The green revolution was vitally dependent on oil-gas based fertilizer trade - which means, doing away with manchester-style centralized trade empires who used cutting off trade as a tool of suffocating opponents. The past never went away, it caught up to the present. All poverty is energy poverty - and exponential humanity, always fills that "gap" to the ressource roof with people.

The old, pre-harber-bosch world was a grim dark all against all where empires (themselves devices to keep civilization afloat in a few centralized places, while extracing at great missery elsewhere) fought wars of fertilizer and used one sided trading and food-exports to starve colonies out like vampires.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chincha_Islands_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Nama_genocide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maji_Maji_Rebellion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_Mount_Lebanon

the whole all against all, no free-trade madness culminated in the two new comer empires copy-pasting the concept dialed up to eleven in their "new colonies". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Japan