Biology (plant and people)- - Research Proposal Example

The corn’s high yield-per-hectare increased the available food supply, which contributed to the increase in the population especially among corn-growing areas. La Fleur, J. D. (2012). Fusion foodways of africa's gold coast in the atlantic era. Leiden: Brill. La Fleur provides a history on how corn became popular during the 1500’s and beyond in the African continent. African farmers were able to experiment planting and breeding corn sourced from Portuguese outposts, using techniques similar to growing local grains such as sorghum.

The corn responded well after being planted during the rainy season, and the farmers were able to successfully harvest a lot during the end of the rainy season. Aside from the experimentations in breeding corn, the local folk also tested several methods of processing corn and creating novel dishes. The excitement from breeding various varieties of corn as well as in experimenting with different methods of preparing the crop helped it gain wide acceptance among many people within Africa. Maddison, A. (2007). Contours of the world economy 1-2030 AD: essays in macro-economic history.

New York: Oxford University Press. Maddison describes how maize was introduced into the African continent, which is mainly via the slave trade routes by Portuguese colonizers. During the 1500’s, early introductions of European crops into the African continent proved futile, mainly due to the poor and uncultivated soils in areas where colonies were first established. Since most of the local folk were hunter-gatherers, the soils were unfit for planting most European-sourced crops. However, with the expansion of the slave-trade by Portugal in Africa as well as discovering and conquering other areas within the New World, there was an increase in the influx of various items across three separate geological regions.

As Portugal brought Christianity from the mainland to the South Americans, corn was later exported from the Americas and into Africa, and from Africa came the slaves, which were sold to Europeans, thus completing a cycle of imports and exports from the countries under control. McCann, J. (2005). Maize and grace: africa's encounter with a new world crop, 1500-2000. Harvard University Press. The author discusses the natural characteristics of corn that made it widely popular in Africa despite its cultural diversity.

First, the sub-tropical and mid-altitude locations of most areas were corn was first introduced were fairly similar to where maize came from, which contributed to the vigorous growth of the crop and fairly high yields. Second, it can be planted as an intercrop along with other kinds of food sources. Thirdly, corn as a crop is easy to transport to other places due to some “floury” varieties as well as the numerous husks covering the cob. Lastly, corn kernels greatly-resembled locally-grown sorghum, and this gave farmers and local folk ideas on how to prepare harvested corn for their dishes.

Warman, A. (2003). Corn and capitalism: how a botanical bastard grew to global dominance. University of North Carolina Press. The flexibility of corn in being used for a variety of food stuffs lead to its acceptability, and is discussed by the author in this book. It is a fact that corn was a crop that was the product of multiple cross-breeding by humans for