7 Billion (7 page)

I look into the intent faces of Mohammed and his family, then down at those ashen pebbles: all incipience, gnarled knots of built-in urge, suggesting neither the centuries of selection that informed them nor the full-fleshed foods they'll eventually become, his own personal seed bank.

This is the beguiling paradox of seeds. They are, for all their obvious significance, so readily dismissible, especially by those of us in the well-fed world, who have forgotten where our food even comes from. Mohammed takes me to a farm across the road, where he and his neighbor lift a stone slab to reveal an earthen chamber six feet deep and wide: an emergency underground food store. In a few weeks, when the harvest is complete, they will line the chamber with straw, fill it with grain, and then pull the slab back over, allowing the earth's chill to keep it fresh.

When I ask how much they had to rely on their emergency store during the famine of 1984, they bow their heads and mumble a response before falling completely silent, their eyes welling with tears. My interpreter signals with a wave of a finger not to pursue the subject any further.

It is hard for them to even think of that time, he explains. They had sold their stored grain, never anticipating a sudden drought. Things got so bad that they had to eat all their reserves. A number of family members died of starvation. They were left with nothing but their seeds. Conditions were so inhospitable to planting that their empty stomachs soon had them planning to do the unthinkable: eat their seeds, their future.

 

ETHIOPIA'S EAST CENTRAL HIGHLANDS
were once one of most botanically diverse spots on Earth, but by the 1970s farmers here were down to growing just teff and a few varieties of wheat distributed to them for its high-yield potential. Today the region has been transformed: Local varieties of legumes and wheat are thriving again. Given the common depiction of Ethiopia as famine prone, it is startling to drive an hour northeast of Addis Ababa and see ample fields of a bushy, purple-seeded durum wheat, a variety found only in Ethiopia that is thriving across the country. Used for pasta, durum is largely resistant to stem rust. In one field is another local variety native to Ethiopia known as setakuri, which translates as “pride of women,” because it makes the sweetest bread. It is doing even better against stem rust.

Ethiopia's turnaround can be traced in part to the efforts of renowned plant geneticist Melaku Worede, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska in 1972, then returned to Ethiopia with the goal of preserving—and rebuilding—the country's rich biodiversity. Training a new generation of plant breeders and geneticists, Worede and his staff at the Plant Genetic Resources Centre in Addis Ababa set about collecting and storing native plants and seeds, known as landraces, from across the country. In 1989 Worede initiated the Seeds of Survival program, a network of community seed banks that save and redistribute the seeds of local farmers.

Worede is hopeful that new efforts to increase food production—such as the Gates Foundation's Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa—will not repeat the mistakes of the past. Attempts are being made to include local farmers in decision-making. “The people planning this are aware that the first green revolution failed over time. There are some intelligent ideas,” Worede says. “But they are still placing too much emphasis on a narrow range of varieties. What about the rest? We'll lose them. Believe me, I'm not against science. Why would I be? I'm a scientist. But contextualize it. Combine science with the local knowledge, the farmer's science.”

Worede believes it is crucial to preserve the region's diversity not just in seed banks but on the ground and in close consultation with local farmers. Although yield is obviously important to farmers, even more crucial is hedging their bets against famine, spreading the risk by growing many crops, over many seasons, in many locations. In this way if one crop gets diseased, or one harvest succumbs to drought, or one hillside is flooded, they have alternatives to fall back on.

The challenge has been to show it's possible to increase productivity without sacrificing diversity. Worede wanted to prove that deciding between having enough to eat today and preserving food biodiversity for tomorrow is a false choice. And he has done precisely that. He has taken the varieties farmers selected for their adaptability and determined which of them promise the best yield. The use of high-yielding local seeds—in combination with natural fertilizers and techniques such as intercropping—has improved yield as much as 15 percent above that of the imported, high-input varieties. A parallel effort is under way with local indigenous livestock breeds. Keith Hammond, a UN expert on animal genetics, says that in 80 percent of the world's rural areas the locally adapted genetic resources are superior to imported breeds.

Still, a 15 percent increase is far from the doubling of our food supply experts say we'll need in future decades. Preserving food diversity is only one of many strategies we'll need to meet that challenge, but it is a crucial one. As the world warms, and the environment becomes less hospitable to the breeds and seeds we now rely on for food, humanity will likely need the genes that allow plants and animals to flourish in, say, the African heat or in the face of recurring blight. Indeed, Worede thinks scientists may well find the Ug99-resistant varieties they're looking for in Ethiopia's fields. “Even if the disease mutates into a new form, it will not wipe out everything here. That is the advantage of diversity.”

