#greenrevolution — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #greenrevolution, aggregated by home.social.
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updates on my WIP industrial ag mega-zine:
i've made good progress on the green revolution materials. i completed a spread about how the US began linking food aid to india to increased fertilizer use targets in 1965, and how they conditioned the release of food aid to india agreeing to allow foreign-owned fertilizer plants in their country (a really important story that i wanted to get right).
i also finished a spread featuring the triumphal story of the beginning of the green rev. and another spread about the creation of the green revolution myth and the importance of "The Image" to the green revolution and other stories of agricultural modernization. the stuff about "The Image" is central to the whole project and i hope that the spread is appealing enough visually to encourage people to read it, because it's kind of a complicated subject.
i haven't decided yet whether i want to do a whole spread that sort of goes through "myth vs more complicated reality" of every part of the green revolution legend (was there famine in india? was indian agriculture 'hopelessly mired in the past'? did the new seeds solve famine? was the green revolution foisted on developing countries? etc.). ideally that would be included, because the completed pages only hint at the fact that the legend wasn't the whole story. but i will go back and do that later because i want to move on. i've spent so much time just trying to understand the story of the green rev, going through loads of source materials, and picking out the texts and images i wanted to use. i want to move to something else.
the next topic is RICE. rice and wheat were the two main green revolution crops, and the development of the green revolution varieties of rice and wheat are both fascinating. i don't know if i'll do a whole spread about wheat, but i definitely want to do a spread about rice because there's crazy stuff about the philippines and marcos, and crazy stuff about the US promoting the green revolution rice variety in vietnam during the vietnam war. which is so crazy to me...it's really doing a number on my head... on the one hand, it's a classic example of western liberalism: "we bomb you with one hand, and offer 'help' with the other." on the other hand, i'm sure that the scientists and other agricultural workers who were trying to help vietnamese villagers grow better rice in the middle of a warzone thought they were doing something good and helpful (and maybe they were...i don't know...).... a lot of the stories i've read so far are like "look at these brave people trying to do agricultural outreach during a war!" and in my mind i'm going "yea, it's YOUR country that's doing the war too, so wtf." oh, and eventually the viet cong got a hold of the new rice variety and grew plenty of it and it supported their efforts, so yea, it was a huge mess.
finally, i don't know if this will make it into the magazine, but i just read a story from the jan. 9, 1967 issue of "foreign agriculture" about malaysia's agricultural efforts. they wanted to diversify their crops, get some higher yielding varieties of rubber, and they also wanted to get in on the new varieties of rice. but their people didn't like the new varieties of rice, so the government wanted to encourage doing 2 plantings a year of the new variety, export that, and use the money to import the rice varieties that their people liked (which presumably, was already growing in malaysia). so there ya have it - that's economic progress and efficiency apparently...
here's the issue if you want to read it yourself: https://archive.org/details/CAT10252662185/page/6/mode/2up
the malaysia topic also starts to get at something that i think is super important but that i'm not sure will make it into the final magazine: the fact that agricultural "modernization" or the green revolution or the industrialization of agriculture did not happen the same way in any two countries, and didn't even happen the same way across different regions of a large country like india. every country's history was different...different ways that land was distributed...different kinds of crops that lent themselves to different kinds of processes...a lot of the tropical crops didn't have as much research done on them as the crops of colder places because the colder places had more $ to invest in agricultural research on crops that were of economic importance in their countries... post-colonial land reforms had varying degrees of success...large-scale irrigation and road networks varied... the attitudes of every country's government varied toward agricultural "modernization" at different times in each country's history... and of course there was a huge split between the communist sphere and the western sphere - china and russia took totally different paths toward agricultural "modernization" than the countries that the US was trying to influence, like mexico and india.
#agriculture #AgriculturalHistory #rice #food #history #research #WIP #GreenRevolution #india
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I agree. A second #GreenRevolution is direly needed. Probably even the only way out to preserve the current societies and reign in the #ClimateCatastrophy.
Systemic thinking and integrated approaches are of the essence.I had hoped to read about #Agrivoltaics, #WaruWaru and #Camellones. Alas, still none of these terms even appear in the "GLOBAL POLICY REPORT:
The Economics of the Food System Transformation".Sad.
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(1/2)
I agree. A second #GreenRevolution is direly needed. Probably even the only way out to preserve the current societies and reign in the #ClimateCatastrophy.
Systemic thinking and integrated approaches are of the essence.I had hoped to read about #Agrivoltaics, #WaruWaru and #Camellones. Alas, still none of these terms even appear in the "GLOBAL POLICY REPORT:
The Economics of the Food System Transformation".Sad.
-
(1/2)
I agree. A second #GreenRevolution is direly needed. Probably even the only way out to preserve the current societies and reign in the #ClimateCatastrophy.
Systemic thinking and integrated approaches are of the essence.I had hoped to read about #Agrivoltaics, #WaruWaru and #Camellones. Alas, still none of these terms even appear in the "GLOBAL POLICY REPORT:
The Economics of the Food System Transformation".Sad.
-
(1/2)
I agree. A second #GreenRevolution is direly needed. Probably even the only way out to preserve the current societies and reign in the #ClimateCatastrophy.
Systemic thinking and integrated approaches are of the essence.I had hoped to read about #Agrivoltaics, #WaruWaru and #Camellones. Alas, still none of these terms even appear in the "GLOBAL POLICY REPORT:
The Economics of the Food System Transformation".Sad.
-
(1/2)
I agree. A second #GreenRevolution is direly needed. Probably even the only way out to preserve the current societies and reign in the #ClimateCatastrophy.
Systemic thinking and integrated approaches are of the essence.I had hoped to read about #Agrivoltaics, #WaruWaru and #Camellones. Alas, still none of these terms even appear in the "GLOBAL POLICY REPORT:
The Economics of the Food System Transformation".Sad.