GEO

Exam Study Guide: Development, Food Systems & T-Shirt Travels

Built from four lecture decks (Thinking Critically About Development; Agro-Industrialization & the "Homogenocene"; Agriculture & the Homogenocene; Reading Development Policy Critically / Sweetpotato case) plus the film T-Shirt Travels.

The One-Paragraph Big Picture

The course argues that today's global inequality and food system are products of history, not accidents or "lack of development." Colonialism rebuilt economies to serve outside powers. When colonies became independent, they were left with extraction-shaped economies and then handed development advice (modernization, free trade, structural adjustment) from the same wealthy countries. Meanwhile, food production was industrialized, standardized, and financialized, which produced huge yields but also environmental damage, loss of diversity, and dependence on companies and markets. The critical move the course keeps asking you to make: instead of asking "how do we fix the poor place?" ask "how did it get this way, and who benefits from the current arrangement?" (the frog-in-a-pot slide).

Unit 1: What Is "Development"? (Development lecture)

Core definitions

• Development is a value-laden idea of what a society can/should achieve. "Developed" vs. "developing" sets up a single continuum that judges every society against one vision.

• Development practice = interventions to correct a perceived lack of development, usually in the decolonized "Global South," focused on alleviating poverty and related concerns.

• Colonialism = dominance of one society by an outside power (political, military, economic, ideological). Colonization = physical settlement of colonizers in the territory.

Two colonial phases

• Mercantile (c. 1492-1800): Spain and Portugal; trading posts and military defense.

• Industrial (c. 1800-1960s): driven by European rivalry; the Industrial Revolution goes international. The "Scramble for Africa" (starting 1885) was enabled by tech like railroads.

Mechanisms of colonialism

• Trade rerouted from internal (within Africa) to external (colony to colonial power).

• Colonies export raw materials (primary goods) and import manufactured goods (secondary goods).

• Infrastructure was fragmented and built for extraction, not local needs.

• Social construction of ethnic and racial hierarchies.

• Settler colonialism: uses local resources to expand the settler population; forced "assimilation" of Indigenous people.

After independence

• Independence waves followed WWI and especially WWII. New states inherited unequal wealth and political power, depleted resources, disrupted cultures, and poor infrastructure.

• Rushkoff (Life Inc): former empires were "willing to lend a hand, for a price."

• 1970s energy crisis: OAPEC oil embargo (1973) pushed prices from about $3 to $12 a barrel. Poorer nations borrowed from the World Bank at high interest, couldn't repay, and debt was often partly forgiven in exchange for privatization and opening markets.

Goals of development interventions: stronger economy, infrastructure, political stability, health care, human rights and legal reform, social equality, education and literacy, environmental protection.

Four theories of development (know the pattern: perceived problem, theory, intervention)

Era

Theory

Perceived problem

Intervention

1940s-60s

Modernization theory (Rostow-style stages: traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, high mass consumption)

Poverty, lack of infrastructure

Move societies through stages; aim for comparative advantage. Linked to the demographic transition model

1960s-70s

Dependency / World Systems theory

Poor countries are structurally dependent on rich ones. Core = capital, management, innovation. Periphery = raw materials, agriculture, simple labor-heavy manufacturing, looser labor and environmental rules. Semi-periphery = both (e.g., Mexico)

Protectionism (tariffs), import substitution

1970s-2000s

Neoliberalism

"Government is the problem." Lack of competition

Free trade agreements; Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) from the IMF and World Bank: privatize utilities, education, resources; sell public land; reduce state role

21st century

Sustainable development (Brundtland: meet present needs without compromising future generations)

Inequality, environmental degradation

Three pillars / triple bottom line: economy, equality, environment

Exam tip: be ready to compare any two theories. Modernization says the problem is internal (a place hasn't progressed yet). Dependency says the problem is relational (the global system makes poor places poor). Neoliberalism says the problem is state interference.

Unit 2: Agro-Industrialization (Agriculture lecture 1)

Framing questions: How did big economic shifts change farming? What did colonialism and industrialization do to food production? How did food markets change? What were the social effects?

The Agro-Industrial Complex = narrowing to a few staple crops + surplus fertilizer + mechanization + financialization, all producing standardization and homogenization of food production.

Before industrialization

• "Traditional" agriculture: hand planting and harvesting, seed saved and selected year to year, manure as the main fertilizer.

• Medieval Europe had frequent famines (Four Horsemen image: Famine). Inefficiency was the problem.

