http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_revolution

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“Agrarian Revolution” redirects here. For the Agrarian Revolution in China between 1927-–1937, see Chinese Civil War.

An agricultural revolution or agrarian revolution is a period of transition from the pre-agricultural period characterized by a Paleolithic diet, into an agricultural period characterized by a diet of cultivated foods; or a further transition from a living form of agriculture into a more advanced and more productive form of agriculture, resulting in further social changes, and some argue worse individual living conditions.^[1] Examples of historical agricultural revolutions include:

• The Neolithic Revolution (around 10,000 B.C.), the initial transition from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture in prehistory and developing the ability to farm crops. This period is commonly referred to as the ‘First Agricultural Revolution’.
• The Arab Agricultural Revolution (8th–13th centuries), diffusion of many crops and farming techniques across Arab world and Muslim world during Islamic Golden Age.
• The British Agricultural Revolution (1750–19th centuries), an increase in agricultural productivity in Great Britain which helped drive the Industrial Revolution.
• The Scottish Agricultural Revolution (18th–19th centuries), the British Agricultural Revolution in Scotland specifically, which led to the Lowland Clearances.
• The Green Revolution (1943–late 1970s), a series of research, development, and technology transfer initiatives that increased industrialized agriculture production in India and other countries in the developing world (the ‘Second Agricultural Revolution’).

Neolithic Revolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

This article is about the introduction of agriculture during the Stone Age. For later historical breakthroughs in agriculture, see agricultural revolution (disambiguation).

The Neolithic Revolution or Neolithic Demographic Transition, sometimes called the Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, allowing the ability to support an increasingly large population.^[1] Archaeological data indicates that the domestication of various types of plants and animals evolved in separate locations worldwide, starting in the geologicalepoch of the Holocene^[2] around 12,000 years ago.^[3] It was the world’s first historically verifiable revolution in agriculture.

However, the Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a limited set of food-producing techniques. During the next millennia it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human pre-history into sedentary (here meaning non-nomadic) societies based in built-up villages and towns. These societies radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation (e.g., irrigation and deforestation) which allowed extensive surplus food production. These developments provided the basis for densely populated settlements, specialization and division of labour, trading economies, the development of non-portable art and architecture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g., writing), and property ownership. The first full-blown manifestation of the entire Neolithic complex is seen in the Middle EasternSumerian cities (c. 5,500 BP), whose emergence also heralded the beginning of the Bronze Age.

The relationship of the above-mentioned Neolithic characteristics to the onset of agriculture, their sequence of emergence, and empirical relation to each other at various Neolithic sites remains the subject of academic debate, and varies from place to place, rather than being the outcome of universal laws of social evolution.^[4][5]

Contents

• 1 Agricultural transition
• 2 Domestication of plants
  • 2.1 Agriculture in the Fertile Crescent
  • 2.2 Agriculture in China
  • 2.3 Agriculture in Africa
  • 2.4 Agriculture in the Americas
  • 2.5 Agriculture in Papua New Guinea
• 3 Domestication of animals
  • 3.1 Domestication of animals in the Middle East
• 4 Consequence
  • 4.1 Social change
  • 4.2 Subsequent revolutions
  • 4.3 Disease
  • 4.4 Technology
• 5 Archaeogenetics

1. Agricultural transition

Map of the world showing approximate centers of origin of agriculture and its spread in prehistory: the Fertile Crescent (11,000 BP), the Yangtze and Yellow River basins (9,000 BP) and the New Guinea Highlands (9,000–6,000 BP), Central Mexico (5,000–4,000 BP), Northern South America (5,000–4,000 BP), sub-Saharan Africa (5,000–4,000 BP, exact location unknown), eastern North America (4,000–3,000 BP).^[6]

Knap of Howar farmstead on a site occupied from 5,500 to 5,100 BP

The term Neolithic Revolution was coined in 1923 by V. Gordon Childe to describe the first in a series of agricultural revolutions in Middle Eastern history. The period is described as a “revolution” to denote its importance, and the great significance and degree of change affecting the communities in which new agricultural practices were gradually adopted and refined.

The beginning of this process in different regions has been dated from 10,000 to 8,000 BC in the Fertile Crescent^[3][7] and perhaps 8000 BC in the Kuk Early Agricultural Site of Melanesia^[8][9] to 2500 BC in Subsaharan Africa, with some^[who?] considering the developments^{[clarification needed]} of 9000–7000 BC in the Fertile Crescent to be the most important. This transition everywhere seems associated with a change from a largely nomadichunter-gatherer way of life to a more settled, agrarian-based one, with the inception of the domestication of various plant and animal species—depending on the species locally available, and probably also influenced by local culture. Recent archaeological research suggests that in some regions such as the Southeast Asian peninsula, the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist was not linear, but region-specific.^[10]

There are several competing (but not mutually exclusive) theories as to the factors that drove populations to take up agriculture. The most prominent of these are:

• The Oasis Theory, originally proposed by Raphael Pumpelly in 1908, popularized by V. Gordon Childe in 1928 and summarised in Childe’s book Man Makes Himself.^[11] This theory maintains that as the climate got drier due to the Atlantic depressions shifting northward, communities contracted to oases where they were forced into close association with animals, which were then domesticated together with planting of seeds. However, today this theory has little support amongst archaeologists because subsequent climate data suggests that the region was getting wetter rather than drier.^[12]
• The Hilly Flanks hypothesis, proposed by Robert Braidwood in 1948, suggests that agriculture began in the hilly flanks of the Taurus and Zagros mountains, where the climate was not drier as Childe had believed, and fertile land supported a variety of plants and animals amenable to domestication.^[13]
• The Feasting model by Brian Hayden^[14] suggests that agriculture was driven by ostentatious displays of power, such as giving feasts, to exert dominance. This required assembling large quantities of food, which drove agricultural technology.
• The Demographic theories proposed by Carl Sauer^[15] and adapted by Lewis Binford^[16] and Kent Flannery posit an increasingly sedentary population that expanded up to the carrying capacity of the local environment and required more food than could be gathered. Various social and economic factors helped drive the need for food.
• The evolutionary/intentionality theory, developed by David Rindos^[17] and others, views agriculture as an evolutionary adaptation of plants and humans. Starting with domestication by protection of wild plants, it led to specialization of location and then full-fledged domestication.
• Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Robert Bettinger^[18] make a case for the development of agriculture coinciding with an increasingly stable climate at the beginning of the Holocene. Ronald Wright‘s book and Massey Lecture Series A Short History of Progress^[19] popularized this hypothesis.
• The postulated Younger Dryas impact event, claimed to be in part responsible for megafauna extinction and ending the last glacial period, could have provided circumstances that required the evolution of agricultural societies for humanity to survive.^[20] The agrarian revolution itself is a reflection of typical overpopulation by certain species following initial events during extinction eras; this overpopulation itself ultimately propagates the extinction event.
• Leonid Grinin argues that whatever plants were cultivated, the independent invention of agriculture always took place in special natural environments (e.g., South-East Asia). It is supposed that the cultivation of cereals started somewhere in the Near East: in the hills of Palestine or Egypt. So Grinin dates the beginning of the agricultural revolution within the interval 12,000 to 9,000 BP, though in some cases the first cultivated plants or domesticated animals’ bones are even of a more ancient age of 14–15 thousand years ago.^[21]
• Andrew Moore suggested that the Neolithic Revolution originated over long periods of development in the Levant, possibly beginning during the Epipaleolithic. In “A Reassessment of the Neolithic Revolution”, Frank Hole further expanded the relationship between plant and animal domestication. He suggested the events could have occurred independently over different periods of time, in as yet unexplored locations. He noted that no transition site had been found documenting the shift from what he termed immediate and delayed return social systems. He noted that the full range of domesticated animals (goats, sheep, cattle and pigs) were not found until the sixth millennium at Tell Ramad. Hole concluded that “close attention should be paid in future investigations to the western margins of the Euphrates basin, perhaps as far south as the Arabian Peninsula, especially where wadis carrying Pleistocene rainfall runoff flowed.”^[22]

2. Domestication of plants

Neolithic grindstone for processing grain

Once agriculture started gaining momentum, human activity resulted in the selective breeding of cereal grasses (beginning with emmer, einkorn and barley), and not simply of those that would favour greater caloric returns through larger seeds. Plants that possessed traits such as small seeds or bitter taste would have been seen as undesirable. Plants that rapidly shed their seeds on maturity tended not to be gathered at harvest, therefore not stored and not seeded the following season; years of harvesting selected for strains that retained their edible seeds longer.

Several plant species, the “pioneer crops” or Neolithic founder crops were named by Daniel Zohary, who highlighted importance of the three cereals, and suggesting domestication of flax, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch and lentil came a little later. Based on analysis of the genes of domesticated plants, he preferred theories of a single, or at most a very small number of domestication events for each taxa that spread in an arc from the Levantine corridor around the fertile crescent and later into Europe.^[23][24]Gordon Hillman and Stuart Davies carried out experiments with wild wheat varieties to show that the process of domestication would have happened over a relatively short period of between twenty and two hundred years.^[25] Some of these pioneering attempts failed at first and crops were abandoned, sometimes to be taken up again and successfully domesticated thousands of years later: rye, tried and abandoned in Neolithic Anatolia, made its way to Europe as weed seeds and was successfully domesticated in Europe, thousands of years after the earliest agriculture.^[26] Wild lentils present a different challenge that needed to be overcome: most of the wild seeds do not germinate in the first year; the first evidence of lentil domestication, breaking dormancy in their first year, was found in the early Neolithic at Jerf el Ahmar (in modern Syria), and quickly spread south to the NetivHaGdud site in the Jordan Valley.^[26] This process of domestication allowed the founder crops to adapt and eventually become larger, more easily harvested, more dependable in storage and more useful to the human population.

