Near a Thousand Tables (42 page)

Of course the poor are always with us; no agrarian society had ever been immune from periodic famine; and the globally interconnected climate had always wrought havoc in surprising and uncontrollable ways. Nevertheless, the late-nineteenth-century famines did represent a new feature of the history of food: famine was now becoming technically avoidable because of worldwide abundance and globally efficient communications. Nevertheless, it happened and went on happening. Some students have blamed free trade, which made “the price of wheat in Liverpool and the rainfall in Madras … variables in the same vast equation of
human survival
.” Imperialism certainly exploited famine and perhaps contributed to its causes. “Europeans,” a missionary heard,“track famine like a sky
full of vultures
.” Cetshwayo, the Zulu paramount who tried to defeat the British Empire, thought “the English chiefs have
stopped the rain
.” “Londoners,” it has been claimed, “were effectively
eating India's bread
.” If they did not engineer famine, white imperialists at least mismanaged it. Humanitarian sentiment, like food, was plentiful in their countries but they found no ways of turning their surplus of either to practical applications. The view “from the saloon window of the viceregal train” always seemed to obscure the severity of their problems, gravity of their responsibilities and the
availability of solutions
.

In some respects, of course, imperialism and free trade were beneficial or, at least, equivocal. Cheap iron from Europe had an enormous impact on the food supply of West African peoples, whose indigenous iron industry was ancient but expensive. Before the arrival of European imports, a hoe blade cost a cow and sons had to take turns
using the implement
. There are, however, two good arguments in favor of indicting imperialism for famine deaths. Earlier, native states had handled exceptionally severe conjunctions of El Niño events relatively well. The ever-normal granaries of the Qing state had coped in 1743-44. In 1661, to the admiration of English observers, the Mughal monarch Aurangzeb “opened his treasury” and saved
millions of lives
. Moreover, Western countries seemed able to save citizens from hunger when they so wished. The American Midwest suffered as severely as almost any other part of the world from the drought of 1889-90, but relief was well organized and famine deaths were few.

The coexistence of food boom and famine was still the pattern in the late twentieth century: because of inequitable distribution, overproduction and overfeeding in the developed world contrasted with vulnerability to famine elsewhere. For a long time, the problem seemed to get worse. In the 1960s pundits were all convinced that famines would transform the world within a couple of decades. Between 1960 and 1965 the rate of food production in poor countries was half that of population growth. India's reserves in the mid-1960s were “the wheat-fields of Kansas.” In 1967 the United States shipped one fifth of its wheat crop to feed India after
monsoon failures
. But even when emergency famine relief could be efficiently organized—and, usually, what with wars, corruption and ideological rivalries, it could not—it was no long-term solution. The famine trap could only be broken by a revolution in agronomy.

“If there was a neolithic revolution,” said Fernand Braudel, “it's
still going on
.” The changes introduced at the dawn of farming—specialization, domestication, selective breeding, multiplication of cultigens—have indeed been going on to our own day. Calling the most recent phase the “Green Revolution” makes it sound environmentally friendly. It should really be called the chemical-agricultural revolution because it relies on massive fertilizer campaigns and pesticide programs, or the agroindustrial revolution because it has been backed by huge new industries turning out agrochemicals and farm machinery.

Its great achievements were the “miracle” wheat and rice seeds of the 1960s. Using traditional hybridization techniques, seeds were developed to exploit tropical sunshine. This is because 56 to 59 percent of radiant energy can be utilized
near the equator: in the American prairie, the figure is less than 50 percent. The second aim of modern agronomists' efforts was to concentrate on strains which could benefit from fertilizing and weeding, instead of growing straggly in competition with weeds. The range of options and methods was brilliantly summarized in 1916 by the author of one of the most influential textbooks in history, in which Mark Carleton, the chief cerealist of the U.S. Bureau of Plant Industry, set out existing knowledge on the introduction, hybridization and selection of new
breeds of grain
. At first, before the Second World War, breeders tried to cope with varieties that toppled before harvest by breeding for
strength of stem
. Then they began to appreciate the properties of Japanese dwarf wheats—produced by breeders long recognized as having “made the dwarfing of wheat an art.” Investigations centered on the variety known as Daruma and its descendant, Norin 10, which could transmit its brevity of stature to hybrid offspring. Similarly, work on rice focused on Deegeowoogen, a cross of short rice from Taiwan and Indonesia, which does not fall when fertilized and matures 130 days after planting, regardless of the length of the day: in consequence, more crops can be
harvested per year
.

