A Discussion On Whether Green Revolution Was Beneficial
Was the Green Revolution Beneficial? There is a lot of controversy about if The Green Revolution was a beneficial time period. The Green Revolution was when the production of global agriculture had been increasing drastically as a result of science and newer technologies. The biggest advance was chemical fertilizers used on crops. These chemical fertilizers helped make it easier to add extra nutrients to crops which increased yield. They became useful as herbicides and pesticides to control weeds, kill insects, and prevent diseases, which soon resulted in higher productivity.
In my opinion, I see more cons than pros in this situation. I believe we need to stop the use of fertilizers. These fertilizers are so strong that if they ever needed to kill these chemicals, it would be almost impossible. I like to compare these chemicals to antibiotics. When a person takes a antibiotic, they take it to kill the bacteria which is making the person. Crops naturally attract bugs and diseases, which humans do not want to consume, therefore they spray the fertilizers to kill these bugs and diseases. This may seem fine, but if we continue to use these chemicals, super weeds and pests will come back even stronger. Another reason I disagree with the use of these pesticides because they employ mono-culturing. Mono-culturing calls for large tracts of land, which is not always available due to the expansion of urban areas, but if you do have that much land available, you will need a lot of water and fertilizers as well, which brings troubles to farmers.
The last detail that struck me was that these fertilizers and pesticides are attempting to kill harmful bugs, but are actually killing off species that help us. The pesticides are strong enough to kill the helpful bugs, but not the bugs that are actually contaminating our food. This last detail made it completely clear to me that using the fertilizers was not that beneficial after all. There are many people who will disagree with my opinion. Some people are able to see how this affects us on a bigger scale. Instead of these crops being grown in small rural areas, they are taking up miles of land and becoming more industrious. Because we never have enough crops, it is easy to say we need to grow more. These fertilizers make it easy to grow crops where they are not usually able to grow. The fertilizers help the plants get through tough times that unfertilized plants cannot. The Green Revolution was not beneficial to our society. Fertilizers did not solve our problems, but new ways of keeping our food supply higher are coming out everyday. Fertilizers have been here for awhile and may or not be here to stay.
