The Green Revolution in the Global South

The Green Revolution in the Global South PDF Author: R. Douglas Hurt
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817320512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
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.

The Green Revolution in the Global South

The Green Revolution in the Global South PDF Author: R. Douglas Hurt
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817320512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Red China's Green Revolution

Red China's Green Revolution PDF Author: Joshua Eisenman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231546750
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
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.

The Long Revolution of the Global South

The Long Revolution of the Global South PDF Author: Samir Amin
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
ISBN: 1583677747
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
The final writings of Samir Amin—a mix of personal experiences and theoretical analysis of global challenges and movements In this second volume of his memoirs, Amin takes us on a journey to a dizzying array of countries, recounting the stages of his ongoing dialogue over several decades with popular movements struggling for a better future. As in his many works over the years, The Long Revolution of the Global South combines Amin’s astute theoretical analyses of the challenges confronting the world’s oppressed peoples with militant action. In these final writings based on his life, Amin presents us with theoretical interventions, analyses of political conjunctures, and narration of personal experiences. Amin’s reminiscences of travels to places too often overlooked by the world at large are a joy to read. We even catch a glimpse of some of his memorable—and sometimes not so memorable—culinary adventures.

Africa’s Green Revolution

Africa’s Green Revolution PDF Author: William G. Moseley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317288068
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This volume examines the dominant neoliberal agenda for agricultural development and hunger alleviation in Africa. The text reviews the history of African agricultural and food security policy in the post-colonial period, across a range of geographical contexts, in order to contextualise the productionist approach embedded in the much heralded New Green Revolution for Africa. This strategy, supported by a range of international agencies, promotes the use of hybrid seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides to boost crop production. This approach is underpinned by a new and unprecedented level of public–private partnerships as donors actively work to promote the private sector and build links between African farmers, input suppliers, agro-dealers, agro-processors, and retailers. On the consumer end, increased supermarket penetration into poorer neighbourhoods is proffered as a solution to urban food insecurity. The chapters in this volume complicate understandings of this new approach and raise serious questions about its effectiveness as a strategy for increasing food production and alleviating poverty across the continent. This book is based on a special issue of African Geographical Review.

Water, Energy, Food and People Across the Global South

Water, Energy, Food and People Across the Global South PDF Author: Larry A. Swatuk
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783319877020
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
This collection critically engages the resource use nexus. Clearly, a nexus-approach to resource policy, planning and practice is essential if sustainable development goals are to be met. In particular, in an era of climate change, an integrated approach to water, energy and agriculture is imperative. Agriculture accounts for 70% of global water withdrawals, food production accounts for 30% of global energy use and a rising global population requires more of everything. As shown in this collection, scholars of resource development, governance and management are ‘nexus sensitive’, utilizing a sort of ‘nexus sensibility’ in their work as it focuses on the needs of people particularly, but not only, in the global South. Importantly, a nexus-approach presents academics and practitioners with a discursive space in which to shape policy through research, to deepen and improve understandings of the interconnections and impacts of particular types of resource use, and to critically reflect on actions taken in the name of the ‘nexus’.

The Green Revolution Revisited

The Green Revolution Revisited PDF Author: Bernhard Glaeser
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1136891633
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
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.

Just Give Money to the Poor

Just Give Money to the Poor PDF Author: Joseph Hanlon
Publisher: Kumarian Press
ISBN: 1565493907
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
* Argues strongly for overlooked approach to development by showing how the poor use money in ways that confound stereotypical notions of aid and handouts * Team authored by foremost scholars in the development field Amid all the complicated economic theories about the causes and solutions to poverty, one idea is so basic it seems radical: just give money to the poor. Despite its skeptics, researchers have found again and again that cash transfers given to significant portions of the population transform the lives of recipients. Countries from Mexico to South Africa to Indonesia are giving money directly to the poor and discovering that they use it wisely “ to send their children to school, to start a business and to feed their families. Directly challenging an aid industry that thrives on complexity and mystification, with highly paid consultants designing ever more complicated projects, Just Give Money to the Pooroffers the elegant southern alternative “ bypass governments and NGOs and let the poor decide how to use their money. Stressing that cash transfers are not charity or a safety net, the authors draw an outline of effective practices that work precisely because they are regular, guaranteed and fair. This book, the first to report on this quiet revolution in an accessible way, is essential reading for policymakers, students of international development and anyone yearning for an alternative to traditional poverty-alleviation methods.

Red Revolution, Green Revolution

Red Revolution, Green Revolution PDF Author: Sigrid Schmalzer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022633029X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
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.

Europe's Green Revolution and Others Since

Europe's Green Revolution and Others Since PDF Author: Jonathan Harwood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415598680
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This book focuses on the development of public-sector plant-breeding in Germany from the nineteenth century through its fate under National Socialism, arguing that peasant-friendly research has an important role to play in future Green Revolutions.

Hungry Nation

Hungry Nation PDF Author: Benjamin Robert Siegel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108695051
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
This ambitious and engaging new account of independent India's struggle to overcome famine and malnutrition in the twentieth century traces Indian nation-building through the voices of politicians, planners, and citizens. Siegel explains the historical origins of contemporary India's hunger and malnutrition epidemic, showing how food and sustenance moved to the center of nationalist thought in the final years of colonial rule. Independent India's politicians made promises of sustenance and then qualified them by asking citizens to share the burden of feeding a new and hungry state. Foregrounding debates over land, markets, and new technologies, Hungry Nation interrogates how citizens and politicians contested the meanings of nation-building and citizenship through food, and how these contestations receded in the wake of the Green Revolution. Drawing upon meticulous archival research, this is the story of how Indians challenged meanings of welfare and citizenship across class, caste, region, and gender in a new nation-state.