I can agree with Terry when he says that it isn't capitalism, but science that developed high yield grains. Indeed I've always thought it was important to distinguish between those developments that take place under capitalism from the system itself.
But it's increased productivity I want to defend, not its limited capitalisitic form.
On the theft of land, I would have said that the greater problem that countries like India (or Fiji, where I've just been) suffer from the failure of capitalism to develop their land, more than they do the from its tendency to do so. A considerable proportion of the people working on the land are excluded from the cash economy (and thereby from productivity increases) and left in subsistence misery.
In message <F192Xix4A2DreBBsQwY000041ed at hotmail.com>, Terry Tapp
<maywildcat at hotmail.com> writes
> It's not true that capitalism has somehow led to greater agricultural
>productivity. The work of individual scientists and small groups of
>scientists has resulted in discoveries and inventions that created our
>present increase in productivity. Capitalists have used the work of those
>scientists to wreak havok on the land through overproduction of crops that
>drain nutrients from the topsoil but yield high profits. Further,
>capitalists have stolen the land from farmers, particularly in "third world"
>countries and forced those farmers to grow crops that bear little or no
>relation to the subsistance of the farmer or his/her local community.
> Regarding eco-optomism: Since the global population is dependent on high
>agricultural productivity to sustain itself at 6 billion, and since this
>productivity is based on the use of pesticides which are petroleum-based,
>what happens to global population when the oil runs out? I don't see this
>problem being addressed anywhere.
>
>Terry
>
>
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