Hunger is Man-Made - Part 3: The Green Trap: How Modernization Concentrated Land and Poverty
Hunger is Man-Made: The Political Economy of Food Scarcity 1 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 1: How Inequality Fabricates Scarcity 2 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 2: Engineered Vulnerability: When Famine Becomes an Act of History 3 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 3: The Green Trap: How Modernization Concentrated Land and Poverty 4 Hunger is Man-Made - Part 4: The Global Supermarket: Corporate Control, Debt, and the Toxic Gift of Aid ← Series Home Key Takeaways "High Yielding Varieties" are actually "High Response Varieties": These seeds require expensive inputs (irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides) available only to wealthy farmers. Technology under inequality worsens conditions for the poor: Profitable innovations in unequal societies inevitably concentrate wealth and displace the vulnerable. Green Revolution excluded 85% of the world's cultivable land: HRVs covered only 15% of land by 1972-73, leaving traditional agriculture to poor farmers with limited resources. Mechanization displaced millions of agricultural workers: Landowners invested in machinery to increase profits and eliminate labor costs, creating permanent joblessness. Land concentration accelerated dramatically: Wealthy farmers monopolized government credit and services, forcing smallholders to sell land cheaply to survive. Post 3: Hunger is Man-Made - Part 3: The Green Trap: How Modernization Concentrated Land and Poverty For decades, the core question driving global food policy has been: “How can we produce more food?”. This focus on aggregate production, rather than equitable access, created an era of “agricultural modernization” which replaced the goal of true rural development. This process ignores the social reality of hunger—that the hungry are precisely those who control little to none of the food production resources. ...