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	July 5, 2004

THE DEVIL'S BARGAIN: CATASTROPHIC AGRICULTURE Figure 1 Richard Manning's book Against the Grain is a remarkable work -- succinct, well-researched, solution-oriented and mind-altering. It's an absolute must-read. Please don't settle for the synopsis below, and don't assume that because it's about the history and economy of agriculture it's a dull read. It's riveting. The issues that Manning describes in the book were first raised in his Harper's Magazine article last winter called The Oil We Eat. But the book goes much further. In my earlier root-cause analysis of what 'caused' us to invent civilization, to abandon our joyful hunter-gatherer cultures, the cause-and-effect went like this: Ice age OR Overhunting Scarcity of food. After millennia of easy hunting of big, slow game, man suddenly had to start really working for a living... Scarcity of foodInvention of agriculture. ...So he invented agriculture; if there wasn't enough food, he's 'make' his own... AgricultureCivilization. ...But agriculture required division of labour, instruction, hierarchies, and constant fighting with 'pests'... CivilizationEnd of Virtuous Cycle (Fig. 1 above) and Start of Vicious Cycle (Fig. 2 below). ...And brought with it all kinds of unintended consequences. But Manning has a more intriguing theory of the first two steps: Fire, Floods & IceGrain monoculture. After natural catastrophes, hardy grains are often the first plants to reappear ... Grain monocultureAgriculture. ...Man in areas victimized by these natural catastrophes merely 'discovered' this, and then by creating continuous 'catastrophes' (clearing land with fire, flooding land through irrigation) exploited nature's own regeneration mechanism, which we call 'agriculture'... The third and fourth steps are the same under both theories. Manning therefore calls what we now practice 'catastrophic agriculture' to differentiate it from the simple tending of 'wild' plants and animals as a secondary source of food by hunter-gatherer cultures without interference with natural cycles. The irony, he says, is that it wasn't scarcity of food that compelled us to invent agriculture, but rather the discovery of over-abundance of food in areas of natural catastrophe that seduced us into it. Figure 2 The 'discovery' of grain monoculture in areas of recurring natural catastrophe (like floodplains) was only possible where man was already settled, which only occurred in areas where fish were plentiful, which is where all agricultural cultures began (the birthplaces of civilization) before they expanded and merged into the single civilization culture we know today. Sedentary life, and soft grain gruels, also allowed a higher birth rate, since babies no longer had to be carried for four years until they were weaned -- and the population explosion began. The ability to store food also allowed the provisioning of armies, and the need to keep people from going back to their instinctive hunter-gatherer ways and abandon the farms required the use of force, which required hierarchy and government. The provisioned armies conquered the remaining hunter-gatherers (most notably in Africa and the Americas) and made them slaves on the farms. To keep unnatural hierarchy1 from crumbling, the governors bribed subordinates with extra resources, larger homes, and their own 'private' land, as long as the subordinates kept the slaves and peasants in line2. Wealth, and its inevitable partner poverty, were born. Dependence on monoculture, which failed often, gave rise to the first famines. Average human heights plummeted due to disease and poor, unvaried diet, bone deformities from constant stooping became commonplace, and grain monoculture and crowded villages allowed previously rare diseases to flourish: anemia, arthritis, malaria, syphilis, and tuberculosis, and, finally, plague, all of them unknown before agriculture. And the high-carb diet of grain monoculture also brought with it other new and unnatural phenomena: tooth decay, obesity, diabetes, lactose tolerance, and alcoholism, which devastated many hunter-gatherer cultures when they were suddenly exposed to this deadly and seductive diet. So agriculture was irresistible to man, the ultimate devil's bargain. By doing so, man threw in his lot with a host of life forms that co-evolved with man and grain monoculture: this 'coalition' included the rat, insect pests, weeds and parasites as well as the aforementioned diseases and a handful of animals suited to domestication, all of which thrive with monoculture. In fact much of the 'conquering' of the hunter-gatherer world by 'civilized' man was really accomplished by our coalition partners: it was our diseases, to which hunter-gatherers had no exposure and hence no resistance, that killed most of them, not our weapons or their years of subsequent slave labour. The introduction of our domestic animals likewise altered the New