• Pre-industrial political economy: Physiocrats (government shouldn't interfere in "natural economic laws"; land is the source of all wealth) vs. Romantic anti-modernists (rejected mass production's material benefits; wanted to protect the moral virtue of small-scale production and local independence).

Conquest and food

• Colonial conquest moved crops around the world. The potato and other New World crops helped end periodic famine in Europe.

• Guano (nitrogen- and phosphate-rich bird droppings from Peru's islands) became a major new fertilizer source in the 19th century. This is the "surplus of fertilizer" leg: fertility imported from colonized places.

Mechanization and standardization

• The grain farm was the "perfect agricultural landscape": fertile prairie soils, flat land, machines (tractors, seed drills) that reward uniform fields and uniform crops.

Transportation changes

• Flatboats, then railroads. Cronon (Nature's Metropolis): rail is cheap over long distances; this reshaped which places could supply which markets. The railroad network expanded dramatically 1850 to 1860, with Chicago as a hub.

Market changes: abstraction and financialization

• Grain standardized into grades so that it became interchangeable; grain elevator receipts let people trade paper instead of physical grain. This is the abstraction of grain.

• Financialization: a system shifts from running on its own internal dynamics to running on the interests and activities of an investment class; exchange happens through financial instruments.

• Philadelphia example: 1700s merchants bought shares of many ships to spread risk (diversify the portfolio).

• Information advantage: trading in secret, horse relays, watchtowers, then the telegraph (an equalizer, but better access still meant an advantage), and today algorithmic/computer trading, where being a few hundred feet closer to the central computer makes you money.

Key takeaway: industrial food is not just about machines. It's about turning food into a standardized, tradable abstraction that can be moved, financed, and speculated on far from where it grows.

Unit 3: The Green Revolution, Environmental Costs, and Homogenization (Agriculture lecture 2)

Framing questions: How and why do we produce so much food? What are the consequences? What is the future?

Green Revolution (c. 1945-1965)

• Crossbred, high-yield crop varieties (inbred plants with predictable traits) to solve hunger.

• High yield requires high inputs: fertilizer, water, pesticide. Traditional breeding is slower but better adapted to local conditions and needs fewer inputs.

• Success story: India. A new rice yielded about 3x per acre; world rice prices fell from about $550/ton (1970s) to about $200/ton (2001); hunger "solved" in the 1960s-70s (the lecture flags that such claims can be misleading).

Social critiques

• Depends on monocropping and heavy inputs, often leading to debt and land loss for small farmers.

• Economic/class polarization: economies of scale favor large farms; wealthy farmers have better access to land and credit.

• "Traditional" crops can out-yield high-yield crops in suboptimal local conditions, yet high-yield crops are introduced anyway, sometimes with disastrous effects.

Environmental critiques

• Water: irrigated land has more than tripled since the 1950s. Ogallala Aquifer (about 30% of US irrigation groundwater; down about 100 ft; depletion in about 20 years at current trends; about 1,200 years to recharge). Colorado River (about 90% diverted). Aral Sea (desertification; collapsed fishing economy; severe health effects).

• Fertilizer: inputs up 4x in 60 years. Problems: runoff pollution and eutrophication; land conversion onto fragile land; soil salinization (overirrigation in arid regions); wind erosion.

• Pesticides: large-scale use began in the 1950s; Silent Spring and DDT harming wildlife; new pesticides in the 1970s and the cycle continues. Linked to biodiversity loss and possibly colony collapse disorder; insect die-off meta-analysis points to intensive agriculture, pesticides, and fertilizers among the major drivers.

• Loss of food diversity.

The "Homogenocene"

• Just over 100 plant species supply 90% of human food; rice, wheat, and corn alone supply about 50% of calories. Why is that a problem? Genetic uniformity means shared vulnerability.

• Gros Michel banana: bananas are propagated from offshoots, so all plants of a variety are genetically identical. Panama disease wiped out Gros Michel in the 1950s; replaced by the resistant Cavendish. (The cautionary tale of monoculture.)

• High yield means bigger seeds that are mostly starch; the fiber (bran) and embryo (oils, nutrients) shrink in proportion. Health effects: digestive disorders (low fiber), malnutrition, heart disease, need for fortification.

Genetic modification (21st century)

• Direct gene splicing for novel traits in one generation: Golden Rice (beta carotene), terminator seeds, Roundup-ready crops, pest resistance. Biofortification = raising nutritional value by breeding (conventional) or genetic engineering.

