Agriculture+and+Industrialization

How have agricultural and/or industrial production changed over the past years (a quick **summary** is fine, and will differ depending upon your topic of choice)?

After describing these major shifts, discuss the major trends in modern agriculture (mechanization; heavy herbicide, pesticide, and irrigation use; selective breeding and the influx of genetic and transgenic manipulation) and/or in industry (from small scale relatively simplified production to fully global, highly complex global production and consumption systems).

Does technology, whether in the form of agrotechnology or industrial technology, promise to reform global agricultural structures to benefit farmers and consumers in developing and developed countries? Will it reform global industrial and production structures as well?

What are the promises and perils of global agricultural industrialization (think GMO's and other technologies)? How do workers fare in this new enterprise, or are they akin to the “sweatshop” labor associated with the apparel industry (think about Eric Schlosser’s article on slaughterhouse workers or the Wal-Mart workers you saw)?

Is this current model the right one for future global economic development? In the end, you need to take a broad and relatively open-ended view on one or both of these topics. Each of you will be living through an incredible transformation of production and consumption unlike any that has come before. How, ultimately, do you see it affecting what you eat, how you consume, and how you live? What will the quality of your life be in 30 or 50 years?

http://www.agriculture.com/ag/story.jhtml?storyid=/templatedata/ag/story/data/1221230981102.xml

__Contaminated Milk__ http://english.sina.com/business/p/2008/0913/186059.html