Yet Worede balks at the idea of the developed world treating Vavilov centers like Ethiopia as wild seed banks from which to withdraw traits whenever the next plague strikes. He cites the outbreak in the early 1970s of yellow dwarf virus, which threatened to wipe out the world's barley crop. A U.S. scientist who had come to Ethiopia in the 1960s had happened to grab some barley samples from a field for his own study. When the virus hit, he handed over the samples to one of the scientists trying to stop the virus. Sure enough they found a resistant gene. “It changed everything,” says Worede, “at no cost to them. No genetic engineering, nothing. Just a natural source of resistance taken from the very part of Ethiopia where people were suffering from starvation.”

Mohammed and his neighbor stood in silence above their own private earthen seed bank that afternoon in Welo. Since the famine of 1984, they don't even think of selling any grain until they know what the harvest has brought. I asked whether the bounty I'd seen in their fields had them feeling a bit more secure and optimistic.

“It will be nice to have some extra money,” Mohammed began, “so we can send our kids to school in good clothes, but…” He paused, looking over at his neighbor, then gave an answer I've come to think might perfectly describe the attitude we all should adopt when it comes to securing our future food supply.

“We're positive,” Mohammed said. “But we're very sensitive to risk.”

JOSÉ ALBERTO, MURILO, GERALDO, ANGELA, PAULO, EDWIGES, VICENTE, RITA, LUCIA, MARCELINO, TERESINHA.
That makes 11, right? Not including the stillbirth, the three miscarriages, and the baby who lived not quite one full day. Dona Maria Ribeiro de Carvalho, a gravelly-voiced Brazilian lady in her 88th year, completed the accounting of her 16 pregnancies and regarded José Alberto, her oldest son, who had come for a Sunday visit and was smoking a cigarette on her couch. “With the number of children I had,” Dona Maria said mildly, her voice conveying only the faintest reproach, “I should have more than a hundred grandchildren right now.”

José Alberto, who had been fishing all morning at the pond on his ranch, was still in his sweatpants. His mother's front room in the mid-Brazil town of São Vicente de Minas was just big enough to contain three crowded-in armchairs, a television, numerous family photos, framed drawings of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin, and the black vinyl couch upon which he, Professor Carvalho, retiring head of his university's School of Economics and one of the most eminent Brazilian demographers of the past half century, now reclined. He put his feet up and smiled. He knew the total number of grandchildren, of course: 26. For much of his working life, he had been charting and probing and writing about the remarkable Brazilian demographic phenomenon that was replicated in miniature amid his own family, who within two generations had crashed their fertility rate to 2.36 children per family, heading right down toward the national average of 1.9.

That new Brazilian fertility rate is below the level at which a population replaces itself. It is lower than the two-children-per-woman fertility rate in the United States. In the largest nation in Latin America—a 191-million-person country where the Roman Catholic Church dominates, abortion is illegal (except in rare cases), and no official government policy has ever promoted birth control—family size has dropped so sharply and so insistently over the past five decades that the fertility rate graph looks like a playground slide.

And it's not simply wealthy and professional women who have stopped bearing multiple children in Brazil. There's a common perception that the countryside and favelas, as Brazilians call urban slums, are still crowded with women having one baby after another—but it isn't true. At the demographic center Carvalho helped found, located four hours away in the city of Belo Horizonte, researchers have tracked the decline across every class and region of Brazil. Over some weeks of talking to Brazilian women recently, I met schoolteachers, trash sorters, architects, newspaper reporters, shop clerks, cleaning ladies, professional athletes, high school girls, and women who had spent their adolescence homeless; almost every one of them said a modern Brazilian family should include two children, ideally a
casal,
or couple, one boy and one girl. Three was barely plausible. One might well be enough. In a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, an unmarried 18-year-old affectionately watched her toddler son one evening as he roared his toy truck toward us; she loved him very much, the young woman said, but she was finished with childbearing. The expression she used was one I'd heard from Brazilian women before:
“A fábrica está fechada.”
The factory is closed.

The emphatic fertility drop is not just a Brazilian phenomenon. Notwithstanding concerns over the planet's growing population, close to half the world's population lives in countries where the fertility rates have actually fallen to below replacement rate, the level at which a couple have only enough children to replace themselves—just over two children per family. They've dropped rapidly in most of the rest of the world as well, with the notable exception of sub-Saharan Africa.

For demographers working to understand the causes and implications of this startling trend, what's happened in Brazil since the 1960s provides one of the most compelling case studies on the planet. Brazil spans a vast landmass, with enormous regional differences in geography, race, and culture, yet its population data are by tradition particularly thorough and reliable. Pieces of the Brazilian experience have been mirrored in scores of other countries, including those in which most of the population is Roman Catholic—but no other nation in the world seems to have managed it quite like this.

