Green Revolution Essay Example

Green Revolution Essay Example Green Revolution Essay Green Revolution Essay The success of industrialization in the world has led to environmental issues through the world. As the 21st century begins, many nations are trying to deal with with the environmental effects of industrialization. Therefore began the green revolution, an attempt to change and if not change at least make progress. Starting in the early 19th Century the United States underwent an industrial revolution. The work that many people did changed as they moved from farms and small workshops into larger factories. They tended to buy things in stores, rather than make them at home or trade with their neighbors. They used machines, and purchased the products of machines, more than they ever had. The small-scale centers of textile production discussed in Unit 1 lasted well into the 19th century. But the manufacture of textiles began to change dramatically, starting as early as the sasss, as these traditional sources were first Joined, and then replaced, by a new material, a new kind of agriculture, and a new kind of factory. : The material processed changed, from linen and wool to cotton; the way that cotton was grown and prepared changed, with the invention of the cotton gin and the reinvention of the plantation; ewe machines, invented to process the cotton, found a new setting in larger and more complex factories. Together, these changes added up to an industrial revolution. This textile revolution did not happen everywhere in the United States at the same time, and its effects were quite different in different areas. Perhaps the largest change came in the South, where the new demand for cotton was supplied by plantations based on slave labor and mechanized processing of the cotton by the cotton gin. (Gin is short for engine. ) The Northeastern United States changed aromatically as home spinning and weaving, and small-scale carding and filling mills gave way to large integrated mills where a new kind of worker used new machines to produce cotton cloth on a scale previously unimagined. Smaller mills remained, and would remain for the rest of the century, but for the most part, only in areas of low population far from the commercial markets of the Northeast. This account of the American Industrial Revolution is different from the usual one found in textbooks. Many textbooks claim, for example, that the Industrial Revolution did not occur until he end of the 19th century, with the coming of massive steel mills and the end of small-scale production. And they omit the mechanization and reorganization of Southern plantations, on the grounds that agricultural production is not part of the history of industry. While this traditional story is not wrong, it leaves out an important part of the story. Let also leaves out many people who participated in and whose lives were changed by industrialization. To focus on factories, which have traditionally employed native white and immigrant workers, and from which African Americans ere kept by racial prejudice, leaves out a large group whose story is a key element of American history. Slaves produced the cotton that made possible Northern factories, a piece of history often slighted in favor of stories about those factories. In this curriculum we have widened our point of view to include Southern cotton production as part of textile history. So slavery, and later sharecropping, becomes an of the history of technology; and technology becomes part of African American history. Such an inclusion view should help students of color imagine themselves s people who, like their ancestors, use and control technology. Based on an ancient technology, the introduction of the saw gin at the end of the 18th century changed the nature of American cotton cultivation. Developed Just as the world-wide demand for raw cotton was skyrocketing because of the expansion of textile mills in Britain and the United States, the machine removed the principal bottleneck to cotton production. Even the early machines allowed one person to clean the seeds from fifty pounds of green-seed cotton in one day. Soon cotton became the most important market crop in the South. Production went from 3,000 bales in 1790 to 1 million bales in 1835. With the opportunity to make a good profit from cotton came dramatic changes in Southern agriculture: increased size of plantations, and to work them, increased numbers of slaves. African slaves had been used in Southern agriculture almost from the beginning of European settlement. Tobacco planters had used slaves since the 17th century; slaves were critical to the rice cultivation that developed in the 18th century. Plantations, large farms using slave labor to grow a single crop, were created to make a profit for the owners before technology made cotton a cash rope and before slavery was the only labor system. But plantations were adapted to produce cotton in the 19th century and by then many of them employed only slaves. Planters became wealthy by exploiting the labor of Africans in America, men and women who could not choose another way of life. The growth of cotton as a cash crop in the 19th century meant the growth of slavery throughout the South. Slavery, which had been in decline, became an integral part of the new agriculture. It might seem odd that a new labor-saving machine like the cotton gin meant an increase in the size of the labor force. But the lower price meant an enormous increase in cotton production, and even with the cotton gin, cotton production still required an enormous amount of labor. Cotton demanded large plantations; it made money only when plantation owners could put more workers in