Everything is revolving around food and we are all working for food either as farmer or as consumer whatever occupation we are engaged in it ends in access to food and human health. The question of food effects the farmer what to grow and how best to grow, scientists and technologists are engaged in producing efficient food, housewives and hoteliers are coming up with modern menus, dieticians are advocating healthy food, and governments are busy in procuring storing and distributing food. However it is apparent that there is not enough food for millions, either there is shortage of grain and vegetables or they are available in plenty but not accessible to millions. This publication tries to sketch present scenario on food, agriculture and humanity as its first volume with the hope to prepare subsequent three volumes with further discussion on food, agriculture and humanity. The present publication The Basics of Human Civilization Food Agriculture and Humanity, Volume I: Present Scenario is intended to make attempt to update present scenario with reference to past in food agriculture and humanity and identify challenges, followed by opportunities to bring changes in food habits and preferences, technology, and proper implementation of programmes and of proper utilization of a natural resources. Mention has been made of food and agriculture policies and developments improved agriculture challenges and opportunities and to address them appropriately.

McKittrick’s history of the 1918 Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. The plan fanned white settlers’ visions for South Africa, stoked mistrust in scientific experts, and influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.

In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority.

Green Lands for White Men explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a black population. Meredith McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race.

While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed suffi cient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite.

A detailed look at the intersection of a settler society, climate change, white nationalism, and expert credibility, Green Lands for White Men examines the reverberations of a scheme that ultimately failed but influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.