Choose the word most similar in meaning to the word ‘slapped’, as used in the passage.

Directions: Read the following passage carefully and select the most suitable answer according to the underlined word per corresponding number in the passage.

Governments have traditionally equated economic progress with steel mills and cement factories. While urban centres thrive and city dwellers get rich, hundreds of millions of farmers remain mired in poverty. However, fears of food shortages, a rethinking of antipoverty priorities and the crushing recession in 2008 are causing a dramatic shift in world economic policy in favour of greater support for agriculture.
This last time when the world’s farmers felt such love was in the 1970s. At that time, as food prices spiked, there was real concern that the world was facing a crisis in which the planet was simply unable to produce enough grain and meat for an expanding population. Governments across the developing world and internationals ploughed investment into agriculture in the early 1970s, while technological breakthroughs, like high-yield strains of important food crops, boosted production. The result was the Green Revolution and food production exploded.
But the Green Revolution became a victim of its own success. Food prices plunged by some 60% by the late 1980s from their peak in the mid-1970s. Policymakers and aid workers turned their attention to the Poor’s other pressing needs, such as health care and education. Farming got starved of resources and investment. By 2004, aid directed at agriculture sank to 3.5% and “Agriculture lost its glitter”. Also, as consumers in high-growth giants such as China and India became wealthier, they began eating more meat, so grain once used for human consumption got diverted to beef up livestock. By early 2008, panicked buying by importing countries and restrictions slapped on grain exports by some big producers helped drive prices up to heights not seen for three decades. Making matters worse, land and resources got reallocated to produce cash crops such as biofuels and the results was that voluminous reserves of grain evaporated. Protests broke out across the emerging world and fierce food riots toppled governments.
This spurred global leaders into action. Africa, which missed out on the first Green Revolution due to poor policy and limited resources, also witnessed a ‘change’. Swayed by the success of East Asia, the primary poverty-fighting method favoured by many policymakers in Africa was to get farmers off their farms and into modern jobs in factories and urban centres
In India on the other hand, with only 40% of its farmland irrigated, entire economic boom currently underway is held hostage by the unpredictable monsoon. With much of India’s farming areas suffering from drought this year, the government will have a tough time meeting its economic growth targets. In a report, Goldman Sachs predicted that if this year too receives weak rains, it could cause agriculture to contract by 2% this fiscal year, making the government’s 7% GDP-growth target look “a bit rich”. Another green revolution is the need of the hour and to make it a reality, the global community still has much backbreaking farm work to do.