Ebook: Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes, and the Cold War

During the past 100 years, the worldwide yields of cereals and grains, such as rice and wheat, have increased dramatically. Indeed, since the 1950s, the influence of plant breeding science on modern agriculture has been trumpeted as the "Green Revolution". But every revolution is not without consequence, and in the West, the reverberations of the Green Revolution include a complex co-dependency between people and their national appetite for wheat. Geopolitics and the Green Revolution examines this tenuous relationship by exploring the political ecology of wheat breeding in developed countries such as the U.S., India, Britain, and Mexico. Through a detailed study of the history of the Green Revolution, this provocative work stimulates questions about the sustainability of agriculture and the future of human population growth.