An “Orange slice” sickle blade element with inverse, discontinuous retouch on each side, not denticulated. Found in large quantities at Qaraoun II and often with Heavy Neolithic tools in the flint workshops of the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon. Suggested by James Mellaart to be older than the Pottery Neolithic of Byblos (around 8,400 cal. BP).

Selectively propagated figs, wild barley and wild oats were cultivated at the early Neolithic site of Gilgal I, where in 2006^[27] archaeologists found caches of seeds of each in quantities too large to be accounted for even by intensive gathering, at strata datable c. 11,000 years ago. Some of the plants tried and then abandoned during the Neolithic period in the Ancient Near East, at sites like Gilgal, were later successfully domesticated in other parts of the world.

A Sumerian harvester’s sickle dated to 5,000 BP

Once early farmers perfected their agricultural techniques like irrigation, their crops would yield surpluses that needed storage. Most hunter gatherers could not easily store food for long due to their migratory lifestyle, whereas those with a sedentary dwelling could store their surplus grain. Eventually granaries were developed that allowed villages to store their seeds longer. So with more food, the population expanded and communities developed specialized workers and more advanced tools.

The process was not as linear as was once thought, but a more complicated effort, which was undertaken by different human populations in different regions in many different ways.

2.1 Agriculture in the Fertile Crescent

Early agriculture is believed to have originated and become widespread in Southwest Asia around 10,000–9,000 BP, though earlier individual sites have been identified. The Fertile Crescent region of Southwest Asia is the centre of domestication for three cereals (einkorn wheat, emmer wheat and barley) four legumes (lentil, pea, bitter vetch and chickpea) and flax.^[28] The Mediterranean climate consists of a long dry season with a short period of rain, which may have favored small plants with large seeds, like wheat and barley.^{[citation needed]} The Fertile Crescent also had a large area of varied geographical settings and altitudes and this variety may have made agriculture more profitable for former hunter-gatherers in this region in comparison with other areas with a similar climate .^{[citation needed]}

Finds of large quantities of seeds and a grinding stone at the paleolithic site of Ohalo II in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee, dated to around 19,400 BP has shown some of the earliest evidence for advanced planning of plant food consumption and suggests that humans at Ohalo II processed the grain before consumption.^[29][30]Tell Aswad is oldest site of agriculture with domesticated emmerwheat dated by Willem van Zeist and his assistant Johanna Bakker-Heeres to 8800 BC.^[31][32] Soon after came hulled, two-row barley found domesticated earliest at Jericho in the Jordan valley and Iraq ed-Dubb in Jordan.^[33] Other sites in the Levantine corridor that show the first evidence of agriculture include WadiFaynan 16 and NetivHagdud.^[3]Jacques Cauvin noted that the settlers of Aswad did not domesticate on site, but “arrived, perhaps from the neighbouringAnti-Lebanon, already equipped with the seed for planting”.^[34] The Heavy NeolithicQaraoun culture has been identified at around fifty sites in Lebanon around the source springs of the River Jordan, however the dating of the culture has never been reliably determined.^[35][36]

2.2 Agriculture in China

Northern China appears to have been the domestication center for foxtail millet (Setariaitalica) and broomcorn millet (Panicummiliaceum) with evidence of domestication of these species approximately 8,000 years ago.^[37] These species were subsequently widely cultivated in the Yellow River basin (7,500 years ago).^[37]Rice was domesticated in southern China later on.^[37]Soybean was domesticated in northern China 5000 years ago.^[38]Orange and peach also originated in China. They were cultivated around 2500 BC.^[39][40]

2.3 Agriculture in Africa

Nile River Valley, Egypt

The Revolution developed independently in different parts of the world, not just in the Fertile Crescent. On the African continent, three areas have been identified as independently developing agriculture: the Ethiopian highlands, the Sahel and West Africa.^[41]

The most famous crop domesticated in the Ethiopian highlands is coffee. In addition, khat, ensete, noog, teff and finger millet were also domesticated in the Ethiopian highlands. Crops domesticated in the Sahel region include sorghum and pearl millet. The kola nut, extracts from which became an ingredient in Coca Cola, was first domesticated in West Africa. Other crops domesticated in West Africa include African rice, yams and the oil palm.^[41]

A number of crops that have been cultivated in Africa for millennia came after their domestication elsewhere. Agriculture in the Nile River Valley developed from crops domesticated in the Fertile Crescent. Bananas and plantains, which were first domesticated in Southeast Asia, most likely Papua New Guinea, were re-domesticated in Africa possibly as early as 5,000 years ago. Asian yams and taro were also cultivated in Africa.^[41]

Many grinding stones are found with the early Egyptian Sebilian and Mechian cultures and evidence has been found of a neolithic domesticated crop-based economy dating around 7,000 BP.^[42] Philip E. L. Smith^[43] writes: “With the benefit of hindsight we can now see that many Late Paleolithic peoples in the Old World were poised on the brink of plant cultivation and animal husbandry as an alternative to the hunter-gatherer’s way of life”. Unlike the Middle East, this evidence appears as a “false dawn” to agriculture, as the sites were later abandoned, and permanent farming then was delayed until 6,500 BP with the Tasian and Badarian cultures and the arrival of crops and animals from the Near East.

2.4 Agriculture in the Americas

Further information: New World Crops, Ancient Pueblo Peoples, Oasisamerica and Proto-Uto-Aztecan

Corn, beans and squash were among the earliest crops domesticated in Mesoamerica, with maize beginning about 7500 BC, squash, as early as 8000 to 6000 BC and beans by no later than 4000 BC. Potatoes and manioc were domesticated in South America. In what is now the eastern United States, Native Americans domesticated sunflower, sumpweed and goosefoot around 2500 BC. At GuiláNaquitz cave in the Mexican highlands, fragments of maize pollen, bottle gourd and pepo squash were recovered and variously dated between 8000 to 7000 BC. In this area of the world people relied on hunting and gathering for several millennia to come. Sedentary village life based on farming did not develop until the second millennium BC, referred to as the formative period.^[3]

2.5 Agriculture in Papua New Guinea

Evidence of drainage ditches at Kuk Swamp on the borders of the Western and Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea shows evidence of the cultivation of taro and a variety of other crops, dating back to 11,000 BP. Two potentially significant economic species, taro (Colocasiaesculenta) and yam (Dioscorea sp.), have been identified dating at least to 10,200 calibrated years before present (cal BP). Further evidence of bananas and sugarcane dates to 6,950 to 6,440 BP. This was at the altitudinal limits of these crops, and it has been suggested that cultivation in more favourable ranges in the lowlands may have been even earlier. CSIRO has found evidence that taro was introduced into the Solomons for human use, from 28,000 years ago, making taro cultivation the earliest crop in the world.^[44][45] It seems to have resulted in the spread of the Trans–New Guinea languages from New Guinea east into the Solomon Islands and west into Timor and adjacent areas of Indonesia. This seems to confirm the theories of Carl Sauer who, in “Agricultural Origins and Dispersals”, suggested as early as 1952 that this region was a centre of early agriculture.

3. Domestication of animals

Further information: Domestication

When hunter-gathering began to be replaced by sedentary food production it became more profitable to keep animals close at hand. Therefore, it became necessary to bring animals permanently to their settlements, although in many cases there was a distinction between relatively sedentary farmers and nomadic herders. The animals’ size, temperament, diet, mating patterns, and life span were factors in the desire and success in domesticating animals. Animals that provided milk, such as cows and goats, offered a source of protein that was renewable and therefore quite valuable. The animal’s ability as a worker (for example ploughing or towing), as well as a food source, also had to be taken into account. Besides being a direct source of food, certain animals could provide leather, wool, hides, and fertilizer. Some of the earliest domesticated animals included dogs (East Asia, about 15,000 years ago),^[46] sheep, goats, cows, and pigs.

3.1 Domestication of animals in the Middle East[edit]

Dromedary camel caravan in Algeria

The Middle East served as the source for many animals that could be domesticated, such as sheep, goats and pigs. This area was also the first region to domesticate the dromedary camel. Henri Fleisch discovered and termed the Shepherd Neolithicflint industry from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon and suggested that it could have been used by the earliest nomadicshepherds. He dated this industry to the Epipaleolithic or Pre-Pottery Neolithic as it is evidently not Paleolithic, Mesolithic or even PotteryNeolithic.^[36][47] The presence of these animals gave the region a large advantage in cultural and economic development. As the climate in the Middle East changed and became drier, many of the farmers were forced to leave, taking their domesticated animals with them. It was this massive emigration from the Middle East that would later help distribute these animals to the rest of Afroeurasia. This emigration was mainly on an east-west axis of similar climates, as crops usually have a narrow optimal climatic range outside of which they cannot grow for reasons of light or rain changes. For instance, wheat does not normally grow in tropical climates, just like tropical crops such as bananas do not grow in colder climates. Some authors, like Jared Diamond, have postulated that this East-West axis is the main reason why plant and animal domestication spread so quickly from the Fertile Crescent to the rest of Eurasia and North Africa, while it did not reach through the North-South axis of Africa to reach the Mediterranean climates of South Africa, where temperate crops were successfully imported by ships in the last 500 years.^{[citation needed]} Similarly, the African Zebu of central Africa and the domesticated bovines of the fertile-crescent — separated by the dry sahara desert — were not introduced into each other’s region.

