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Green Revolution Dbq
Alex Marshall DBQ Essay AP World History Green Revolution

The Green Revolution was the world’s introduction to modern agricultural and a time of vast improvements in the world’s fight against hunger. New technologies such as High Yield Variety seeds, chemical fertilizer, and agricultural machinery led this revolution and are still a big part of the way we produce food for the world today. The Green Revolution was a savior do many small developing countries throughout the world that barely made enough food to survive and one bad harvest could destroy an entire village. Food is now mass produced throughout the fields of the world and distributed on the world market to countries in need and to already developed countries whose people will pay for foreign and exotic food. The Green Revolution has one enemy; the reproductive rate of the human species is exceeding the rate at which we can make food to feed it. The main cause for the Green Revolution was need. The population was growing and we needed to produce more food. In 1949 President Harry Truman said that half of the world’s population had inadequate food supply and that it needed to change (Doc.3). There were many technological advancements which caused the revolution to happen. High Yield Variety seeds (or HYVs) produce plants that produce of the actual food, such as a corn stalk producing more ears of corn per stalk. These new plants produced much more food in the same amount of land, but when farms started expanding more food was grown than ever before. This is shown when the world food supply shot around 1950 and has continued to grow with the population to this day (Doc.1). Chemical fertilizer was also a new invention of the time. The fertilizer put more nutrients and minerals into the soil causing plants to bigger and faster. The chemical fertilizer also allowed fertilizer to be mass produced and much easier to fertilize the land with.

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