Food Production & Distribution
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1. The four case studies under discussion cover four different rice-producing regions--the Iban culture, the Bang Chan in Thailand, the United States, and Japan. The two latter countries are very different from the two former in terms of levels of industrialization and modernization, and certainly Japan and the U.S. have more advanced technologies at their disposal than do the Iban or the Bang Chan, who are still engaged largely in subsistence farming with hand implements. For the Iban and the Bang Chan, rice production is very labor intensive and employs nearly every person of any age in the village or local community. While it might be presumed that production could be improved with more technological solutions to the problems of rice production, this does not seem to be the case. Rice production has to be labor intensive to be productive, and reducing the human labor involved through mechanical means reaches a point of diminishing returns. This is one of the reasons yield rates for the United States are lower though the technology is greater. The U.S. uses more advanced technology even than Japan. In Japan, the primary energy sources are humans, animals, the tiller, and the thresher. In the United States, the primary energy sources are humans, animals, the tractor, the grader, the combine, and the airplane. At the same time, the seed to yield ratio is high for the U.S., which shows that the method of planting must be more effective for some reason.
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of individuals for a better standard of living generally have a stronger effect on decision makers than the requirement of ecological systems for lower human pressure, and because of this technological solutions tend never to solve the problems of the higher level. As soon as the adopted technological improvements make available more disposable resources to society (loosening the external constraint), society takes advantage of them by expanding the welfare of its members rather than reducing the pressure on the environment. This process is made all the stronger because of the unavoidable presence of levels in the distribution of wealth among individuals in society. Giampietro (1994) states:
This process is, for instance, what sunk the green revolution's hopes of eradicating hunger. Without a new set of internal controls (e.g., changes in cultural identity, institutions, or laws), a simple improvement in food supply per hectare of arable land (an intensive variable) can actually backfire by generating an even larger increase in population size (an extensive variable) that reduces the hectares of arable land available per capita (Giampietro, 1994, 681).
Giampietro also refers to this as the "silver bullet syndrome":
The descr
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3227
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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