4. Consequence

4.1 Social change

It has long been taken for granted that the introduction of agriculture had been an unequivocal progress. This is now questioned in view of findings by archaeologists and paleopathologists showing that nutritional standards of Neolithic populations were generally inferior to that of hunter-gatherers, and that their life expectancy may well have been shorter too, in part due to diseases and harder work – hunter-gatherers must have covered their food needs with about 20 hours’ work a week, while agriculture required much more and was at least as uncertain. The hunter-gatherers’ diet was more varied and balanced than what agriculture later allowed. Average height went down from 5’10” (178 cm) for men and 5’6″ (168 cm) for women to 5’5″ (165 cm) and 5’1″ (155 cm), respectively, and it took until the twentieth century for average human height to come back to the pre-Neolithic Revolution levels.^[48] Agriculturalists had more anaemias and vitamin deficiencies, more spinal deformations and more dental pathologies.^[49]

From the social viewpoint, the traditional view is that the shift to agricultural food production supported a denser population, which in turn supported larger sedentary communities, the accumulation of goods and tools, and specialization in diverse forms of new labor. The development of larger societies led to the development of different means of decision making and to governmental organization. Food surpluses made possible the development of a social elite who were not otherwise engaged in agriculture, industry or commerce, but dominated their communities by other means and monopolized decision-making.^[50] Jared Diamond (in The World Until Yesterday) identifies the availability of milk and/or cereal grains as permitting mothers to raise both an older (e.g. 3 or 4 year old) child and a younger child concurrently, whereas this was not possible previously. The result is that a population can significantly more-rapidly increase its size than would otherwise be the case, resources permitting.

However, recent analyses point out that agriculture also brought about deep social divisions and in particular encouraged inequality between the sexes.^[51]

4.2 Subsequent revolutions

Domesticated cow being milked in Ancient Egypt.

Andrew Sherratt has argued that following upon the Neolithic Revolution was a second phase of discovery that he refers to as the secondary products revolution. Animals, it appears, were first domesticated purely as a source of meat.^[52] The Secondary Products Revolution occurred when it was recognised that animals also provided a number of other useful products. These included:

• hides and skins (from undomesticated animals)
• manure for soil conditioning (from all domesticated animals)
• wool (from sheep, llamas, alpacas, and Angora goats)
• milk (from goats, cattle, yaks, sheep, horses and camels)
• traction (from oxen, onagers, donkeys, horses, camels and dogs)
• guarding and herding assistance (dogs)

Sherratt argues that this phase in agricultural development enabled humans to make use of the energy possibilities of their animals in new ways, and permitted permanent intensive subsistence farming and crop production, and the opening up of heavier soils for farming. It also made possible nomadic pastoralism in semi arid areas, along the margins of deserts, and eventually led to the domestication of both the dromedary and Bactrian camel. Overgrazing of these areas, particularly by herds of goats, greatly extended the areal extent of deserts. Living in one spot would have more easily permitted the accrual of personal possessions and an attachment to certain areas of land. From such a position, it is argued, prehistoric people were able to stockpile food to survive lean times and trade unwanted surpluses with others. Once trade and a secure food supply were established, populations could grow, and society would have diversified into food producers and artisans, who could afford to develop their trade by virtue of the free time they enjoyed because of a surplus of food. The artisans, in turn, were able to develop technology such as metal weapons. Such relative complexity would have required some form of social organisation to work efficiently, so it is likely that populations that had such organisation, perhaps such as that provided by religion, were better prepared and more successful. In addition, the denser populations could form and support legions of professional soldiers. Also, during this time property ownership became increasingly important to all people. Ultimately, Childe argued that this growing social complexity, all rooted in the original decision to settle, led to a second Urban Revolution in which the first cities were built.^{[citation needed]}

4.3 Disease

Llama overlooking the ruins of the Inca city of Machu Picchu.

Throughout the development of sedentary societies, disease spread more rapidly than it had during the time in which hunter-gatherer societies existed. Inadequate sanitary practices and the domestication of animals may explain the rise in deaths and sickness following the Neolithic Revolution, as diseases jumped from the animal to the human population. Some examples of diseases spread from animals to humans are influenza, smallpox, and measles.^[53] In concordance with a process of natural selection, the humans who first domesticated the big mammals quickly built up immunities to the diseases as within each generation the individuals with better immunities had better chances of survival. In their approximately 10,000 years of shared proximity with animals, such as cows, Eurasians and Africans became more resistant to those diseases compared with the indigenous populations encountered outside Eurasia and Africa.^[54] For instance, the population of most Caribbean and several Pacific Islands have been completely wiped out by diseases. According to the Population history of American indigenous peoples, 90% of the population of certain regions of North and South America were wiped out, perhaps by contact with European trappers, before recorded contact with European explorers or colonists. Some cultures like the Inca Empire did have one big mammal domesticated, the Llama, but the Inca did not drink its milk or live in a closed space with their herds, hence limiting the risk of contagion. According to bioarchaeological research, the effects of agriculture on physical and dental health in Southeast Asian rice farming societies from 4000 to 1500 B.P. was not detrimental to the same extent as in other world regions.^[55]

The causal link between the type or lack of agricultural development, disease and colonisation is not supported by colonization in other parts of the world. Disease increased after the establishment of British Colonial rule in Africa and India despite the areas having diseases for which Europeans lacked natural immunity. In India, agriculture developed during the Neolithic period with a wide range of animals domesticated. During colonial rule an estimated 23 million people died from cholera between 1865 and 1949, and millions more died from plague, malaria, influenza and tuberculosis. In Africa, European colonization was accompanied by great epidemics, including malaria and sleeping sickness and despite parts of colonized Africa having little or no agriculture, Europeans were more susceptible to disease than the Africans. The increase of disease has been attributed to increased mobility of people, increased population density, urbanisation, environmental deterioration and irrigation schemes that helped to spread malaria rather than the development of agriculture.^[56]

4.4 Technology

In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond argues that Europeans and East Asians benefited from an advantageous geographical location that afforded them a head start in the Neolithic Revolution. Both shared the temperate climate ideal for the first agricultural settings, both were near a number of easily domesticable plant and animal species, and both were safer from attacks of other people than civilizations in the middle part of the Eurasian continent. Being among the first to adopt agriculture and sedentary lifestyles, and neighboring other early agricultural societies with whom they could compete and trade, both Europeans and East Asians were also among the first to benefit from technologies such as firearms and steel swords. In addition, they developed resistances to infectious disease, such as smallpox, due to their close relationship with domesticated animals. Groups of people who had not lived in proximity with other large mammals, such as the Australian Aborigines and American indigenous peoples, were more vulnerable to infection and largely wiped out by diseases.

During and after the Age of Discovery, European explorers, such as the Spanish conquistadors, encountered other groups of people who had never or only recently adopted agriculture.

5. Archaeogenetics[edit]

The dispersal of Neolithic culture from the Middle East has recently been associated with the distribution of human genetic markers. In Europe, the spread of the Neolithic culture has been associated with distribution of the E1b1b lineages and Haplogroup J that are thought to have arrived in Europe from North Africa and the Near East respectively.^[57][58] In Africa, the spread of farming, and notably the Bantu expansion, is associated with the dispersal of Y-chromosome haplogroupE1b1a from West Africa.^[57]

 

Arab Agricultural Revolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Agricultural_Revolution

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The so-called Arab Agricultural Revolution^[1] (also referred to variously as Medieval Green Revolution,^[2][3]Muslim Agricultural Revolution, Islamic Agricultural Revolution^[4] or Islamic Green Revolution)^[5] is a term coined by the historian Andrew Watson in a 1974 paper postulating a fundamental transformation in agriculture from the 8th century to the 13th century in the Muslim lands.^[1]

Reviewers (Ashtor 1976, Decker 2009) rejected the proposal, stating that there was no such “revolution”, as contrary to Watson’s central claim, widespread cultivation and consumption of staples such as durum wheat, Asiatic rice, and sorghum as well as cotton were already commonplace under the Roman Empire and Sassanid Empire, centuries before the Islamic period.

Contents

• 1 Hypothesis
• 2 Reception

1. Hypothesis

Watson’s proposal was an extension of another hypothesis of an agricultural revolution in Islamic Spain proposed much earlier in 1876 by the Spanish historian Antonia Garcia Maceira.^[6]

Watson argued that the economy established by Arab and other Muslim traders across the Old World enabled the diffusion of many crops and farming techniques among different parts of the Islamic world, as well as the adaptation of crops and techniques from and to regions beyond the Islamic world. Crops from Africa such as sorghum, crops from China such as citrus fruits, and numerous crops from India such as mangos, rice, cotton and sugar cane, were distributed throughout Islamic lands, which, according to Watson, previously had not grown these crops.^[1] Watson listed eighteen such crops being diffused during the Islamic period.^[7] Watson argues that these introductions, along with an increased mechanization of agriculture, led to major changes in economy, population distribution, vegetation cover,^[8] agricultural production and income, population levels, urban growth, the distribution of the labour force, linked industries, cooking, diet and clothing in the Islamic world.^[1]

2. Reception

Watson’s paper met with scepticism at the time of publication.^[9][10] E. Ashtor has argued that, contrary to Watson’s thesis, agricultural production declined in areas brought under Muslim rule in the Middle Ages, including areas in Iraq (Mesopotamia) and Egypt, on the basis of records of taxes collected on cultivated area.^[11]

It was again reviewed by Michael Decker (2009), who also challenges the hypothesis.^[12] Drawing on literary and archaeological evidence, Decker shows that, contrary to Watson’s central thesis, widespread cultivation and consumption of staples such as durum wheat, Asiatic rice, and sorghum as well as cotton were already commonplace under the Roman Empire and Sassanid Empire, centuries before the Islamic period. At the same time he argues that their actual role in Islamic agriculture has been exaggerated. Decker concludes that the agricultural practices of Muslim cultivators did not fundamentally differ from those of pre-Islamic times, but rather evolved from the hydraulic know-how and ‘basket’ of agricultural plants inherited from their Roman and Persian predecessors.^[13]

Decker also points to the advanced state of ancient irrigation practices which “rebuts sizeable parts of the Watson thesis.”^[14] This shows that basically all important agricultural devices, including the all-important watermills (see List of ancient watermills), but also waterwheels, shadufs, norias, sakias, water screws, and various kinds of water pumps were widely known and applied by Greek and Roman farmers long before the Muslim conquests.^{[15][16][17][18]}

British Agricultural Revolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolution

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The British Agricultural Revolution was the unprecedented increase in agricultural production in England due to increases in labour and land productivity that took place between 1690 and 1800, although it had its beginnings in the 17th century.

