Sources: http://www.lastfirst.net/images/product/R004548.jpg

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Food Insecurity of poor not addressed
•
Cash Crops: food flows from the poor and hungry nations to the rich and well-fed nations
•
Green Revolution not sustainable
– destroys resource base on which agriculture depends

India
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Self-sufficient in grain due to Green Revolution
•
But 1/3 of people poor
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5,000 children die each day
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Poor cannot afford to
BUY the food

•
Early, poor had little access to credit
•
Could not buy seeds, fertilizer, irrigation to make
Green Revolution work
•
Wealthy invested, got richer, drove out poor
•
Now, more emphasis on loans for poor

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Need good land (wealthy own)
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Agrochemicals bad for health, environment
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Expensive inputs: profits to global chemical companies
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Rural people displaced from land
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Mechanization reduces agricultural jobs
•
Not ecologically sustainable: depletes soil, pesticide race

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Fertilizer use increases by huge amount
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Yields do not increase proportionally
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India: 6x rise in fertilizer use but 2/3 less production/ton fertilizer
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Need more fertilizer, pesticide each year for same result
•
Thus cost go up faster than yields: cost-price squeeze

•
U.S. true home of Green Revolution
•
Yields up 3x
– but prices down
•
To survive, must expand acreage
– to make up for lower per acre profit.

•
Since WWII
– number of farms decreased 2/3
– average farm size up ½
– rural communities gutted
– production costs up from 50% of gross to 80%

•
Dramatic increases in yields during 1970s,
1980s
•
Soil now depleted, resulting in leveling off or dropping yields
•
6% of Ag land in India now useless

Brazil
•
Profits from Green
Revolution go to
– Middlemen
– Banks
– Chemical companies
– Biggest growers
•
Grain prices fall
•
Farms get bigger

•
Poor countries must import:
– Seeds
– Fertilizer
– Pesticides
– Herbicides
•
Cost to India increased
600% 1960-1980
•
Biotechnology leads to more dependency

•
Industrial agriculture =
– mining land to extract maximum output
• “War” between humans and weeds, insects and disease
•
Market dictates weapons:
– pesticides and chemical fertilizers
•
We are destroying our foodproducing resources

•
Desertification
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Soil erosion
•
Pesticide contamination
•
Groundwater depletion
•
Salinization
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Urban sprawl
•
Genetic resources shrinking
•
Fossil fuels depleting

http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_15/b3624011.htm

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Biotechnology will help developing countries accomplish things that they could never do with conventional plant breeding”
• “I believe genetically modified food crops will stop world hunger.”
Norman Borlaug
Nobel Peace Prize

•
Biotechnology helps farmers produce higher yields on less land.
•
Technology allows us to have less impact on soil erosion, biodiversity, wildlife, forests, and grasslands
•
To achieve comparable yields
(1950-1999) with old farming methods, would have needed an additional 1.8 Billion hectares of land
Norman Borlaug
Nobel Peace Prize

•
Biotechnology development
– Same vision as chemical industry:
•
Short term goals
–
Enhanced yields, profit margins
•
Nature should be dominated and exploited
– forced to yield more
•
Prefer quick solutions
– to complex ecological problems
•
Reductionist thinking about farming
–
Instead of integrated systems
•
Agricultural success means
–
Short term profits
–
Not long term sustainability
-Jane Rissler, Union of Concerned Scientists

• History of theory in anthropology
• Unilinear, relativism, symbolism, materialism, humanism
• Flat Earth
– Positive aspects of globalization?
• Falling Flat
– Negative aspects of globalization?

• Originated in the 1940's
– Positivistic period in sciences. What does positivism mean?
• Biologist Ludwig von
Bertalanffy (General
Systems Theory, 1968)
• Ross Ashby
(Introduction to
Cybernetics, 1956).