World's terrain, since these animals had few natural predators and exploded in population, literally eating the natural flora to extinction. Like us, these domestic animals paid the price of civilization -- they are smaller, sicker and poorer than their wild counterparts, but the ultimate test of evolution is endurance, and our unholy coalition has passed that test with flying colours. Humans, members of the six domestic animal groups and the big five monoculture grains, and the rodents, insects, weeds and disease parasites that come with them have all flourished, at least in numbers, together, and together they now constitute a huge and growing proportion of Earth's biomass, while the millions of non-coalition creatures almost all face extinction. Although our diseases did most of the dirty work, Manning argues that our civilization culture committed systematic genocide against every hunter-gatherer culture on the planet, from the Cro-Magnon man in Eastern Europe (whose language, intriguingly lives on only in the tiny Basque community whose culture is still under siege), to the First Nations of the Americas and Oceania. The result was what anthropologists have called "remarkable cultural homogeneity" and "pathological conventionality". Its sustained hallmark has been ever-increasing famines, the "very badge of civilization". The worst famine ever, and one of the most recent, in Mao's China, killed 80 million people. The second worst, in Russia, was also in the past century. Famine, a sudden and severe shortage of vital resources, breeds hunger, and that always breeds imperialism in turn. The alternative, common and legal in China for millennia until quite recently, is an invention called "Swapping Children / Making Food" -- in times of famine you exchange your children for your neighbour's, and then kill them and eat them and use their bones for fuel. Modern mythology would have us believe that famine is a political problem -- a consequence of bad distribution of food and bad government -- and while this is in part true, famine is ultimately an inevitable consequence of our fragile monoculture and massive overpopulation. This quote, describing one such famine in Ireland, where potato blight in one year eliminated 90% of the monoculture potato crop and hence 90% of the food, has given me nightmares: In the first hovel, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth, and their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning that they were alive, they were in fever -- four children, a woman, and what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through the details. Suffice it to say that, in a few minutes, I was surrounded by at least 200 of such phantoms, such frightful specters as no words can describe. All of this because we threw ourselves out of the Garden of Eden, seduced by the lure of uniform plenty. Why and how did we get into this mess, and who is to blame? Manning recaps: "A population explosion generates the need to grow more food, but agriculture is the cause of that population explosion, and agriculture creates the need for government. The hierarchical, specialized societies that agriculture builds are wholly dependent on the smooth operation of their infrastructure, on transportation, on stability. Dams must be built, canals must flow, roads must be maintained and government must be established to order these tasks. Government leaders emerge from the social hierarchy that agriculture's wealth makes possible. Failures are human and inevitable. To hold agriculture blameless and government responsible for famine is like holding a lion blameless for a child's death on the grounds that it was the lion's teeth that did the damage. Poverty, government and famine are co-evolved species, every bit as integral to catastrophic agriculture as wheat, bluegrass, smallpox and rats." Our solution, of course, was not to blame agriculture, but to try to make it more efficient. Although we now produce a massively excess amount of monoculture food, famines, starvation and poverty remain commonplace. So lately we developed the Green Revolution to increase efficiency of grain production, to increase yields and edible mass per acre and per plant. The theory was that these high-yield crops could be grown closer to the starving. But fifty years later this has not solved the problem, and it has in fact increased the fragility of the system. Plants are now patented, and GM now threatens existing plant species and diversity and their utter homogeneity exposes them to new vulnerabilities as nature evolves new pests and diseases to try to bring back into balance this massive, ecologically unsustainable and undifferentiated surplus. And these higher yields come with a huge price tag. Whereas a calorie of your home-grown carrots requires less than a calorie of non-photosynthetic energy to produce, a calorie of grain requires ten calories of energy to produce3, mostly in the form of