One factor was the move in crop mixing to turnips and clover in place of fallow in the late eighteenth century. Turnips can be grown in winter and are deep rooted, allowing them to gather minerals unavailable to shallow rooted crops. Clover fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere into a form of fertiliser. This permitted the intensive arable cultivation of light soils on enclosed farms. By 1750, agricultural output grew faster than the population. This increase in the food supply allowed the population of England and Wales to increase from 5.5 million in 1700 to over 9 million by 1801.^[1] Because the Agricultural Revolution freed up labour, providing an escape from the Malthusian trap, it is often cited as one of the causes of the Industrial Revolution.^[2]

Contents

• 1 Major developments and innovations
  • 1.1 Crop rotation
  • 1.2 The Dutch and Rotherham swing (wheel-less) plough
  • 1.3 Enclosure
  • 1.4 Development of a national market
  • 1.5 Transportation infrastructures
  • 1.6 Land conversion, drainage and reclamation
  • 1.7 Rise in capitalist farmers
  • 1.8 Selective breeding
• 2 British Agricultural Revolution in perspective
• 3 British agriculture 1800–1900
  • 3.1 Seed planting
• 4 Significance

1. Major developments and innovations

The British Agricultural Revolution was the result of the complex interaction of social, economic and farming technology changes. Major developments and innovations include:

• Norfolk four-course crop rotation: Fodder crops, particularly turnips and clover, replaced leaving the land fallow.^[3]
• The Dutch improved the Chinese plough so that it could be pulled with fewer oxen or horses.
• Enclosure: the removal of common rights to establish exclusive ownership of land
• Higher output of livestock due to more intensive farming with higher labour inputs
• Development of a national market free of tariffs, tolls and customs barriers
• Transportation infrastructures, such as improved roads, canals and, later, railways
• Land conversion, land drains and reclamation
• Increase in farm size
• Selective breeding

1.1 Crop rotation

Crop Yield net of Seed (bushels/acre)[4]
Year	Wheat	Rye	Barley	Oats	Peas beans	Growth rate (%/year)$
1250–1299	8.71	10.71	10.25	7.24	6.03	-0.27
1300–1349	8.24	10.36	9.46	6.60	6.14	-0.032
1350–1399	7.46	9.21	9.74	7.49	5.86	0.61
1400–1449	5.89	10.46	8.44	6.55	5.42	0.08
1450–1499	6.48	13.96	8.56	5.95	4.49	0.48
1550–1599	7.88	9.21	8.40	7.87	7.62	-0.16
1600–1649	10.45	16.28	11.16	10.97	8.62	-0.11
1650–1699	11.36	14.19	12.48	10.82	8.39	0.64
1700–1749	13.79	14.82	15.08	12.27	10.23	0.70
1750–1799	17.26	17.87	21.88	20.90	14.19	0.37
1800–1849	23.16	19.52	25.90	28.37	17.85	0.63
1850–1899	26.69	26.18	23.82	31.36	16.30	—
———————————————————————————————-
Notes: Yields have had the seed used to plant the crop subtracted to give net yields. Average seed sown; wheat 2.5 bu/acre; Rye 2.5 bu/acre; Barley 3.5–4.30 bu/acre; Oats 2.5–4.0 bu/acre; Peas & beans 2.50–3.0 bu/acre. $ Average annual growth rate of agricultural output is per agricultural worker.

One of the most important innovations of the British Agricultural Revolution was the development of the Norfolk four-course rotation, which greatly increased crop and livestock yields by improving soil fertility and reducing fallow.^[5]

Crop rotation is the practice of growing a series of dissimilar types of crops in the same area in sequential seasons to help restore plant nutrients and mitigate the build-up of pathogens and pests that often occurs when one plant species is continuously cropped. Rotation can also improve soil structure and fertility by alternating deep-rooted and shallow-rooted plants. Turnip roots, for example, can recover nutrients from deep under the soil. The Norfolk System, as it is now known, rotates crops so that different crops are planted with the result that different kinds and quantities of nutrients are taken from the soil as the plants grow.

During the Middle Ages, the open field system had initially used a two-field crop rotation system where one field was left fallow or turned into pasture for a time to try to recover some of its plant nutrients. Later they employed a three year, three field crop rotation routine, with a different crop in each of two fields, e.g. oats, rye, wheat, and barley with the second field growing a legume like peas or beans, and the third field fallow. Normally from 10–30% of the arable land in a three crop rotation system is fallow. Each field was rotated into a different crop nearly every year. Over the following two centuries, the regular planting of legumes such as peas and beans in the fields that were previously fallow slowly restored the fertility of some croplands. The planting of legumes helped to increase plant growth in the empty field due to the bacteria on legume roots’ ability to fix nitrogen (N₂) from the air into the soil in a form that plants could use. Other crops that were occasionally grown were flax and members of the mustard family.

Convertible husbandry was the alternation of a field between pasture and grain. Because nitrogen builds up slowly over time in pasture, ploughing up pasture and planting grains resulted in high yields for a few years. A big disadvantage of convertible husbandry was the hard work in breaking up pastures and difficulty in establishing them. The significance of convertible husbandry is that it introduced pasture into the rotation.^[6]

The farmers in Flanders (in parts of France and current day Belgium) discovered a still more effective four-field crop rotation system, using turnips and clover (a legume) as forage crops to replace the three-year crop rotation fallow year.

The four-field rotation system allowed farmers to restore soil fertility and restore some of the plant nutrients removed with the crops. Turnips first show up in the probate records in England as early as 1638 but were not widely used till about 1750. Fallow land was about 20% of the arable area in England in 1700 before turnips and clover were extensively grown. Guano and nitrates from South America were introduced in the mid-19th century and fallow steadily declined to reach only about 4% in 1900.^[7] Ideally, wheat, barley, turnips and clover would be planted in that order in each field in successive years. The turnips helped keep the weeds down and were an excellent forage crop—ruminant animals could eat their tops and roots through a large part of the summer and winters. There was no need to let the soil lie fallow as clover would re-add nitrates (nitrogen-containing salts) back to the soil. The clover made excellent pasture and hay fields as well as green manure when it was ploughed under after one or two years. The addition of clover and turnips allowed more animals to be kept through the winter, which in turn produced more milk, cheese, meat and manure, which maintained soil fertility.

The mix of crops also changed, replacing some low-yielding types, such as rye, with higher-yielding types such as wheat or barley. Grain yields also increased as new and better seed was introduced. Wheat yields increased by about 25% between 1700 and 1800, and then by about another 50% between 1800 and 1850.^[8]

1.2 The Dutch and Rotherham swing (wheel-less) plough

The Dutch acquired the iron tipped, curved moldboard, adjustable depth plough from the Chinese in the early 17th century. It had the advantage of being able to be pulled by one or two oxen compared to the six or eight needed by the heavy wheeled northern European plough. The Dutch plough was brought to Britain by Dutch contractors who were hired to drain East Anglican fens and Somerset moors. The plough was extremely successful on wet, boggy soil, but soon was used on ordinary land.^[9][10]

British improvements included Joseph Foljambe’s cast iron plough (patented 1730), which combined an earlier Dutch design with a number of innovations. Its fittings and coulter were made of iron and the mouldboard and share were covered with an iron plate, making it easier to pull and more controllable than previous ploughs. By the 1760s Foljambe was making large numbers of these ploughs in a factory outside of Rotherham, England, using standard patterns with interchangeable parts. The plough was easy for a blacksmith to make, but by the end of the 18th century it was being made in rural foundries. ^[11][12][13] By 1770 it was the cheapest and best plough available. It spread to Scotland, America, and France.^[14]

1.3 Enclosure

See also: Enclosure and Common land

Conjectural map of a mediaeval English manor. The part allocated to “common pasture” is shown in the north-east section, shaded green.

In Europe, agriculture was feudal since the Middle Ages. In the traditional open field system, many subsistence farmers cropped strips of land in large fields held in common, and divided the produce. They typically worked under the auspices of the aristocracy or the Catholic Church, which owned much of the land.

As early as the 12th century, some fields in England tilled under the open field system were enclosed into individually owned fields. The Black Death in 1349 and on sparked the break-up of the feudal system in England. Many farms were bought by yeomen who enclosed their property and improved the use of their land. More secure control of the land allowed the owner to make innovations that improved yields. Other husbandmen rented property they “share cropped” with the land owners. Many of these enclosures were accomplished by acts of Parliament in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The process of enclosing property accelerated in the 15th and 16th centuries. The more productive enclosed farms meant that fewer farmers were needed to work the same land, leaving many villagers without land and grazing rights. Many of them moved to the cities in search of work in the emerging factories of the Industrial Revolution. Others settled in the English colonies. English Poor Laws were enacted to help these newly poor.

Some practices of enclosure were denounced by the Church, and legislation was drawn up against it; but the large, enclosed fields was needed for the gains in agricultural productivity from the 16th to 18th centuries. This controversy led to a series of government acts, culminating in the General Enclosure Act of 1801 which sanctioned large-scale land reform.

The process of enclosure was largely complete by the end of the 18th century.

1.4 Development of a national market

Markets were widespread by 1500 with about 800 locations in Britain. These were regulated and not free. The most important development between the 16th century and the mid-19th century was the development of private marketing. By the 19th century, marketing was nation-wide and the vast majority of agricultural production was for market rather than for the farmer and his family. The 16th-century market radius was about 10 miles, which could support a town of 10,000.^[15]

The next stage of development was trading between markets, requiring merchants, credit and forward sales, knowledge of markets and pricing and of supply and demand in different markets. Eventually the market evolved into a national one driven by London and other growing cities. By 1700, there was a national market for wheat.

