals of sustainability are healthy soil, increasing water conservation and quality, managing organic waste without pollution, safer pest management, adopting livestock and crops more adapted to nature, increased biodiversity, energy conservation, increased profitability, and reduced risk. Horne hopes to convert farmers to sustainable agriculture with folksy lines like: "I feel like I'm carrying on in the pioneer spirit of Oklahoma-- breaking new ground, looking for a better life. What keeps me going is the knowledge that the good earth will sustain us if we treat her right." Horne is president of the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Oklahoma. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book The Green Revolution written by Stanley Johnson and published by Hamish Hamilton. This book was released on 1972 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about aspects of agricultural development, including new high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat. It is also about the men and women who work on the land or fish in the sea, and the "experts" and scientists who are striving to revolutionize their living conditions.
Download or read book The Violence of the Green Revolution written by Vandana Shiva and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Green Revolution has been heralded as a political and technological achievement -- unprecedented in human history. Yet in the decades that have followed it, this supposedly nonviolent revolution has left lands ravaged by violence and ecological scarcity. A dedicated empiricist, Vandana Shiva takes a magnifying glass to the effects of the Green Revolution in India, examining the devastating effects of monoculture and commercial agriculture and revealing the nuanced relationship between ecological destruction and poverty. In this classic work, the influential activist and scholar also looks to the future as she examines new developments in gene technology.
Download or read book Food S Frontier written by Richard Manning and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-10-29 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses how recent developments in agricultural research will affect different cultures in the future.
Download or read book Beyond the Green Revolution written by Kenneth Dahlberg and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, which is the result of an intellectual odyssey, began as an attempt to explore and map the environmental and cross-cultural dimensions of the continuing spread of the green revolution-that package of high-yielding varieties of grain, fertilizers, irrigation, and pesticides that constitutes the core of modern industrial agriculture. In the process of traversing the terrain of several intellectual traditions and cutting through various disciplinary forests and thickets, a number of striking observations were made-all leading to two sober ing conclusions. First, most intellectual maps dealing with agriculture fail to recognize it as the basic interface between human societies and their environment. Because of this, they are little better than the "flat earth" maps of earlier centuries in helping to understand global realities. Second, when agriculture is analyzed from a global perspec tive that takes evolution seriously, one sees that the ecological risks as well as the energy and social costs of modern industrial agriculture make it largely inappropriate for developing countries. Beyond that, one can see a great need within industrialized countries to develop less costly, less risky, and more sustainable agricultural alternatives. Early in the journey it became clear that conventional disciplinary approaches were inadequate to comprehend the scope and diversity of global agriculture and that a new multilevel approach was needed. It also became clear that any new approach would have to try to correct certain Western biases and blind spots.
Download or read book The Green Revolution A Mixed Blessing written by Sonja Meyer and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2008-10 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Environmental Policy, grade: A+, University of Otago (New Zealand - Department of Anthropology), course: Global Politics of Food, 19 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper will look at the effects of the Green Revolution. As part of the imperial strategy of US foreign policy, the new agricultural strategy shows how the World food system does not only consist in food trade itself, but also comprises the industry of respective production factors. Through development strategies like the Green Revolution, the US manage to boost its own economy while pretending to have only altruistic and benevolent intentions. The interrelatedness of agricultural practices and the wider system of societal organization leads to the fact that this imperialism does not only impose economic standards but also affects the cultural sphere of the concerned countries.
