Reflection

I’m glad I wrote this paper because I really enjoyed doing the research for my case study. I didn’t really know much about the Colombian palm oil industry when I started out. I’ve been doing a lot of papers on farmers and farm labor this semester so I thought I’d pick a similar topic for this class. I started out by looking into the Green Revolution, because I know that had a lot to do with farming and such. I didn’t want to write about India because I feel like that’s been done a lot and Shiva had already given a theoretical analysis about it. As I researched the Green Revolution, I stumbled upon Mexico and learned for the first time about how green technology was initially developed there. I explored some more and then decided that I wanted to write about the Green Revolution in Latin America since I’d never heard anything about it. After reading some more I decided to do it on the palm oil industry since almost every agricultural interaction between countries is a result of the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution caused many developing countries to be economically depended on developed countries. So basically right after they stopped being colonies and thought they were free, the developing countries were right back where they started, under the thumb of the developed nations.
This led to my use of neocolonialism in my paper since neocolonialism is the economic control of one country by another. This applied in my case study since the United States economically controlled Colombia with palm oil. During the Green Revolution, developed countries gave out loans to developing countries so that they could get started. But the developing countries could never quite pay back their debt so they became dependent on the developed country for economic support and transaction. In Colombia, their biggest industry is the palm oil industry, and one of their biggest buyers is the United States. If it wasn’t for the business of the United States, Colombia’s palm oil industry, and economy, would be struggling. I liked applying theory to my case study as well because then I could see an example of the things we had learned about in class. Not only was I able to use neocolonialism in my paper but I was also able to fit in power and discourse. I honestly think that having to write this paper made me understand the concepts a lot better.