Mideast-oil-based, highly processed nitrogen fertilizers poured onto severely and evermore soil- and nutrient-depleted land. Ironically, that fertilizer replaces animal manure, which is no longer economical to truck from the new concentration-camp factory farms (also developed to improve 'efficiency'). So most of the oil-based fertilizer runs off into the water supply, along with massive amounts of pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics and other by-products of 'efficient' agriculture and the mountains of shit from the factory farms, which no longer has commercial 'value'. And if the smell of that shit makes living in the area unbearable, that's fine, too, because Archer Daniels Midland and the other handful of companies that run this entire system can then buy up and concentrate the farms more cheaply. Besides, we don't want nosy 'eco-terrorists' and news media poking around and seeing what really goes on in those factory farms anyway. The cost of this is so phenomenally high that government subsidies now exceed the entire 'commercial value' of the food produced. It's a massive corporate welfare scheme originally designed to keep families on farms and now accruing primarily to the few corporations that control the industry. Taxpayers pay for these corporations to produce and process an absurd excess of bad food and to finance governments who pursue Middle Eastern wars to get the oil needed for fertilizer. And in return the taxpayers get cheap, tasteless, unhealthy, polluted food, monstrous animal cruelty, massive pollution of the air and water, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, alcoholism, ruined land, and unemployment. And still there is famine. So what are we to do? Manning starts by pointing out what not to do -- try to get government to change the system. "The political system cannot be counted on to reform agriculture because the political system is a creation of agriculture, a co-evolved entity". Of course we should try to end agricultural subsidies, but Manning says we are unlikely to succeed. Vegetarianism can help, but not much: As long as the vegetables come from the same commodity system, they're still causing massive environmental and social damage and animal cruelty. And we couldn't go back to hunter-gatherer culture, at least not in our current numbers, even if we wanted to. But reducing human population is a necessary condition: "I do not take human population as a given; if we accept six billion as inevitable, we are doomed". Beyond that, Manning's solution is the same one that a rising chorus of radicals and revolutionaries is calling for: A walking away from this system and its products, and the creation of a new, healthy culture and economy. To Manning, focused on the food economy, this means: Eating better: Selecting and eating a wide variety of exclusively organic, fresh, local, delicious, unpolluted, quality, unprocessed, non-factory foods. Eating less: Since these good foods are unsubsidized and hence more expensive, eating less is economically advantageous, and, for most of us, it is also healthier. Preparing and cooking your own: Not using processed or packaged foods even if they're organic and/or vegetarian. Natural gardening: Personally producing your own food without use of any fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides or other unnatural products. Nothing more invasive than a fence to keep out the bunnies. On a larger scale this is called permaculture, and it's growing in popularity. Supporting small, local farms: Going to farmers' markets, and challenging the vendors and operators to allow only local, unprocessed4, organic, small-farm products and free-range, grass-fed meats. I am writing a book on Natural Enterprise, and its recipe is perfectly suited to small, local, responsible farms. I think we all know that such foods are better for us, and better for the environment and the society we live in. We need some pioneers to start, and teach others to start, Natural Enterprises that can break our deadly addiction to catastrophic agriculture. And the rest of us need, in more ways than one, to go back to the (natural) garden. In nature there are pecking orders and specialized roles to organize and reduce conflict in communities, but no hierarchy that allows the alpha male, the 'queen' bee, or the bull moose to hog a disproportionate amount of the resources of the community. Manning hypothesizes there is more reason to believe the Great Wall of China was built to keep the stooped slaves in the rice paddies in, than to keep the hunter-gatherer 'Mongol hordes' out. A calorie of beef requires over 100 calories of energy to produce, despite the 'efficiencies' of factory farms. Exception: labour-intensive processed foods are OK if they use only local and organic ingredients e.g. artisanal bakeries, microbreweries 3:41:59 PM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dave Pollard. Last update: 02/08/2004; 3:42:03 PM.