In 1961 experimenters produced Gaines—the winter wheat variety which broke all production records on an experimental plot in Washington state. Meanwhile, spectacular progress was being made in experiments with wheat varieties in Mexico, after seven years of frustrating trials, in contrasting environments at the Chapingo station on the rain-fed central plateau and the Sonora station on the irrigated northern
coastal plain
. Two hundred thousand wheat crosses had been made in Mexico
by 1980
. Wheat strains developed in Mexico have now colonized the world. This seems a delicious irony from the land that gave the world maize.

As usual with improvements in technology, the developed world actually benefited most. Wheat yields in the United States doubled in little more than twenty-five years thanks to fertilizers and
disease-resistant strains
. According to figures compiled by some of the leading practitioners and spokesmen of the new agronomy, British farmers in 1977-79 were able to achieve average yields of 13.88 tons per acre, the same as in Mexico's best wheat-growing area, the Yaqui valley, where there was enough sunlight to make the time to harvest only about three fifths of England's. The world's record yield at the time was 32.88 tons per acre, grown intensively on an experimental plot of two hectares in Washington state. At the same time, the average yield in all developing countries in the best year then on record was 3.95 tons per acre. This, however, was double the
average for 1950
.

When the “miracle” crops were introduced into struggling regions they seemed to have an immediate effect. In India, in the disaster year of 1967, the national harvest was 11.3 million tons, but
16.5 million tons in 1968
. When the Filipino “farmer
of the year” for 1969 was asked what rice he would plant next year, “I don't know,” he replied. “I'm still waiting for a
newer variety
.” In 1970, reversing the gloomy predictions of a few years earlier, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that the earth's agricultural potential would be capable of feeding 157 billion people. Agricultural revolutions in Pakistan, Turkey, India, the Philippines, Kenya and Mexico, it was said, made “earlier agricultural take-offs in the U.S. and Japan
seem minor
.” By the early 1990s, over three quarters of the Third World's grain-growing areas were under the new varieties. In China, the new strains accounted for
95 percent of production
.

The Green Revolution deserves to be remembered as one of humankind's greatest achievements: it fed millions who must otherwise have starved. The trouble, however, with most of the problem solving of applied science is that solutions solve old problems but create new ones. The Green Revolution displaced traditional varieties. It threatened biodiversity, which is good for coping with changing circumstances. In Zimbabwe, where two hybrids now account for 90 percent of maize production, an elder told agronomists in 1993,

You, you are the witches. You are taking us back, you are not making us develop. In times past, my family used not to have problems because I grew the traditional small grains. You are the people who are killing us now, you are taking us back because you are telling us to grow crops that are not proper. Even the fertility that you sell is not good for the small grains. We believe that the Number One crops are the small grains. They are our ancestral spirit, our bank…. Ah, you people, you let us
throw them away
.

This may sound like reactionary fanaticism, but really it reflects a good deal of common sense. Programs of agrarian reform, moreover, often become pretexts for tyranny: land appropriations, bureaucratic compulsion, ruthlessness in dealing with the laggards. “In one Asian country,” a U.N. official reported with approval, “the chief of state, explaining his role to a visitor, tapped his finger on the telephone and said: ‘Here is the most powerful element in the wheat revolution. When I hear that some staff member is lagging, I pick up the telephone and call the officer involved. He promises action but I tell him, “I don't want promises; I want your return telephone call by tomorrow telling me what
you have accomplished
.”'”