the field. From an investors point of view, slaves were a capital investment, comparable to the machinery a northern factory owner might purchase. Many nations throughout the world have to deal with the effects of industrialization. This problem goes back all the way to the Industrial Revolution that started in the mid-sass in England. As a result, these countries are now trying to find ways to resolve these problems. New organizations and countries are working to resolve these problems, such as the Greenback, the United Nations, and the ROI Conference. The Industrial Revolution was the time of change from making goods in the home to making them in a factory. These factories led to an increase of pollution. Industrialization causes many problems in todays nations. Some of these problems include air pollution, water pollution, land pollution, global warming, and the destruction of forests and forest life. Air pollution is event in highly industrialized countries. Industrialized is a term that means producing many goods, usually in factories. The smoke giving off these factories include high amounts of CO and carbon emissions. Countries that are highly industrialized are putting out six times the amount of CO gas developing, non-industrialized countries. This CO gas is harming the environment and ruining the ozone layer. The rate of carbon emission the amount in highly industrialized countries by the year 2020. Most of these gases are formed in industrial cities. Factory smokestacks and car exhaust pipes put these out. When countries do not have the natural resources for farming and food they build up their cities so they have a means of production. Japan is one such country. Because it lacks fertile soil for growing crops it relies on industry to get the products it needs. She has to trade manufactured goods for food products. Cities such as Tokyo have become highly developed and crowded so they are having high amounts of air pollution. Air pollution contributes to smog and acid rain. The burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests are causing great problems including global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer. The problems may eventually cause the destruction of the earth. The disposal of toxic chemicals in water are forming problems for underdeveloped countries who dont have purifying systems before they drink their water. The green trend resulted from the introduction of hybrid strains of wheat, rice, and corn and the adoption of modern agricultural technologies, including irrigation and heavy doses of chemical fertilizer. The Green Revolution was launched by research establishments in Mexico and the Philippines that were funded by the governments of those nations, international donor organizations, and he U. S. Government. Similar work is still being carried out by a network of institutes around the world. The Green Revolution was based on years of painstaking scientific research, but when it was deployed in the field, it yielded dramatic results, nearly doubling wheat production in a few years. The extra food produced by the Green Revolution is generally considered to have averted famine in India and Pakistan; it also allowed many developing countries to keep up with the population growth that many observers had expected would outstrip food production. The leader of a Mexican research term, U. S. Agronomist Norman Burglar, was instrumental in introducing the new wheat to India and Pakistan and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. The key breakthrough in Mexico was the breeding of short-stemmed wheat that grew to lesser heights than other varieties. Whereas tall plants tend both to shade their neighbors from sunlight and topple over before harvesting, uniformly short stalks grow more evenly and are easier to harvest. The Mexican dwarf wheat was first released to farmers in 1961 and resulted in a doubling of the average yield. Burglar described the twenty years from 1944 to 1964 as the silent revolution that set the stage for the more dramatic Green Revolution to follow. Len the sass, many observers felt that widespread famine was inevitable in the developing world and that the population would surpass the means of food production, with disastrous results in countries such as India. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization calculated that 56 percent of the human race lived in countries with an average per-capita food supply of 2,200 calories per day or less, which is barely at pubescence level (cited by Mann, p. 038). Biologist Paul Earlier predicted in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the sass and sass in spite of any crash programs embarked upon at the time he wrote his book (Earlier, p. X). In 1963, Just such a devastating famine had threatened India and Pakistan. Burglar went to the subcontinent to try to persuade governments to impo rt the new varieties of wheat. Not until 1965 was Burglar able to overcome hundreds of tons of seed to Jump-start production. The new plants caught on rapidly. By the 1969-1970 crop seasonabout the time Earlier was dismissing crash programs55 percent of the 35 million acres of wheat in Pakistan and 35 percent of Indians 35 million acres of wheat were sown with the Mexican dwarf varieties or varieties derived from them. New production technologies were also introduced, such as a greater reliance on chemical fertilizer and pesticides and the drilling of thousands of wells for controlled irrigation. Government policies that encouraged these new styles of production provided loans that helped farmers adopt it. Wheat reduction in Pakistan nearly doubled in five years, going from 4. Million tons in 1965 to 8. 