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V. Summary
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What is the proper place of an agricultural geography unit in an AP Human Geography course? There are several streams of geographic thought on the topic of agriculture. Cultural geographers of the tradition of Carl Sauer have contributed immeasurably to our understanding of the history of agriculture, the process of agricultural invention, and the diffusion of crops and livestock around the surface of the Earth. In addition, the landscape school of cultural geography has developed strategies for analyzing the imprint of agriculturists on the land through studies of settlement patterns, house types, fences, and land division and the associated infrastructure that constitutes the rural landscape.
Economic geography has focused our attention on the processes of the production, consumption, processing, and redistribution of agricultural products, and on the ways in which the political economy of a state or the state system has dominated the world and manipulated agriculture to maintain various schemes of class and social status.
In essence, this chapter should enable students to understand: - The processes that have produced the food they eat.
They should understand that they are part of a global system of production, transportation, processing, and consumption, and that they as consumers have a direct impact on the production of agricultural products in an amazingly diverse set of locations. Even though they never set foot on a farm, as consumers they are part of the agribusiness system. - That the invention of biotechnological approaches to agriculture will have great impacts on their lives.
While the technology and innovations driving this are not at all geographical, they will eventually move over space in processes that are understandable with the lens of the geographer. Therefore, they will be able to make predictions about changing relationships and production and consumption as the biotechnology revolution unfolds. - That the issue of hunger is not so much an issue of production but rather distribution.
Tremendous surpluses of food exist at the same time that conditions of hunger prevail in other locations. The inequitable distribution of food is a result of inequitable distributions of power; this topic is open to research with the insights and techniques of political geography. - Finally, that the processing and sale of agriculture products take place within the neighborhoods of urban residents or within the jurisdictions of political units they belong to.
Issues such as zoning, the impact of the need for workers drawing migrants into new locations, and the environmental impact of agricultural processing play big roles in the quality of life in urban locations (environmental impact of production also has a large impact on the quality of life all around the world). Thus, every student is inextricably bound into the web of agribusiness. We are all consumers. Many of us have agribusiness processing facilities in our neighborhoods. All of us share a concern for the impact of agribusiness on the environment as a whole.
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