The Green Revolution turned sickly green as the effects of its worst deficiencies became apparent. Because the new crops were designed to work in conjunction with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, they imperiled the ecological balance and the survival of incalculable species of inhabitants of cultivated fields: not just
the pests, but the predators who fed on them. Early in the process, in 1961, Rachel Carson published
Silent Spring.
It probably deserves to be ranked among the most influential books ever written. Its apocalyptic vision of songbirds starved into extinction in pesticide-blasted doomscapes recruited hundreds of thousands of people into the ecological movement. Norman E. Borlaug, universally hailed as the scientific “father of the Green Revolution,” denounced “vicious, hysterical propaganda” against agricultural chemicals by “
scientific halfwits
.” But more than science was at stake. In England in the 1990s,

Starting in the autumn, the conventional farmer will spray with a broad-spectrum weedkiller such as Javelin to kill emerging weeds such as grasses, chickweed, pansy, speedwell and red deadnettle. (Pesticides tend to have macho names like Missile, Rapier, Impact and Commando. Chemical companies find that they give the farmer confidence in the product.) Next the crop will receive a dose of Avadex which keeps it free of wild oats into winter. Then, in rapid succession, come methocarb pellets (brand name Draza) to kill slugs and the first spray of insecticide, say Ripcord,
to kill aphids
.

Ripcord spares ladybirds but is more likely to kill other insects, spiders and fish. That is only the beginning. Conventional farmers will probably spray again with fungicide, herbicide, growth regulator and more insecticide before the year is out. According to the World Health Organization, pesticides had caused a million cases of acute poisoning—most of them agricultural workers—by 1985. The organization attributed twenty thousand deaths to the same cause
in 1990
. Moreover, chemical fertilizers and pesticides only work on marginal lands with help from irrigation: because of mismanagement of great hydraulic projects in the twentieth century, irrigation has probably led to as much land lost, through erosion and pollution, as gained for agriculture: big dams cause evaporation, salination and “dust bowls.” The Green Revolution is still going on but in the long run it looks unsustainable: it relies on technologies which damage the environment and outrage the public.

The world's reliance on the seeds of the Green Revolution is dangerous not only because of the incalculable effects of pesticide profligacy but also because of the risk from rapidly evolving new pests and crop diseases. The most widely canvassed next stage is conversion to genetically modified foods. There is no reason to suppose that these will be other than nutritious, health-giving and efficient. But they are almost as likely as Green Revolution crops to bring unforeseen consequences. Among the foreseeable consequences are the accidental hybridization of
non-genetically modified species, with resultant extinctions and the creation of new eco-niches in which new, potentially destructive biota can emerge. Rogue, random effects are always loose in causation. Our sallies in genetic manipulation will be made in tiny portions of the field: mainly in our own species and those we already domesticate. The big battalions in nature will still be those beyond our control. Evolution will still outclass our revolutions as a force for change. Most of the diseases we eliminate, for instance, microbial evolution will replace. Changes we engineer in the species we eat will be like all our previous interventions in the environment: a mixture of solution finding and problem forming. It is not yet clear whether we have the means of escape from the world's food problems or merely a means of multiplying crisis.

In the long run, the world's population will stabilize and perhaps decline. Population alarmism is based on very short-term readings of the statistics. To predict the long-term future one has to take a long look at the past. Population acceleration has always reached a plateau or a turning point whenever it has occurred in the past. Its reversals do not usually depend on “Malthusian checks,” though these have been effective at times. Most societies regulate their population increase by modifying marriage customs and exploiting for breeding more or less of their womenfolk's span of fertility as circumstances demand. Prosperity is the world's most effective source of restraint; for there is a fairly direct long-term link between the poor and the philoprogenitive. For what they are worth, some short-term trends are consistent with this analysis. Some of the world's most prosperous countries already have birth rates so low that population is falling or likely to fall and the effect of growing prosperity in areas of historically high birth rates in Asia and South America show trends in the same direction. We can look forward with some optimism to a future in which the world's population can be fed by traditional farming. In the meantime, the benefits of the Green Revolution and of genetic engineering will be useful. At some point, however, the consensus will turn against them and they will have to be reversed. It would be prudent, meanwhile, not to rely on them but rather to adopt further radical innovations only with extreme caution. There is no likelihood of global food shortages in the foreseeable future, nor any danger of famine if we manage distribution properly. There is no need for us to panic into risk.