Green Revolution Chapter Summary

The green revolution is discussed in Paarlberg, and it highlights how the green revolution did two different things in two different locations, Asia and Latin America. While it stimulated the well-being of the poor in Asia it widened the gap between the wealthy and the poor in Latin America. These two places had different experiences with the battle against hunger but they both experienced negative environmental effects. I think that the negative effects on the environment that the green revolution helped to create in these two places were things that would have manifested in another area of environmental damage. Instead of fertilizer runoff doing damage to bodies of water, it would be the deforestation of land to make room for more farmland. There was probably a push to get the new seeds and conventional farming methods out to these places to reduce hunger, but in not properly educating the farmers with potential side effects it probably established the poor use of the advanced technology. Subsidies started out, in America, as a way to help out farmers, when the mass of farmers that produced food were not feeling the growth
I think that before reading this book I was under the impression that productivity was always a big goal of agriculture, and that with increased production that profit would naturally increase. Modern farming always to me seemed to be centered on the need to increase profits to establish a successful business, because making money is something that we view in this country as the standard measurement of success. I think that the focus on monetary gain here in America causes us to overlook things that might reduce how much “success” we experience, and that in the context of agriculture it truly does cause us to have short sighted