With the passage of time, people begin to understand their environment and the forces of nature. With social and cultural development, humans develop better and more efficient technology. They move from a state of necessity to a state of freedom. They create possibilities with the resources obtained from the environment. Human activities create a cultural landscape. Human activities take place everywhere—health resorts on highlands, huge urban sprawls, fields, orchards and pastures in plains and rolling hills, ports on the coasts, oceanic routes on the oceanic surface and satellites in space.
Nature provides opportunities and human beings make use of these and so gradually nature gets humanised and starts bearing the imprints of human endeavour.
Plantation agriculture was introduced by the Europeans in colonies situated in the tropics. Some of the important plantation crops are tea, coffee, cocoa, rubber, cotton, oil palm, sugarcane, bananas and pineapples.
The characteristic features of this type of farming are large-estates or plantations, large capital investment, managerial and technical support, scientific methods of cultivation, single crop specialisation, cheap labour, and a good system of transportation which links the estates to the factories and markets for the export of the products.
The French established cocoa and coffee plantations in West Africa. The British set up large tea gardens in India and Sri Lanka, rubber plantations in Malaysia and sugarcane and banana plantations in the West Indies.
Spanish and Americans invested heavily in coconut and sugarcane plantations in the Philippines. The Dutch once had a monopoly over sugarcane plantations in Indonesia. Some coffee fazendas (large plantations) in Brazil are still managed by Europeans.
Today, ownership of the majority of plantations has passed into the hands of the government or the nationals of the countries concerned.
The Indian agricultural economy was largely subsistence in nature after Independence. During partition about one-third of the irrigated land in undivided India went to Pakistan.
After Independence, the immediate goal of the Government was to increase food-grains production by:
1.Switching over from cash crops to food crops.
2.Intensification of cropping over already cultivable land.
3.Increasing cultivation by bringing cultivated land and fallow land under plough.
4.This strategy helped in increasing food grains production. But it stagnated during the late 1950s. Intensive Agricultural District Programme and Intensive Agricultural Area Programme were launched to overcome this problem.
5.New seed varieties of wheat and rice known as HYVs were available for cultivation by mid-1960. Package technology including HYVs was introduced in Punjab, Haryana, Western Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat.
6.This strategy of agricultural development led to an increase in production of the food grains at a very fast rate and this agricultural growth came to be known as the Green Revolution. This strategy of agricultural development made the country self-reliant in food grain production.
7.The Planning Commission of India initiated agro-climatic planning in 1988 to induce regionally balanced agricultural development in the country. It also emphasised the need for diversification and harnessing of resources for development of dairy farming, poultry, horticulture etc.