• Reaction to reductionism in science
• Attempted to revive a unified theory in science
• What does this mean?
– General Theory
– Holism
– Positivism

• Systems are sets of covariant entities no subset of which is unrelated to any other subset
• Systems Theory is the trans-disciplinary study of the abstract organization of phenomena, independent of their substance, type, or spatial or temporal scale of existence

• To be a system requires organization and interdependence
• An grouping of functioning parts that are not interdependent is described as a Heap

• Systems theory looks beyond functional cause and effect models
• It portrays human adaptation in terms of wellspecified webs of mutual causality.
• Is a way of looking at the relationships among variables

• Systems analysis focuses on the meaningful interactions of the parts with one another and with the whole as they influence some process or outcome
• No elemental part of the system can be understood only in terms of itself
• Systems can be understood by studying the interactions of a functioning part with the entire system
• Systems are shaped by both internal and environmental processes and conditions over time

• Excellent theory for describing flows
• Excellent for describing closed systems
• Problems?
• No closed cultural system
• What does this mean?
• Systems thinking tends to be processual (time and space), conditional, and probabilistic

• System in its everyday sense
• Nervous system
• Legal system
• Cooling/Heating system
– Automobile cooling system
• Radiator
• Fan
• Water pump
• Thermostat
• Cooling jacket around the cylinder head
• Hoses/clamps

• Cow, like all organisms, is a very complex system
– Circulatory system
– Nervous systems
– Digestive system
– Study digestive system to understand how cow lives on grass (total system)
• One we use to turn grass into milk
– Also part of a number of larger systems
– If kept with other cows, part of Herd
= social organization of cows
– Study cow as part of herd to understand herd
OTHER EXAMPLES OF SYSTEMS COWS
ARE PART OF?

• Collection of smaller parts more stable over time than one large operational part
– Scientists made atoms of bigger and bigger size, and they became more unstable the larger they were

• Energy and information is needed to fuel systems
• The more complex the system, the more energy and information is needed
• Inputs and Outputs

• Systems can transform things
• Input / Output
• Information about the result of a transformation is recorded
• If this information affects the transformation in a positive way – positive feedback = leads to accelerate the transformation
• If this information affects the transformation in a negative way – negative feedback = leads to system stabilization

• Emmanuel Wallerstein
• U.S. sociologist
• Historical social scientist
• World-systems analyst
• The Modern World-
System, 1974, 1980, and 1989
• Marx, history of exchange networks,
Dependency Theory

• Before World Systems
Theory, there was…
• Dependency Theory
• Social science theories predicated on the notion that resources flow from a "periphery" of poor and underdeveloped states to a "core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former.

• The late 18th and early
19th centuries marked a great turning point in the development of capitalism
• Capitalists achieved statesocietal power in the key states which furthered the industrial revolution marking the rise of capitalism
• UK and USA

• “World Economy” integrated through the market rather than a political center
• Two or more regions interdependent and two or more polities completing for dominance
• Division of labor
“Core“ of "free countries“ dominating others without being
Dominated
“Semi-periphery“ the countries which are dominated while at the same time they dominate
Others
“Periphery" as the countries which are dominated

• Multicultural territorial division of labor in which the production and exchange of basic goods and raw materials is necessary for the everyday life of its inhabitants
• Division of labor: the forces and relations of production of the world economy as a whole
• Leads to the existence of two interdependent regions: core and periphery.

• World-system theory is a macrosociological perspective that seeks to explain the dynamics of the
“capitalist world economy” as a “total social system”
• “Man’s ability to participate intelligently in the evolution of his own system is dependent on his ability to perceive the whole”
(Wallerstein 1974:10)

• Powerful and wealthy
"core" societies dominate and exploit weak and poor peripheral societies.
• Technology (both military and civilian) is a central factor in the positioning of a region in the core or the periphery

• Capitalism, as a historical social system, has always integrated a variety of labor forms within a functioning division of labor
• Countries do not have economies, but are part of the world-economy.

• Unequal exchange: the systematic transfer of surplus from semiproletarian sectors in the periphery to the hightechnology, industrialized core
• Capital accumulation at a
global scale: necessarily involves the appropriation and transformation of peripheral surplus

• Imperialism: The domination of weak peripheral regions by strong core states.
• Hegemony : The existence of one core state temporarily outstripping the rest.
• Global Class Struggle: The inherent conflict between the owners of the means of production and labor.
• What is the inherent conflict?

• Criticisms to modernization
• (1) the reification of the nationstate as the sole unit of analysis,
• (2) assumption that all countries can follow only a single path of evolutionary development,
• (3) disregard of the worldhistorical development of transnational structures that constrain local and national development,
• (4) explaining in terms of ahistorical ideal types of
“tradition” versus “modernity”,

• SUNY Binghamton, at the
Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies,
Historical Systems and
Civilizations
• Journal of World Systems
Research
• Greatest impact among intellectuals in the periphery countries
• Used to analyze development dynamics and to understand the relationship between developed and developing regions