• Lecture's stance on GMOs: little evidence of direct human-health hazard (though each GMO is novel, so caution), but major social and economic concerns: corporate ownership of seed and loss of farmer control, dependence on seed and chemical companies (worst for marginal farmers), gene drift with property implications, and increased pesticide/fertilizer use driving pest resistance and pollution.

Four-stage recap: Traditional (to 1800s; hand work, manure, locally adapted crops) → Industrial (19th c.; colonization, mechanization, new fertilizer, new crops, transportation, financialization) → Green Revolution (1940s-60s on; hybrids, more water/fertilizer/pesticide, marginal land) → Genetic modification (21st c.).

Alternatives to industrial food

• Local foods: keeps the food economy local, preserves producer-consumer trust, lowers environmental burden; usually small farms and unprocessed food.

• Sustainable farming techniques: crop rotation, contour plowing/terracing, stubble mulching, windbreaks, minimum tillage, fallowing, less intensive farming (tradeoff: can't always grow the highest-price crop; time consuming).

• Organic: limits synthetic chemicals, GMOs, sewage sludge; requires records, separation, inspection, certification (expensive, favors large producers). For: reduces input dependence, long-term sustainability, healthier food, more diversity. Against: high labor means high prices, contamination risk, lower yields and may not feed everyone.

• Fair trade (accountability, profit-sharing; challenges the pattern where most value is added near consumers, as with coffee and chocolate) and urban agriculture (uses extra land, keeps production near consumption).

Unit 4: Reading Development Policy Critically (Sweetpotato case)

Colonialism, two versions

• Traditional colonialism: force local societies to follow another society's rules; mechanism = violence or threat of violence (military control); effect = capital flows from colony to homeland.

• Economic colonialism: encourage or force local economies to follow external economic rules; mechanism = economic regulation and development techniques; effect = capital flows from poor economies to wealthy ones. Example: free trade policies force competition among economies that can't compete.

Hunger statistics (UN FAO): undernourishment in developing countries about 60% in 1960 to about 14% in 2006 despite population growth; about 850 million lacked enough food in 2006, about 538.7 million at the 2014 low, rising again since. More food per person every year since the 1960s, so increased production has so far avoided a Malthusian catastrophe. Under-nutrition (not enough calories) differs from malnutrition (lacking proper nutrients, e.g., protein, vitamins): many have access to food but not nutritious food. Vitamin A deficiency in Africa: about 500,000 children go blind each year; half die within a year; weakened immunity raises risk from malaria, diarrhea, measles.

How development frames Africa: malnutrition seen as endemic to an "undeveloped" region; communities seen as lacking the capacity to solve their own problems and needing assistance, advice, and wisdom from the West.

The Mozambique case

• Problem: very low GDP; about 80% of people in agriculture, mostly subsistence; vitamin A deficiency among children.

• Development solution: replace traditional white sweet potato (low vitamin A) with orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) (high vitamin A). Biofortification via selective breeding. Backed by CGIAR/IFPRI, the International Potato Center, Feed the Future (US government), and Helen Keller International. A published study found the large-scale program increased vitamin A intake in children and women.

• Acceptance strategy: social marketing and behavior change communications, training and supervision of front-line distributors, convincing producers to switch. Some people resist.

The critical reading (post-development)

• Economic/nutritional: white = fewer inputs, better suited to subsistence farming; orange = needs high inputs to reach high yields.

• Cultural: local tastes and cooking habits fit the dry flesh of white sweet potato; no traditional methods or technology for the moist orange flesh.

• Historicizing malnutrition (Rijpma): before colonization spread inland (to the mid-19th century) African agricultural peoples ate diverse diets and there is little evidence of significant malnutrition; doctors noted abundant food and skilled farming (manure, irrigation, intercropping). The lecture claims the colonial shift (1880-1920, "Scramble for Africa") caused loss of life far greater than the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade.

• How colonization produced malnutrition: forced labor and male migration increased women's work (less prolonged nursing); laws banned use of common lands for hunting and fishing (poorer weaning foods); plantations replaced farmland and game areas; taxation forced cash-crop production.

• Conclusion of the lecture: Malnutrition in Mozambique is an effect of recent economic and cultural change tied to colonization, not a lack of "development." Well-meaning interventions like OFSP require economic and cultural reconfiguration of food production and consumption, which echoes economic colonialism. Successful interventions must understand the reasons for present conditions and involve people as full and equal participants.

