Barta, Patrick. "Feeding Billions, A Grain at a Time." The Wall Street Journal. 29 July 2007, weekend ed.: A1, A10.
The rice that was the miracle of the Green Revolution is now putting a strain on farmers as they try to produce enough food for billions of people. The strains of rice that were developed to be more resilient and produce more have now depleted the soil enough that crop yields are declining and prices are rising. This reminds me of the ch. 6 Isbister reading where he discusses the pitfall in third world nations of an agriculture sector that isn't as advanced as the industrial sector. In order for a strong industry, and strong economy, the agriculture must be high-yielding so it can produce enough for the rural farming people as well as the urban industrial people. Hopefully technology can catch up quickly enough to get the agriculture up to speed before famine strikes.
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Yes this also reminds me of Shahhat's story on pg. 9 in isbister. However, I don't think technology will be able to "catch up" like you suggested. Unfortunately science (which I am not ashamed to critisize despite that I am a science major)is too chemical orientated. All that will happen is.. ohh a newer and better strain. Yeah right, until that does something bad too. Scientists made a mistake with genetic engeneering of crops to increase yeilds. I think the only was to replenish the soil is to go back to the old ways.
So the question here is was is the lesser of two evils. On one had a population starves because the soil is so depleated that crops can no longer grow. On the other had say half a population starves as they go back to wild type crop which doesn't yeild as much, but at least some people can survive.
I agree with colleen in that I don't think we should look for a technological solution to this problem. I think that the fact that such a course of action will probably be pursued is very indicitive in the way our world works now: our mentality seems to be we can find a way to fix anything with science. This is a very shallow approach to problems, because it doesn't actually try to fix the problem itself. Instead, it's a sort of "Band-Aid" technique, where we just try to heal the immediate problem instead of the overarching problem behind the entire situation, in this case, the huge amounts of food that few people need to make to feed the larger population. Does it need to be this way in the first place?
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