GEOG 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 26: Food Security, Social Inequality, Demographic Transition
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Geog 102
Cultural Geography
Spring 2017
Inconvenient Truths
○ Is it true that poverty is a result of population pressure
○ Measure population density
○ Relationship between population density and how that society is doing?
○ Does high population density foster poverty?
○ No because the graph shows that it is flat
○ Diagram suggests that there is no such relationship
○ Have high densities in Bangladesh but also in Netherlands and live very differently
○ Human development index vs. population growth: no general trend and certainly no
downward trend
○ Development of the world: population will even off, naturally tailing off,
demographic transition from low populations to acceleration to stabilization
○ As families become better off, birth rates tail off
○ This has been the historical experience of Europeans as they industrialized
○ Green Revolution
■ You can intensify growing of things with
■ New seed forms that were much more efficient, much more grain per unit of
green material and were bred to be resistant in wider varity of climates; focus
on wheat and rice=major grain crops
■ They can grow more food per acre and then hunger will fall
■ Based on research done in the united states
■ Extremely influential and successful program
■ Yields per acre did increase
■ However hunger remained a persistant feature in these societies
■ Wasn’t a question of buying a new package of seeds, had to adopt new
agricultural technology fertlizers, insecticides; problem= taking package in
other climates didn’t work as effectively
■ Second problem was that in order to use technology, land had to be put in
large units
■ That meant a lot of people got displaced off of lands, couldn’t compete with
richer farmers
■ Then lose only means of support then forced into cities
■ Extra food was fed to livestock, people who could afford meat ate it indirectly
■ Also made into alcohol and some stored
■ Social benefits that were supposed to come with technological benefits were
less than people expected
■ Is hunger a problem of population pressure or is it something more?
■ Weve now shifted from field based improvement that were key in the green
revolution to the gene revolution where it is all about genetically modfiing
organisms
○ Gene Revolution
■ Create more food