Legislation regulating middlemen required registration, addressed weights and measures, fixing of prices and collection of tolls by the government. Market regulations were eased in 1663, when people were allowed some self-regulation to hold inventory, but it was forbidden to withhold commodities from the market in an effort to increase prices. In the late 18th century, the idea of “self regulation” was gaining acceptance.^[16]

The lack of internal tariffs, customs barriers and feudal tolls made Britain “the largest coherent market in Europe”.^[17]

1.5 Transportation infrastructures

High wagon transportation costs made it uneconomical to ship commodities very far outside the market radius by road, generally limiting shipment to less than 20 or 30 miles to market or to a navigable waterway. Water transport was, and in some cases still is, much more efficient than land transport. In the early 19th century it cost as much to transport a ton of freight 32 miles by wagon over an unimproved road as it did to ship it 3000 miles across the Atlantic.^[18] A horse could pull at most one ton of freight on a Macadam road, which was multi-layer stone covered and crowned, with side drainage. But a single horse could pull a barge weighing over 30 tons.

Commerce was aided by the expansion of roads and inland waterways. Road transport capacity grew from threefold to fourfold from 1500 to 1700.^[19][20]

Railroads would eventually reduce the cost of land transport by over 95%; however they did not become important until after 1850.

1.6 Land conversion, drainage and reclamation

Another way to get more land was to convert some pasture land into arable land and recover fen land and some pastures. It is estimated that the amount of arable land in Britain grew by 10–30% through these land conversions.

The British Agricultural Revolution was aided by land maintenance advancements in Flanders, and the Netherlands. Due to the large and dense population of Flanders and Holland, farmers there were forced to take maximum advantage of every inch of usable land; the country had become a pioneer in canal building, soil restoration and maintenance, soil drainage, and land reclamation technology. Dutch experts like Cornelius Vermuyden brought some of this technology to Britain.

Water-meadows were utilised in the late 16th to the 20th centuries and allowed earlier pasturing of livestock after they were wintered on hay. This increased livestock yields, giving more hides, meat, milk, and manure as well as better hay crops.

1.7 Rise in capitalist farmers

With the development of regional markets and eventually a national market, aided by improved transportation infrastructures, farmers were no longer dependent on their local market and were less subject to having to sell at low prices into an oversupplied local market and not being able to sell their surpluses to distant localities that were experiencing shortages. They also became less subject to price fixing regulations. Farming became a business rather than solely a means of subsistence.^[21]

Under free market capitalism, farmers had to remain competitive. To be successful, farmers had to become effective managers who incorporated the latest farming innovations in order to be low cost producers.

1.8 Selective breeding

In England, Robert Bakewell and Thomas Coke introduced selective breeding as a scientific practice, mating together two animals with particularly desirable characteristics, and also using inbreeding or the mating of close relatives, such as father and daughter, or brother and sister, to stabilise certain qualities in order to reduce genetic diversity in desirable animals programmes from the mid-18th century. Arguably, Bakewell’s most important breeding programme was with sheep. Using native stock, he was able to quickly select for large, yet fine-boned sheep, with long, lustrous wool. The Lincoln Longwool was improved by Bakewell, and in turn the Lincoln was used to develop the subsequent breed, named the New (or Dishley) Leicester. It was hornless and had a square, meaty body with straight top lines.^[22]Bakewell was also the first to breed cattle to be used primarily for beef. Previously, cattle were first and foremost kept for pulling ploughs as oxen or for dairy uses, with beef from surplus males as an additional bonus, but he crossed long-horned heifers and a Westmoreland bull to eventually create the Dishley Longhorn. As more and more farmers followed his lead, farm animals increased dramatically in size and quality. In 1700, the average weight of a bull sold for slaughter was 370 pounds (168 kg). By 1786, that weight had more than doubled to 840 pounds (381 kg).^[23][24]

2. British Agricultural Revolution in perspective[edit]

Despite its name, the Agricultural Revolution in Britain did not result in crop yields nearly as high as in China, where intensive cultivation had been practiced for many centuries.^[25][26] The British Agricultural Revolution’s significance is the rate of increase in food supply compared to population growth, and the market conditions and technological changes that were happening when it occurred.

3. British agriculture 1800–1900

 

Populations (in millions)[27][28]
Year	Britain	London[29]	Rural	Percent Rural	Pop. Change % per Yr.
————————————————————————————-
1100	1.0–2.0	0.01–0.02	—	—	—
1300	3.0–3.8	0.02–0.05	—	—	0.63
1350	4.5–6.0	0.02–0.05	—	—	1.12
1400	2.0–2.2	0.05–0.10	—	—	−1.21
1450	2.0–2.3	0.05–0.10	—	—	0.05
1500	2.4	0.05–0.10	1.82	76	0.23
1550	3.0	0.10–0.15	—	—	0.50
1600	4.1	0.20	2.87	70	0.73
1650	5.2	0.35	2.95	56	0.54
1700	5.1	0.70	2.78	55	−0.04
1750	5.8	0.70	2.64	46	0.27
1801	8.7	0.96	3.14	36	1.00
1851	16.7	2.36	3.84	23	1.84
1901	41.6	6.53	—	—	2.98
1951	50.2	8.20	—	—	0.41
2001	58.8	7.30	1.2	2B	0.34
—————————————————————————————-
Notes: Populations before 1700 are somewhat speculative. Population changes in %/year are tentative before 1700. The Black Death starting in about 1349 is thought to have reduced the population by 30–50%. The increases in population since 1800 have grown too fast to avoid famine without more productive agriculture and extensive imports. The Industrial Revolutions products could be easily traded for other countries surplus agricultural products. B: About 40–50% of Britain’s food is now imported.

New fertilisers, besides the organic fertilisers in manure, were slowly found as massive sodium nitrate (NaNO₃) deposits found in the Atacama Desert, Chile, were brought under British financiers like John Thomas North and imports were started. Chile was happy to allow the exports of these sodium nitrates by allowing the British to use their capital to develop the mining and imposing a hefty export tax to enrich their treasury. Massive deposits of sea bird guano (11–16% N, 8–12% phosphate, and 2–3% potash), were found and started to be imported after about 1830. Significant imports of potash obtained from the ashes of trees burned in opening new agricultural lands were imported. By-products of the British meat industry like bones from the knacker‘s yards were ground up or crushed and sold as fertiliser. By about 1840 about 30,000 tons of bones were being processed (worth about £150,000). An unusual alternative to bones was found to be the millions of tons of fossils called coprolites found in South East England. When these were dissolved in sulphuric acid they yielded a high phosphate mixture (called “super phosphate”) that plants could absorb readily and increased crop yields. Mining coprolite and processing it for fertiliser soon developed into a major industry—the first commercial fertiliser.^[30] Higher yield per acre crops were also planted as potatoes went from about 300,000 acres in 1800 to about 400,000 acres in 1850 with a further increase to about 500,000 in 1900.^[31]Labour productivity slowly increased at about 0.6% per year. With more capital invested, more organic and inorganic fertilisers, and better crop yields increased the food grown at about 0.5%/year—not enough to keep up with population growth.

The British population in 1800 was about 8.7 million increasing to 16.7 million in 1851 and 41.6 million by 1901. This corresponds to a rate of population increase from 1801 to 1851 of 1.84% per year and a rate of population increase of 3.00% per year from 1851 to 1901. Not only did the need for more food increase but the need for more shoes, clothes, carriages, horses, homes, and furniture increased at the same or a greater rate as more products became available. The fast-growing coal mining industry could provide plentiful coal for heating. Burning all this coal gave London a severe smog problem during nearly all winter months. Canals, macadam roads, and after about 1832 railroads helped lower the cost of transportation of people, coal, agricultural, and industrial products. The rate of population increase was much faster than the rate of increased agricultural yield per acre (hectare), which increased at about a rate of 0.5% per year from 1800 to 1850 and 0.2% per year from 1850 to 1900.^[32]

In addition to needing more land for cultivation there was also needed more pasture land to grow more poultry, livestock, and draft horses and other agricultural products. The British Agricultural Statistics for this period show this competition for more land for cultivation and more land for pasturage in Britain was won by the need for more pasture as the arable land actually decreased from about 7.5 million hectares in 1800 to about 6.0 million hectares in 1900. The number of acres under wheat cultivation decreased from about 1.5 million hectares in 1800 to about 0.6 million hectares in 1900.^[33]

So many cheap agricultural imports were coming into Britain after the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) and the resumption of American trade after the War of 1812 (1812–1815) that the Corn Laws (protective tariffs) were passed to protect cereal grain producers in Britain against competition from less expensive imports. These laws were in force between 1815 and 1846. The Corn Laws were removed in 1846 at the onset of the potato blight hitting much of Europe. The Irish Potato blight that ruined most of the Irish potato crop and brought devastation to the Irish people in 1846–50 also occurred in England, Wales, and Scotland, and the rest of Europe. The effect of the potato late blight (Phytophthorainfestans) infestation^[34] on the potatoes common to Ireland, known today as Irish Potatoes, was much less in other countries since a much smaller percentage of the diet of the people of England, Wales, Scotland, and the rest of Europe was centred on potatoes. In addition the citizens of Britain had the capital to buy and import more food from other countries—most of the Irish were too poor to do this. Several hundred thousand Irish died in the Irish potato famine and several hundred thousand more emigrated to England, Wales, Scotland, Canada, Australia, Europe, and the United States. This massive Irish emigration continued till about 1921 when the population had been reduced from about 8.3 million in 1840 to 4.3 million by 1921.

