Question

Please write your answer in (around) 3-4 sentences.

What was the Green Revolution? Please explain 2 criticisms of the Green Revolution.

What two things make evolution possible? Why might evolution be difficult for varieties bred for monoculture farming?

Answer 1

Green revolution depended heavily on monoculture high yielding varieties of plants, whereas the target third world countries used polycutures. This led to the monocultures having less resistance to local climates and pests, and often compared to the local polycultures, the appeal of the food made from the HYV cultures would be much lower.

The green revolution also brought along the heavy use of insecticides and pesticides. Even though many of the more dangerous ones were banned soon in the first world countries, the third world countries continue to use toxic insecticides such as DDT due to lax government oversight. This brought along biomagnificance and insecticide resistant insects and pests.

The two major things that make evolution possible are variance and inheritance. Monocultures lack the variance found in polycultures, which make them superior from an evolutionary standpoint. Monocultures lack the variety of genes found in a single growth of polyculture plants, who keep on exchanging the genes until the plants better adapted to it's surrounding dominate. Because of having uniform genes, this is not found in monocultures.