Unit 5: T-Shirt Travels (film)

Note: this section is from public descriptions of the film (Shantha Bloemen, 2001; aired on PBS Independent Lens in 2004), not from your slides. Check it against your class notes and add anything your instructor emphasized.

What it shows: The filmmaker, an aid worker in Zambia, noticed nearly everyone wearing secondhand Western clothing (band tees, brand-name jackets). She follows the trail from charity donation bins in New Jersey, to textile exporters/graders, to bales sold to African importers, to Zambian market sellers.

Main arguments

• Donated clothes aren't simply "helping." Huge volumes of cheap secondhand clothing undercut local manufacturers; Zambia's clothing industry collapsed. Many sellers are former teachers, nurses, civil servants, and factory workers who lost jobs and now sell used clothes.

• The deeper cause is policy. She traces Zambia's history from colonization through independence to World Bank/IMF-directed economic policy and debt, i.e., structural adjustment and market opening. A Zambian banker in the film frames it as having no political colonialism but an economic colonialism.

• The film's subtitle ties it directly to Third World debt.

How it connects to the course

• Economic colonialism: policy and finance (not troops) channel value to wealthy economies.

• Neoliberalism / SAPs: open markets and privatization remove protection for local producers (the opposite of import substitution).

• Dependency theory: Zambia as periphery; the West as core; a global supply chain that moves goods, and benefit, one direction.

• Post-development thinking: well-meaning charity (donations) can have harmful, hidden consequences when the system's history is ignored. Same lesson as OFSP.

• Commodity-chain thinking: like grain, a T-shirt is an object whose story is hidden by market abstraction until you follow it.

Cross-Cutting Themes (the "broad ideas" to be able to write about)

1. History explains the present. Colonial extraction (trade rerouting, raw materials out, manufactured goods in) shaped both food systems and poverty. Don't treat poverty or malnutrition as natural or timeless.

2. Economic colonialism replaced military colonialism. Debt, SAPs, free trade rules, and development "techniques" can funnel capital from poor to rich economies.

3. Well-meaning interventions can reproduce the problem. OFSP and used-clothing donations both ignore local economic and cultural context and can deepen dependence.

4. Standardization and homogenization. Standard grain grades, uniform crops, a few staple species, identical banana clones: efficient and productive, but fragile and concentrated in a few hands.

5. Abstraction and financialization. Food becomes paper (elevator receipts), shares, futures, and algorithms; control shifts to those with capital and information.

6. Tradeoffs of high yield. More calories per person and cheaper food vs. debt, land loss, water depletion, pollution, biodiversity loss, and less nutritious food.

7. Who decides? Seed ownership, certification costs, who gets credit, who participates in designing interventions. Power matters as much as technology.

8. Who defines "development"? One vision of progress applied to all societies; the post-development move is to ask how the problem was produced and to include affected people as equal participants.

Practice Questions

1. Compare modernization theory and dependency theory. What problem does each identify and what intervention does each recommend?

2. What is the difference between traditional and economic colonialism? Give an example of each mechanism.

3. Explain "financialization" using grain elevator receipts. Why does it matter for who controls food?

4. List three environmental and three social critiques of the Green Revolution. Which ones apply to the India rice story?

5. What is the Homogenocene? Use the Gros Michel banana to illustrate the risk.

6. Why does the lecture argue GMO concerns are mostly social and economic rather than health-related?

7. Use the OFSP case to explain the difference between development thinking and post-development thinking.

8. How does T-Shirt Travels illustrate economic colonialism and structural adjustment? What would a post-development reading say about donating clothes?

9. Evaluate organic farming as a solution to industrial agriculture's problems (arguments for and against).

10. Choose two themes from the cross-cutting list and tie each to a case from the lectures and to the film.

Key Terms Quick List

Development; colonialism vs. colonization; mercantile vs. industrial colonialism; settler colonialism; primary vs. secondary goods; Scramble for Africa; modernization theory; demographic transition; dependency/world systems theory; core, periphery, semi-periphery; import substitution; protectionism; neoliberalism; SAPs; IMF/World Bank; sustainable development / triple bottom line; agro-industrial complex; guano; abstraction of grain; financialization; Green Revolution; monocropping; eutrophication; salinization; Ogallala; Aral Sea; Homogenocene; Gros Michel; GMO; biofortification; gene drift; local food; organic; fair trade; undernutrition vs. malnutrition; Malthusian catastrophe; OFSP; behavior change communications; economic colonialism; post-development.