4 million tons in 1970. India went from 12. 3 million tons of wheat in 1965 to 20 million tons in 1970. Both nations were self-sufficient in cereal production by 1974. As important as the wheat program was, however, rice remains the worlds most important food crop, providing 35-80 percent of the calories consumed by people in Asia. The Inter national Rice Research Institute in the Philippines was founded in 1960 and was funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the government of the Philippines, and the U. S. Agency for International Development. This organization was to do for rice what the Mexican program had done for wheat. Scientists addressed the problem of intermittent flooding of rice paddies by developing strains of rice that would thrive even when submerged in three feet of water. The new varieties produced five times as much rice as the traditional departed varieties and opened flood-prone land to rice cultivation. Other varieties were dwarf (for the same reasons as the wheat), or more disease-resistant, or more suited to tropical climates. Scientists crossed thirty-eight different breeds of rice to rate AIR, which doubled yields and became known as miracle rice. AIR served as the catalyst for what became known as the Green Revolution. By the end of the twentieth century, more than 60 percent of the worlds rice fields were planted with varieties developed by research institutes and related developers. A pest-resistant variety known as IR was planted on nearly 28 million acres, a record amount for a single food-plant variety. In addition to Mexico, Pakistan, India, and the Philippines, countries benefiting from the Green Revolution included Afghanistan, Sir Lankan, China, Indonesia, Iran, Kenya, Malay, Morocco, Thailand, Tunisia, and Turkey. The Green Revolution contributed to the overall economic growth of these nations by increasing the incomes of farmers (who were then able to afford tractors and other modern equipment), the use of electrical energy, and consumer goods, thus increasing the pace and volume of trade and commerce. As successful as the Green Revolution was, the wholesale transfer of technology to the developing world had its critics. Some objected to the use of chemical fertilizer, which augmented or replaced animal manure or mineral fertilizer. Others objected to the use of pesticides, some of which are believed to be persistent in the environment. The use of irrigation was also criticized, as it often required drilling wells and tapping underground water sources, as was the encouragement of farming in areas formerly considered marginal, such as flood-prone regions in Bangladesh. The very fact that the new crop varieties were developed with foreign support caused some critics to label the entire program imperialistic. Critics also argued that the Green Revolution primarily benefited large equipment, and that it helped displace poorer farmers from the land, driving them into urban slums. Critics also pointed out that the heavy use of fertilizer and irrigation causes long-term degradation of the soil. The success of the Green Revolution also depended on the fact that many of the host countriessuch as Mexico, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Chinahad relatively stable governments and fairly well-developed infrastructures. These factors permitted these countries to diffuse both the new seeds and technology and to bring the products to market in an effective manner. The challenges were far more difficult in places such as Africa, where governments were unstable and roads and water resources were less developed. For example, in mid-sass Mystique, improved corn grew well in the northern part of the country, but civil unrest and an inadequate transportation system left much of the harvest to rot. According to the report by David Gayety, with the exception of a few countries such as Kenya, where corn yields quadrupled in the sass, Africa benefited far less from the Green Revolution than Asian countries and is still threatened periodically with famine. The Green Revolution could not have been launched without the scientific work done at the research institutes in Mexico and the Philippines. The two original institutes have given rise to an international network of research establishments dedicated to agricultural improvement, technology transfer, and the development of agricultural resources, including trained personnel, in the developing countries. A total of sixteen autonomous centers form the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CIGAR), which operates under the direction of the World Bank. These centers address issues concerning tropical agriculture, dry-area farming, corn, potatoes, wheat, rice, livestock, forestry, and aquatic resources, among others. Future advances in agricultural productivity depend on the development of new varieties of plants such as sorghum and millet, which are mainstays in African countries and other less-developed areas, and on the introduction of appropriate agricultural technology. This will probably include biotechnologythe genetic alteration of food plants to give them desirable characteristics. For example, farmers in Africa are plagued by hardy, invasive weeds that can quickly overrun a cultivated plot and compel the farmer to abandon it and move on to virgin land. If the plot were planted with corn, soybeans, or other crops that are genetically altered to resist herbicide, then the farmer could more easily control the weeds and harvest a successful crop. Scientists are also developing a genetically modified strain of rice fortified with vitamin A that is intended to help ward off blindness in children, which will be especially useful in developing countries.