Between 1873 and 1879 British agriculture had wet summers that damaged grain crops. Cattle farmers were hit by foot-and-mouth disease, and sheep farmers by sheep liver rot. The poor harvests, however, masked a greater threat to British agriculture: growing imports of foodstuffs from abroad. The development of the steam ship and the development of extensive railway networks in Britain and the USA allowed US farmers with much larger and more productive farms to export hard grain to Britain at a price that undercut the British farmers. At the same time, large amounts of cheap corned beef started to arrive from Argentina, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the development of refrigerator ships (reefers) in about 1880 opened the British market to cheap meat and wool from Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina. The Long Depression was a worldwide economic recession that began in 1873 and ended around 1896. It hit the agricultural sector hard and was the most severe in Europe and the United States, which had been experiencing strong economic growth fuelled by the Second Industrial Revolution in the decade following the American Civil War. By 1900 half the meat eaten in Britain came from abroad and tropical fruits such as bananas were also being imported on the new refrigerator ships.

3.1 Seed planting

Before the introduction of the seed drill, the common practice was to plant seeds by broadcasting (evenly throwing) them across the ground by hand on the prepared soil and then lightly harrowing the soil to cover the seed. Seeds left on top of the ground were eaten by birds, insects, and mice. There was no control over spacing and seeds were planted too close together and too far apart. Alternately seeds could be laboriously planted one by one using a hoe and/or a shovel. Cutting down on wasted seed was important because the yield of seeds harvested to seeds planted at that time was around four or five.

The seed drill was introduced from China to Italy in the mid-16th century where it was patented by the Venetian Senate. JethroTull invented an improved seed drill in 1701. It was a mechanical seeder which distributed seeds evenly across a plot of land and at the correct depth. Tull’s seed drill was very expensive and not very reliable and therefore did not have much of an impact. Good quality seed drills were not produced until the mid-18th century.^[35]

4. Significance

Sound advice on farming began to appear in England in the mid-17th century, from writers such as Samuel Hartlib, Walter Blith and others,^[36] but the overall agricultural productivity of Britain started to grow significantly only in the period of the Agricultural Revolution. It is estimated that the productivity of wheat was about 19 bushels per acre in 1720 and that it had grown to 21–22 bushels in the middle of the 18th century. It declined slightly in the decades of 1780 and 1790 but it began to grow again by the end of the century and reached a peak in the 1840s around 30 bushels per acre, stabilising thereafter.^[37]

The Agricultural Revolution in Britain proved to be a major turning point in history. The population in 1750 reached the level of 5.7 million. This had happened before: in around 1350 and again in 1650. Each time, either the appropriate agricultural infrastructure to support a population this high was not present or plague or war occurred (which may have been related), a Malthusian catastrophe occurred, and the population fell. However, by 1750, when the population reached this level again, an onset in agricultural technology and new methods without outside disruption, and also the effects of sugar imports, allowed the population growth to be sustained.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the substantial gains in British agricultural productivity were rapidly offset by competition from cheaper imports, made possible by advances in transportation, refrigeration, and many other technologies.

Scottish Agricultural Revolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Agricultural_Revolution

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Agricultural Revolution in Scotland was a series of changes in agricultural practice that began in the seventeenth century and continued in the nineteenth century. They began with the improvement of Scottish Lowlands farmland and the beginning of a transformation of Scottish agriculture from one of the least modernised systems to what was to become the most modern and productive system in Europe. The traditional system of agriculture in Lowland Scotland had existed unchanged for hundreds of years. In many ways, it was a totally rural economy, the land being worked by the cottars on the centuries-old runrig system of subsistence farming.

Contents

• 1 Use of the term
• 2 History
  • 2.1 Seventeenth century
  • 2.2 Eighteenth century
  • 2.3 Nineteenth century
• 3 Consequences

1. Use of the term

The term Scottish Agricultural Revolution was used in the early twentieth century primarily to refer to the period of most dramatic change in the second half of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. More recently historians have become aware of a longer processes, with change beginning in the late seventeenth century and still continuing into the mid-nineteenth century. The expansion of the period covered has led some to question the concept of a revolution.^[1]

2. History

2.1 Seventeenth century

Runrig farming outside the town of Haddington, East Lothian c. 1690

Before the seventeenth century, with difficult terrain, poor roads and methods of transport there was little trade between different areas of the country and most settlements depended on what was produced locally, often with very little in reserve in bad years. Most farming was based on the lowland fermtoun or highland baile, settlements of a handful of families that jointly farmed an area notionally suitable for two or three plough teams, allocated in run rigs, of “runs” (furrows) and “rigs” (ridges), to tenant farmers. Most ploughing was done with a heavy wooden plough with an iron coulter, pulled by oxen, which were more effective in the heavy Scottish soil, and cheaper to feed than horses.^[2] Those with property rights included husbandmen, lesser landholders and free tenants.^[3] Below them were the cottars, who often shared rights to common pasture, occupied small portions of land and participated in joint farming as hired labour. Farms also might have grassmen, who had rights only to grazing.^[3] Three acts of parliament passed in 1695 allowed the consolidation of runrigs and the division of common land.^[4]

2.2 Eighteenth century[edit]

After the union with England in 1707, there was a conscious attempt among the gentry and nobility to improve agriculture in Scotland. The Society of Improvers was founded in 1723, including in its 300 members dukes, earls, lairds and landlords.^[5] In the first half of the century these changes were limited to tenanted farms in East Lothian and the estates of a few enthusiasts, such as John Cockburn and Archibald Grant. Not all were successful, with Cockburn driving himself into bankruptcy, but the ethos of improvement spread among the landed classes.^[6]

Sheep feeding on turnips, Auchindrain, Argyll

Haymaking was introduced along with the English plough and foreign grasses, the sowing of rye grass and clover. Turnips and cabbages were introduced, lands enclosed and marshes drained, lime was put down, roads built and woods planted. Drilling and sowing and crop rotation were introduced. The introduction of the potato to Scotland in 1739 greatly improved the diet of the peasantry. Enclosures began to displace the runrig system and free pasture. There was increasing specialisation, with the Lothians became a major centre of grain, Ayrshire of cattle breading and the borders of sheep.^[5]

Although some estate holders improved the quality of life of their displaced workers,^[5] the Agricultural Revolution led directly to what is increasingly becoming known as the Lowland Clearances,^[7] when hundreds of thousands of cottars and tenant farmers from central and southern Scotland were forcibly moved from the farms and small holdings their families had occupied for hundreds of years.^[5]

2.3 Nineteenth century

An 1851 illustration showing the reaping machine developed by Patrick Bell

Improvement continued in the nineteenth century. Innovations included the first working reaping machine, developed by Patrick Bell in 1828. His rival James Smith turned to improving sub-soil drainage and developed a method of ploughing that could break up the subsoil barrier without disturbing the topsoil. Previously unworkable low-lying carselands could now be brought into arable production and the result was the even Lowland landscape that still predominates.^[8]

While the Lowlands had seen widespread agricultural improvement, the Highlands remained very poor and traditional.^[9] A handful of powerful families, typified by the dukes of Argyll, Atholl, Buccleuch, and Sutherland, owned the best lands and controlled local political, legal and economic affairs. As late as 1878, 68 families owned nearly half the land in Scotland.^[10] Particularly after the end of the boom created by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1790-1815), these landlords needed cash to maintain their position in London society. They turned to money rents and downplayed the traditional patriarchal relationship that had historically sustained the clans. This was exacerbated after the repeal of the Corn Laws in mid-century, when Britain adopted a free trade policy, and grain imports from America undermined the profitability of crop production.^[11]

Crofts at Borreraig on the island of Skye

One result of these changes were the Highland Clearances, by which much of the population of the Highlands suffered forced displacement as lands were enclosed, principally so that they could be used for sheep farming. The clearances followed patterns of agricultural change throughout the UK, but were particularly notorious as a result of the late timing, the lack of legal protection for year-by-year tenants under Scots law, the abruptness of the change from the traditional clan system, and the brutality of many evictions.^[12] The result was a continuous exodus from the land—to the cities, or further afield to England, Canada, America or Australia.^[13]

The Lowland and Highland Clearances meant that many small settlements were dismantled, their occupants forced either to the new purpose-built villages built by the landowners such as John Cockburn’s Ormiston or Archibald Grant‘s Monymusk^[14] on the outskirts of the new ranch-style farms, or to the new industrial centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh, or northern England. Tens of thousands of others emigrated to Canada or the United States, finding opportunities there to own and farm their own land.^[5] In the Highlands many that remained were now crofters, living on very small rented farms with indefinite tenure used to raise various crops and animals. For these families kelping, fishing, spinning of linen and military service became important sources of additional revenue.^[15]

 

Green Revolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Green Revolution (disambiguation).

 

Increased use of various technologies such as pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers as well as new breeds of high yield crops were employed in the decades after the Second World War to greatly increase global food production.

The Green Revolution refers to a series of research, and development, and technology transfer initiatives, occurring between the 1940s and the late 1960s, that increased agricultural production worldwide, particularly in the developing world, beginning most markedly in the late 1960s.^[1] The initiatives, led by Norman Borlaug, the “Father of the Green Revolution” credited with saving over a billion people from starvation, involved the development of high-yielding varieties of cereal grains, expansion of irrigation infrastructure, modernization of management techniques, distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers.

