IB Geography 11

Chapter 4 – Food as a resource

Key terms

Green revolution
 Technological development in the 1960s
 Purpose: to increase crop productivity to feed developing countries’ growing
population
 2 categories of development
o Breeding new plant varieties
o Modern agricultural techniques (chemical fertilizers, herbicides, irrigation,
mechanization)
 Began in Mexico in 1944  continued in India and Pakistan in the 1960s
 Dr. Norman Borlaug led the program
 Criticism:
o Terminator seeds
o Profit over people
o “Playing God” (morality)
o Environment
o Activist Vandana Shina
Starvation
 Not getting enough food to sustain vital organs
 Leads to death over enough time
Malnutrition
 Consuming fewer nutrients and calories, and less protein than needed to maintain
long-term health
 Result of insufficient diet
 LEDCs: lack of food
 MEDCs: obesity
Chronic hunger
 Long-term
Periodic hunger
 Short-term
 Caused by factors such as drought, famine, war, conflict or political upheavals
Agri-business
 Large corporations involved in farming
Crop substitutions
 Corporations, with the help of the World Bank, convince subsistence farmers in
LEDCs to restructure their economy:
o Abandon food production, switch to commercial production of non-food
crops
 Crops: cocoa, cotton, cut flowers, asparagus, strawberries, grapes, etc.
 Pros:
o Helped farmers in MEDCs sell their surplus, get money
 o Good for the corporations
o Good for consumers in MEDCs
 Ideally:
o Farmers sell products on world market
o Use money to buy food
o Have surplus
 Problems:
o Prices for exports often don’t meet expectations
o Farmers can’t buy as much food as they had previously grown themselves
o Farmers are trapped because of contracts to corporations, and loans
o Formerly self-sufficient countries (e.g. Sudan, Ethiopia) are now facing
malnutrition
Food aid
 Pros:
o Important when there are natural disasters
 Cons:
o Hindering the development of the commercial food growing industry in
LEDCs in the long run
o Local farmers can’t sell their products if MEDCs give food away cheaply
or for free
Productivity
 Increases when less land per person produces more food per person
 Amount of agricultural output a piece of land can yield
High yielding crops
 Genetically engineered to shorten growing cycle, enabling double cropping and
even triple cropping of farmland
 More resistant to disease
 HYVs: high-yielding varieties
 Especially wheat and rice
 Between 1955 and 1995, India more than tripled its food production
Irrigation systems
 Artificial application of water to soil
 Increased between 1981 and 1994
 Especially Bangladesh (17%-37%), Nepal, North Korea
Chemical pesticides and fertilizers
 Increase farm productivity
 Side-effects on biophysical environment
 Iceland uses the most fertilizers
Mechanical technology
 Enables small number of people to achieve tasks that used to require a huge
workforce
 Largest increases of use of tractors from 1987 to 1997 in South Korea (903%),
Indonesia, Burkina Faso, Indonesia
Agricultural workforce
 Number of people around the world in agriculture is decreasing
 Farm amalgamations: neighbors or corporations buy farms and enlarge them to
make the use of machinery easier
 Increased productivity