Geography 130 – Spring 2024

Potential final exam questions

Key terms/definitions: define and/or briefly explain in 1-2 sentences

Market concentration Teleconnections

Business consolidation Pesticide treadmill
Vertical integration Technological treadmill
Food system hourglass The General Law of Capitalist
Food security Accumulation
Food justice Organic composition of capital
Food sovereignty Industrial reserve army
Sustainable intensification The Metabolic rift
Bennett’s Law The Invisible hand
Nutrition transition The Principle of population
Antibiotic resistance The Poor Laws
The Industrial diet Division of labor
Obesogenic environment Fallow
The Mann-Dickinson thesis Justus von Liebig
The Bracero Program Law of the minimum
Earl Butz Enclosure
Globalization Land tenure
Neoliberalism Commons
The First (British) Food Regime Crop rotation
The Second (U.S.) Food Regime The Columbian exchange
The Ever-Normal Granary The Triangular trade
The Agricultural Adjustment Act Open vs. closed resources
Modernization theory The Pristine Myth
The Green Revolution The Great Dying
Norman Borlaug Pleistocene overkill hypothesis
The Demographic transition Pastoralism
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Nitrogen fixation
(GATT) The Neolithic Revolution
International Wheat Agreement Ecological niche construction
Fritz Haber Hunting-gathering
Simple mass selection Quaternary period
Differentiation Aboriginal, agricultural and industrial fire
In situ vs. ex situ conservation

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Short essays: Answer the following questions in 1-2 paragraphs

1. Roughly three quarters of the billion or so hungry people in the world are rural
agricultural producers or recent migrants from rural areas. Why? What does this
suggest about the causes of hunger and how it might best be combated?

2. What is the relative contribution of food production to global greenhouse gas

emissions? Which gasses from agriculture are the most important contributors, and
which parts of the food system produce them?

3. How does food sovereignty differ from food security? Can food sovereignty be achieved
without control over land? Why or why not?

4. What are some of the reasons that California farmland is so expensive? How do high
land values affect farm laborers’ wages and working conditions? How do they affect the
prospects for organic or alternative agriculture?

5. Why do so many of the people who work in the food system on farms, in processing and
distribution, and in restaurants experience chronic food insecurity? What kinds of
measures could be taken to address this?

6. Describe the extent of market concentration in the food system today. What are the
consequences of concentration for farmers (both industrial and alternative) and
consumers?

7. Describe how the technological treadmill and the pesticide treadmill contribute to the
emergence of foodborne pathogens, herbicide-resistant weeds, and antibiotic-resistant
strains of diseases.

8. How did the First (British) Food regime contribute to the famines that struck India in
the late 19th century?

9. What is the nutrition transition? When and where did it first occur at a societal scale
(i.e., not just for the elites)? What are the nutritional pros and cons of the dietary
patterns after the transition?

10. Why is demand for food relatively inelastic? What difference does this make for food as
a commodity?

11. According to Jon Erlandson, roughly 90 percent of human history in coastal areas is
now under water due to interglacial sea level rise. What effect has this had on scholarly
understanding of prehistoric human diets?

12. What does it mean to say that agriculture today is a sink for industry?

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13. “Globally, 62% less land and 46% less greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe) are used now to
produce one kilocalorie from livestock than were used in 1961. This intensification of
production has occurred at the expense of an 188% increase in nitrogen use for increasing
feed production.” (Ramankutty et al. 2018, p. 798). Briefly explain how these changes
were brought about.

14. What is sustainable intensification? Why might reducing off-farm inputs be a strategy
for achieving it?

Long essays: Answer the following questions in 3-5 paragraphs

1. Explain the significance of the following passage: “In a little more than a half century, the
difference in productivity between the least efficient agriculture in the world, practiced
exclusively with manual implements (hoe, spade, digging stick, machete, harvest knife,
sickle) and the best equipped and most efficient agriculture has increased dramatically.
The gap has widened from 1 to 10 in the interwar period to 1 to 2000 at the end of the
twentieth century.” (Mazoyer and Roudart 2006, pp. 10-11)

2. The increasing prevalence of obesity in the last 3-4 decades is frequently described as
an “epidemic.” What are some of the patterns that can be seen in the distribution of
obese and overweight people over time, and across different age groups, genders, races,
and classes? Describe and compare the theories that have been offered to explain these
patterns. What kinds of solutions does each theory suggest? In your opinion, is it
accurate or helpful to call obesity an epidemic? Why or why not?

3. How has the scale of agricultural production changed over the past century or so? How
have global trade and globalization contributed to these changes? Describe some
positive and negative consequences of this change.

4. What were the main components of the Green Revolution, and what were their relative
effects on increasing food supplies in the developing world? Who benefited from
increased production, who didn’t, and why? What other kinds of policies might have
been more effective in helping societies to complete the demographic transition?

5. Why is the global food system prone to overproduction? How do farmers typically
respond to overproduction? What effects do these responses have for individual
farmers, and for the food system as a whole? How did the Second (U.S.) Food Regime
attempt to combat overproduction, and did these policies succeed?

6. Describe and compare extensive and landless livestock production in terms of (a)
environmental impacts; (b) land use; and (c ) the animals’ breeding, management and
life spans.

7. We have seen that Malthus’s “principle of population” is both empirically false and
theoretically incoherent. Drawing on the overall body of ideas we have encountered

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 this semester, please reflect on why Malthus’s ideas have remained so influential, for so
long, despite these flaws. Why do so many (well-meaning) people and institutions talk
so much about “feeding 9 billion,” “feeding the world,” and the “crisis of
overpopulation”? Why do other ways of approaching these issues struggle to get
traction and attract resources and support?

8. What are the key characteristics and ramifications of (a) aboriginal, (b) agricultural, and
(c) industrial fire? How have the patterns and effects of fire changed over time,
according to Stephen Pyne? How does a consideration of Earth as “a fire planet” and
humans as “fire creatures” complicate conventional ideas about deforestation,
agriculture, and climate change?

9. How have property systems shaped food production, and how have changes in food
production (e.g., the domestication of plants, innovations in farming, the invention of
new inputs, technology or mechanization) altered property systems? How might
changes in property regimes or land tenure systems help make new and different food
systems possible?

10. Describe and compare selection and adaptation in: (a) public seed improvement by
simple mass selection; (b) in situ conservation of plant biodiversity; and (c) antibiotic
resistant diseases. What factors exert selective pressure in each case? What role do
human actions play, if any?

11. Using at least 2 examples from the semester, describe how commodification and
economies of scale have operated together to alter the ways in which foods are grown,
processed, distributed and consumed. What have been some of the effects on plants and
animals, on different groups of people (e.g., farmers, workers, consumers), and on
environments? In what sense is large-scale food production more efficient, and what are
some of the downsides of that efficiency?

12. Describe the main environmental alterations and impacts of human food systems
during: (a) the late Pleistocene; (b) the late 19th century (1850-1900); (c) the 21st
century.

13. Native Californians derived ample, reliable and diverse food supplies without
domesticating any crop or livestock species. What attributes of California’s landscapes
and ecosystems made this possible, and perhaps necessary? Why did not becoming
agriculturalists make sense for Native Californians?

14. Describe the relationship between the industrial and agricultural revolutions in Europe
and the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. Then explain how chemical
fertilizer and pesticides altered these synergies, economically and ecologically, in the
20th century.