Strategies For Agriculture In LEDC

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Strategies For Agriculture In LEDCs
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Food Production

• Food production is one of the most important
  industries in most LEDC's and agriculture is
  often still their main source of employment.
• has increased, and with the environmental
  difficulties that many of these countries face, a
  number of strategies have been introduced.
• These have been aimed at helping the farmers
  become firstly self-sufficient and then begin to
  allow them to make a profit.
• However it has not just been a case of the
  developed countries of the world throwing money
  at the problem, the solutions have had to be
  appropriate to the countries concerned.

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Appropriate Technology

• This involves small-scale projects that will help
  a community or maybe even individual subsistence
  farmers.
• Ideas include digging wells to provide water for
  irrigation, setting up projects that can be
  easily maintained and sustained by the local
  people.
• They have not included bringing in large machines
  and expensive technology, as this can rarely be
  repaired when it goes wrong.
• The use of renewable energy sources, such as wind
  power and biogas has been encouraged rather than
  huge HEP schemes.

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The Green Revolution

• This involved developing new high yield crops,
  initially in Mexico, which were then used in
  countries such as India.
• Their effect was to increase yields dramatically,
  and sometimes allow an extra crop each year to
  grown.
• The farmers quickly produced greater amounts of
  crops and there fore produced larger profit, from
  which they could buy improved machinery.
• There were some disadvantages of the scheme
  however.
• The new seeds were very expensive to buy and
  required a lot of expensive fertilisers and
  pesticides to ensure that they grew properly.
• This meant that many of the poor farmers just
  couldn't afford the new crops.
• Some farmers fell heavily into debt trying to
  finance buying the new crops.

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Irrigation

• The Green Revolution meant the need of massive
  irrigation schemes.
• Long series of canals took water to the fields.
• The canals were fairly cheap to set up but did
  cause problems of waterlogging and salinisation.
• Some communities used deep wells instead of
  irrigation canals to water their crops, however
  this method could only really cater for a couple
  of hectares of land.
• With the Green Revolution came electric water
  pumps, which allowed one well to irrigate much
  larger areas of land.