The term “Green Revolution” was first used in 1968 by former United States Agency for International Development (USAID) director William Gaud, who noted the spread of the new technologies: “These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.”^[2]

Contents

• 1 History
  • 1.1 IR8 and the Philippines
  • 1.2 CGIAR
  • 1.3 Brazil’s agricultural revolution
  • 1.4 Problems in Africa
• 2 Agricultural production and food security
  • 2.1 Technologies
  • 2.2 Production increases
  • 2.3 Effects on food security
• 3 Criticism
  • 3.1 Food security
    • 3.1.1 Malthusian criticism
    • 3.1.2 Famine
    • 3.1.3 Quality of diet
    • 3.1.4 Political impact
    • 3.1.5 Socioeconomic impacts
    • 3.1.6 Globalization
  • 3.2 Environmental impact
    • 3.2.1 Biodiversity
    • 3.2.2 Greenhouse gas emissions
    • 3.2.3 Dependence on non-renewable resources
  • 3.3 Health impact
    • 3.3.1 Pesticides and cancer
    • 3.3.2 Punjab case
• 4 Norman Borlaug’s response to criticism
• 5 The “New” Green Revolution

 

1. History

In 1961, India was on the brink of mass famine.^[3]Norman Borlaug was invited to India by the adviser to the Indian minister of agriculture C. Subramaniam. Despite bureaucratic hurdles imposed by India’s grain monopolies, the Ford Foundation and Indian government collaborated to import wheat seed from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). Punjab was selected by the Indian government to be the first site to try the new crops because of its reliable water supply and a history of agricultural success. India began its own Green Revolution program of plant breeding, irrigation development, and financing of agrochemicals.^[4]

India soon adopted IR8 – a semi-dwarf rice variety developed by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) that could produce more grains of rice per plant when grown with certain fertilizers and irrigation. In 1968, Indian agronomist S.K. De Datta published his findings that IR8 rice yielded about 5 tons per hectare with no fertilizer, and almost 10 tons per hectare under optimal conditions. This was 10 times the yield of traditional rice.^[5] IR8 was a success throughout Asia, and dubbed the “Miracle Rice”. IR8 was also developed into Semi-dwarf IR36.

Wheat yields in developing countries, 1950 to 2004, kg/ha baseline 500. The steep rise in crop yields in the U.S. began in the 1940s. The percentage of growth was fastest in the early rapid growth stage. In developing countries maize yields are still rapidly rising.^[6]

In the 1960s, rice yields in India were about two tons per hectare; by the mid-1990s, they had risen to six tons per hectare. In the 1970s, rice cost about $550 a ton; in 2001, it cost under $200 a ton.^[7] India became one of the world’s most successful rice producers, and is now a major rice exporter, shipping nearly 4.5 million tons in 2006.

1.1 IR8 and the Philippines

In 1960, the Government of the Republic of the Philippines with Ford and Rockefeller Foundations established IRRI (International Rice Research Institute). A rice crossing between Dee-Geo-woo-gen and Peta was done at IRRI in 1962. In 1966, one of the breeding lines became a new cultivar, IR8.^[8] IR8 required the use of fertilizers and pesticides, but produced substantially higher yields than the traditional cultivars. Annual rice production in the Philippines increased from 3.7 to 7.7 million tonnes in two decades.^[9] The switch to IR8 rice made the Philippines a rice exporter for the first time in the 20th century.^[10] But the heavy pesticide use reduced the number of fish and frog species found in rice paddies.^[11]

1.2 CGIAR

In 1970, foundation officials proposed a worldwide network of agricultural research centers under a permanent secretariat. This was further supported and developed by the World Bank; on 19 May 1971, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research(CGIAR) was established, co-sponsored by the FAO, IFAD and UNDP. CGIAR, has added many research centers throughout the world.

CGIAR has responded, at least in part, to criticisms of Green Revolution methodologies. This began in the 1980s, and mainly was a result of pressure from donor organizations.^[12] Methods like Agroecosystem Analysis and Farming System Research have been adopted to gain a more holistic view of agriculture. Methods like Rapid Rural Appraisal

1.3 Brazil’s agricultural revolution

Brazil’s vast inland cerrado region was regarded as unfit for farming before the 1960s because the soil was too acidic and poor in nutrients, according to Norman Borlaug. However, from the 1960s, vast quantities of lime (pulverised chalk or limestone) were poured on the soil to reduce acidity. The effort went on and in the late 1990s between 14 million and 16 million tonnes of lime were being spread on Brazilian fields each year. The quantity rose to 25 million tonnes in 2003 and 2004, equalling around five tonnes of lime per hectare. As a result, Brazil has become the world’s second biggest soyabeans exporter and, thanks to the boom in animal feed production, Brazil is now the biggest exporter of beef and poultry in the world. ^[13]

1.4 Problems in Africa

There have been numerous attempts to introduce the successful concepts from the Mexican and Indian projects into Africa.^[14] These programs have generally been less successful. Reasons cited include widespread corruption, insecurity, a lack of infrastructure, and a general lack of will on the part of the governments. Yet environmental factors, such as the availability of water for irrigation, the high diversity in slope and soil types in one given area are also reasons why the Green Revolution is not so successful in Africa.^[15]

A recent program in western Africa is attempting to introduce a new high-yielding ‘family’ of rice varieties known as “New Rice for Africa” (NERICA). NERICA varieties yield about 30% more rice under normal conditions, and can double yields with small amounts of fertilizer and very basic irrigation. However, the program has been beset by problems getting the rice into the hands of farmers, and to date the only success has been in Guinea, where it currently accounts for 16% of rice cultivation.^[16]

After a famine in 2001 and years of chronic hunger and poverty, in 2005 the small African country of Malawi launched the “Agricultural Input Subsidy Program” by which vouchers are given to smallholder farmers to buy subsidized nitrogen fertilizer and maize seeds. Within its first year, the program was reported with extreme success, producing the largest maize harvest of the country’s history; enough to feed the country with tons of maize left over. The program has advanced yearly ever since. Various sources claim that the program has been an unusual success, hailing it as a “miracle”.^[17]

2. Agricultural production and food security

2.1 Technologies

New varieties of wheat and other grains were instrumental to the green revolution.

The Green Revolution spread technologies that already existed, but had not been widely implemented outside industrialized nations. These technologies included modern irrigation projects, pesticides, synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and improved crop varieties developed through the conventional, science-based methods available at the time.

The novel technological development of the Green Revolution was the production of novel wheat cultivars. Agronomistsbred cultivars of maize, wheat, and rice that are generally referred to as HYVs or “high-yielding varieties”. HYVs have higher nitrogen-absorbing potential than other varieties. Since cereals that absorbed extra nitrogen would typically lodge, or fall over before harvest, semi-dwarfing genes were bred into their genomes. A Japanese dwarf wheat cultivar (Norin 10 wheat), which was sent to Washington, D.C. by Cecil Salmon, was instrumental in developing Green Revolution wheat cultivars. IR8, the first widely implemented HYV rice to be developed by IRRI, was created through a cross between an Indonesian variety named “Peta” and a Chinese variety named “Dee-geo-woo-gen.”

With advances in molecular genetics, the mutantgenes responsible for Arabidopsis thaliana genes (GA 20-oxidase,^[18]ga1,^[19]ga1-3^[20]), wheat reduced-height genes (Rht)^[21] and a rice semidwarf gene (sd1)^[22] were cloned. These were identified as gibberellinbiosynthesis genes or cellular signaling component genes. Stem growth in the mutant background is significantly reduced leading to the dwarfphenotype. Photosynthetic investment in the stem is reduced dramatically as the shorter plants are inherently more stable mechanically. Assimilates become redirected to grain production, amplifying in particular the effect of chemical fertilizers on commercial yield.

HYVs significantly outperform traditional varieties in the presence of adequate irrigation, pesticides, and fertilizers. In the absence of these inputs, traditional varieties may outperform HYVs. Therefore, several authors have challenged the apparent superiority of HYVs not only compared to the traditional varieties alone, but by contrasting the monocultural system associated with HYVs with the polycultural system associated with traditional ones.^[23]

2.2 Production increases

Cereal production more than doubled in developing nations between the years 1961–1985.^[24] Yields of rice, maize, and wheat increased steadily during that period.^[24] The production increases can be attributed roughly equally to irrigation, fertilizer, and seed development, at least in the case of Asian rice.^[24]

While agricultural output increased as a result of the Green Revolution, the energy input to produce a crop has increased faster,^[25] so that the ratio of crops produced to energy input has decreased over time. Green Revolution techniques also heavily rely on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides and rely on machines, which as of 2014 rely on or are derived from crude oil, making agriculture increasingly reliant on crude oil extraction.^[26] Proponents of the Peak Oil theory fear that a future decline in oil and gas production would lead to a decline in food production or even a Malthusian catastrophe.^[27]

World population 1950–2010

2.3 Effects on food security

Main article: Food security

The effects of the Green Revolution on global food security are difficult to assess because of the complexities involved in food systems.

The world population has grown by about four billion since the beginning of the Green Revolution and many believe that, without the Revolution, there would have been greater famine and malnutrition. India saw annual wheat production rise from 10 million tons in the 1960s to 73 million in 2006.^[28] The average person in the developing world consumes roughly 25% more calories per day now than before the Green Revolution.^[24] Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by over 250%.^[29]

The production increases fostered by the Green Revolution are often credited with having helped to avoid widespread famine, and for feeding billions of people.^[30]

There are also claims that the Green Revolution has decreased food security for a large number of people. One claim involves the shift of subsistence-oriented cropland to cropland oriented towards production of grain for export or animal feed. For example, the Green Revolution replaced much of the land used for pulses that fed Indian peasants for wheat, which did not make up a large portion of the peasant diet.^[31]

3. Criticism

3.1 Food security

3.1.1 Malthusian criticism

Some criticisms generally involve some variation of the Malthusian principle of population. Such concerns often revolve around the idea that the Green Revolution is unsustainable,^[32] and argue that humanity is now in a state of overpopulation or overshoot with regards to the sustainable carrying capacity and ecological demands on the Earth.

Although 36 million people die each year as a direct or indirect result of hunger and poor nutrition,^[33] Malthus’s more extreme predictions have frequently failed to materialize. In 1798 Thomas Malthus made his prediction of impending famine.^[34] The world’s population had doubled by 1923 and doubled again by 1973 without fulfilling Malthus’s prediction. Malthusian Paul R. Ehrlich, in his 1968 book The Population Bomb, said that “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980” and “Hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs.”^[34] Ehrlich’s warnings failed to materialize when India became self-sustaining in cereal production in 1974 (six years later) as a result of the introduction of Norman Borlaug‘s dwarf wheat varieties.^[34]

King Hubbert‘s prediction of world petroleum production rates. Modern agriculture is largely reliant on petroleum energy.^[35]

Since supplies of oil and gas are essential to modern agriculture techniques,^[36] a fall in global oil supplies could cause spiking food prices in the coming decades.^[37]

3.1.2 Famine

To some modern Western sociologists and writers, increasing food production is not synonymous with increasing food security, and is only part of a larger equation. For example, Harvard professor AmartyaSen claimed large historic famines were not caused by decreases in food supply, but by socioeconomic dynamics and a failure of public action.^[38] However, economist Peter Bowbrick disputes Sen’s theory, arguing that Sen relies on inconsistent arguments and contradicts available information, including sources that Sen himself cited.^[39]Bowbrick further argues that Sen’s views coincide with that of the Bengal government at the time of the Bengal famine of 1943, and the policies Senadvocates failed to relieve the famine.^[39]

3.1.3 Quality of diet

Some have challenged the value of the increased food production of Green Revolution agriculture. Miguel A. Altieri, (a pioneer of agroecology and peasant-advocate), writes that the comparison between traditional systems of agriculture and Green Revolution agriculture has been unfair, because Green Revolution agriculture produces monocultures of cereal grains, while traditional agriculture usually incorporates polycultures.^{[citation needed]}

These monoculture crops are often used for export, feed for animals, or conversion into biofuel. According to Emile Frison of Bioversity International, the Green Revolution has also led to a change in dietary habits, as fewer people are affected by hunger and die from starvation, but many are affected by malnutrition such as iron or vitamin-A deficiencies.^[15]Frison further asserts that almost 60% of yearly deaths of children under age five in developing countries are related to malnutrition.^[15]

High-yield rice (HYR), introduced since 1964 to poverty-ridden Asian countries, such as the Philippines, was found to have inferior flavor and be more glutinous and less savory than their native varieties.^{[citation needed]} This caused its price to be lower than the average market value.^[40]

In the Philippines the introduction of heavy pesticides to rice production, in the early part of the Green Revolution, poisoned and killed off fish and weedy green vegetables that traditionally coexisted in rice paddies. These were nutritious food sources for many poor Filipino farmers prior to the introduction of pesticides, further impacting the diets of locals.^[41]

3.1.4 Political impact

A major critic^[42] of the Green Revolution, U.S. investigative journalistMark Dowie, writes:^[43]

The primary objective of the program was geopolitical: to provide food for the populace in undeveloped countries and so bring social stability and weaken the fomenting of communist insurgency.

Citing internal Foundation documents, Dowie states that the Ford Foundation had a greater concern than Rockefeller in this area.^[44]

There is significant evidence that the Green Revolution weakened socialist movements in many nations. In countries such as India, Mexico, and the Philippines, technological solutions were sought as an alternative to expanding agrarian reform initiatives, the latter of which were often linked to socialist politics.^[45][46]

3.1.5 Socioeconomic impacts

The transition from traditional agriculture, in which inputs were generated on-farm, to Green Revolution agriculture, which required the purchase of inputs, led to the widespread establishment of rural credit institutions. Smaller farmers often went into debt, which in many cases results in a loss of their farmland.^[12][47] The increased level of mechanization on larger farms made possible by the Green Revolution removed a large source of employment from the rural economy.^[12] Because wealthier farmers had better access to credit and land, the Green Revolution increased class disparities, with the rich–poor gap widening as a result. Because some regions were able to adopt Green Revolution agriculture more readily than others (for political or geographical reasons), interregional economic disparities increased as well. Many small farmers are hurt by the dropping prices resulting from increased production overall.^{[citation needed]} However, large-scale farming companies only account for less than 10% of the total farming capacity. This is a criticism held by many small producers in the food sovereignty movement.

The new economic difficulties of small holder farmers and landless farm workers led to increased rural-urban migration. The increase in food production led to a cheaper food for urban dwellers, and the increase in urban population increased the potential for industrialization.^{[citation needed]}

3.1.6 Globalization

In the most basic sense, the Green Revolution was a product of globalization as evidenced in the creation of international agricultural research centers that shared information, and with transnational funding from groups like the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

3.2 Environmental impact

Increased use of irrigation played a major role in the green revolution.

3.2.1 Biodiversity

The spread of Green Revolution agriculture affected both agricultural biodiversity (oragrodiversity) and wild biodiversity.^[41] There is little disagreement that the Green Revolution acted to reduce agricultural biodiversity, as it relied on just a few high-yield varieties of each crop.

This has led to concerns about the susceptibility of a food supply to pathogens that cannot be controlled by agrochemicals, as well as the permanent loss of many valuable genetic traits bred into traditional varieties over thousands of years. To address these concerns, massive seed banks such as Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research’s (CGIAR) International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (now Bioversity International) have been established (see Svalbard Global Seed Vault).

There are varying opinions about the effect of the Green Revolution on wild biodiversity. One hypothesis speculates that by increasing production per unit of land area, agriculture will not need to expand into new, uncultivated areas to feed a growing human population.^[48] However, land degradation and soil nutrients depletion have forced farmers to clear up formerly forested areas in order to keep up with production.^[49] A counter-hypothesis speculates that biodiversity was sacrificed because traditional systems of agriculture that were displaced sometimes incorporated practices to preserve wild biodiversity, and because the Green Revolution expanded agricultural development into new areas where it was once unprofitable or too arid. For example, the development of wheat varieties tolerant to acid soil conditions with high aluminium content, permitted the introduction of agriculture in sensitive Brazilian ecosystems as Cerradosemi-humidtropical savanna and Amazon rainforest in the geoeconomicmacroregions of Centro-Sul and Amazônia.^[48] Before the Green Revolution, other Brazilian ecosystems were also significantly damaged by human activity, such as the once 1st or 2nd main contributor to Brazilian megadiversityAtlantic Rainforest (above 85% of deforestation in the 1980s, about 95% after the 2010s) and the important xeric shrublands called Caatinga mainly in the Northeastern Brazil (about 40% in the 1980s, about 50% after the 2010s — deforestation of the Caatinga biome is generally associated with greater risks of desertification).

Nevertheless, the world community has clearly acknowledged the negative aspects of agricultural expansion as the 1992 Rio Treaty, signed by 189 nations, has generated numerous national Biodiversity Action Plans which assign significant biodiversity loss to agriculture’s expansion into new domains.

3.2.2 Greenhouse gas emissions

According to a study published in 2013 in PNAS, in the absence of the crop germplasm improvement associated with the Green revolution, greenhouse gas emissions would have been 5.2-7.4 Gt higher than observed in 1965–2004.^[50]

3.2.3 Dependence on non-renewable resources

Most high intensity agricultural production is highly reliant on non-renewable resources. Agricultural machinery and transport, as well as the production of pesticides and nitrates all depend on fossil fuels.^[51] Moreover, the essential mineral nutrient phosphorus is often a limiting factor in crop cultivation, while phosphorus mines are rapidly being depleted worldwide.^[52] The failure to depart from these non-sustainable agricultural production methods could potentially lead to a large scale collapse of the current system of intensive food production within this century.

3.3 Health impact

Main article: Health effects of pesticides

The consumption of the pesticides used to kill pests by humans in some cases may be increasing the likelihood of cancer in some of the rural villages using them.^[53] Poor farming practices including non-compliance to usage of masks and over-usage of the chemicals compound this situation.^[54] In 1989, WHO and UNEP estimated that there were around 1 million human pesticide poisonings annually. Some 20,000 (mostly in developing countries) ended in death, as a result of poor labeling, loose safety standards etc.^[55]

3.3.1 Pesticides and cancer

Long term exposure to pesticides such as organochlorines, creosote, and sulfate have been correlated with higher cancer rates and organochlorinesDDT, chlordane, and lindane as tumor promoters in animals.^{[citation needed]} Contradictory epidemiologic studies in humans have linked phenoxy acid herbicides or contaminants in them with soft tissue sarcoma (STS) and malignant lymphoma, organochlorine insecticides with STS, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), leukemia, and, less consistently, with cancers of the lung and breast, organophosphorous compounds with NHL and leukemia, and triazine herbicides with ovarian cancer.^[56][57]

3.3.2 Punjab case

See also: Green Revolution in India

The Indian state of Punjab pioneered green revolution among the other states transforming India into a food-surplus country.^[58] The state is witnessing serious consequences of intensive farming using chemicals and pesticide. A comprehensive study conducted by Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) has underlined the direct relationship between indiscriminate use of these chemicals and increased incidence of cancer in this region.^[59] An increase in the number of cancer cases has been reported in several villages including Jhariwala, Koharwala, Puckka, Bhimawali, and Khara.^[59]

Environmental activist Vandana Shiva has written extensively about the social, political and economic impacts of the Green Revolution in Punjab. She claims that the Green Revolution’s reliance on heavy use of chemical inputs and monocultures has resulted in water scarcity, vulnerability to pests, and incidents of violent conflict and social marginalization.^[60]

In 2009, under a Greenpeace Research Laboratories investigation, Dr Reyes Tirado, from the University of Exeter, UK conducted the study in 50 villages in Muktsar, Bathinda and Ludhiana districts revealed chemical, radiation and biological toxicity rampant in Punjab. Twenty percent of the sampled wells showed nitrate levels above the safety limit of 50 mg/l, established by WHO, the study connected it with high use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.^[61]

4. Norman Borlaug’s response to criticism[edit]

He dismissed certain claims of critics, but did take other concerns seriously and stated that his work has been “a change in the right direction, but it has not transformed the world into a Utopia”.^[62]

Of environmental lobbyists, he said:

“some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels…If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things”.^[63]

5. The “New” Green Revolution

Although the Green Revolution has been able to improve agricultural output in many regions in the world, there was and is still room for improvement. As a result, many organizations continue to invent new ways to improve the techniques already used in the Green Revolution. Frequently quoted inventions are the System of Rice Intensification,^[64]marker-assisted selection,^[65]agroecology,^[66] and applying existing technologies to agricultural problems of the developing world.^[67]