“What took 120 years in England took 40 years here,” Carvalho told me one day. “Something
happened.”
At that moment he was talking about what happened in São Vicente de Minas, the town of his childhood, where nobody under 45 has a soccer-team-size roster of siblings anymore. But he might as well have been describing the entire female population of Brazil. For although there are many reasons Brazil's fertility rate has dropped so far and so fast, central to them all are tough, resilient women who set out a few decades back, without encouragement from the government and over the pronouncements of their bishops, to start shutting down the factories any way they could.

Encountering women under 35 who've already had sterilization surgery is an everyday occurrence in Brazil, and they seem to have no compunctions about discussing it. “I was 18 when the first baby was born—wanted to stop there, but the second came by accident, and I am
done,”
a 28-year-old crafts shop worker told me in the northeastern city of Recife, as she was showing me how to dance the regional two-step called the
forró.
She was 26 when she had her tubal ligation, and when I asked why she'd chosen irreversible contraception at such a young age—she's married, what if she and her husband change their minds?—she reminded me of son number two, the accident. Birth control pills made her fat and sick, she said. And in case I'd missed this part: She was done.

So why two? Why not four? Why not the eight your grandmother had? Always the same answer—“Impossible! Too expensive! Too much work!” With the facial expression, the widened eyes and the startled grin that I came to know well: It's the 21st century,
senhora,
are you nuts?

Population scholars like José Alberto Carvalho maintain a lively argument about the multiple components of Brazil's fertility plunge. (“Don't let anybody tell you they know for sure what caused the decline,” a demographer advised me at Cedeplar, the university-based study center in Belo Horizonte. “We'll never have a winner as the best explanation.”) But if one were to try composing a formula for crashing a developing nation's fertility rate without official intervention from the government—no China-style one-child policy, no India-style effort to force sterilization upon the populace—here's a six-point plan, tweaked for the peculiarities of modern Brazil:

1. Industrialize dramatically, urgently, and late, causing your nation to hurtle through in 25 years what economists used to think of as a century's worth of internal rural-to-urban relocation of its citizens. Brazil's military rulers, who seized power in a 1964 military coup and held on through two decades of sometimes brutal authoritarian rule, forced the country into a new kind of economy, one that has concentrated work in the cities, where the housing is cramped, the favela streets are dangerous, babies look more like new expense burdens than like future useful farmhands, and the jobs women must take for their families' survival require leaving home for ten hours at a stretch.

2. Keep your medications mostly unregulated and your pharmacy system over-the-counter, so that when birth control pills hit the world in the early 1960s, women of all classes can get their hands on them, even without a doctor's prescription, if they can just come up with the money. Nurture in these women a particularly dismissive attitude toward the Catholic Church's position on artificial contraception. (See number 4.)

3. Improve your infant and child mortality statistics until families no longer feel compelled to have extra, just-in-case babies on the supposition that a few will die young. Compound that reassurance with a national pension program, relieving working-class parents of the conviction that a big family will be their only support when they grow old.

4. Distort your public health system's financial incentives for a generation or two, so that doctors learn they can count on higher pay and more predictable work schedules when they perform cesareans rather than waiting for natural deliveries. Then spread the word, woman to woman, that a public health doctor who has already begun the surgery for a cesarean can probably be persuaded to throw in a discreet tubal ligation, thus ensuring a thriving, decades-long publicly supported gray market for this permanent method of contraception. Brazil's health system didn't formally recognize voluntary female sterilization until 1997. But the first time I ever heard the phrase “a fábrica está fechada,” it was from a 69-year-old retired schoolteacher who had her tubes tied in 1972, after her third child was born. This woman had three sisters. Every one of them underwent a ligation. Yes, they were all Catholic. Yes, the church hierarchy disapproved. No, none of them much cared; they were women of faith, but in some matters the male clergy is perhaps not wholly equipped to discern the true will of God. The lady was pouring tea into china cups at her dining table as we talked, and her voice was matter-of-fact. “Everyone was doing it,” she said.

5. Introduce electricity and television at the same time in much of the nation's interior, a double disruption of traditional family living patterns, and then flood the airwaves with a singular, vivid, aspirational image of the modern Brazilian family: affluent, light skinned, and small. Scholars have tracked the apparent family-size-shrinking influence of
novelas,
Brazil's Portuguese-language iterations of the beloved evening soap operas, or
telenovelas,
that broadcast all over Latin America, each playing for months, like an endless series of bodice-ripper paperbacks. One study observes that the spread of televisions outpaced access to education, which has greatly improved in Brazil, but at a slower pace. By the 1980s and '90s all of Brazil was dominated by the Globo network, whose prime-time novelas were often a central topic of conversation; even now, in the era of multichannel satellite broadcasting, you can see café TVs turned to the biggest Globo novela of the season.

While I was there it was
Passione,
featuring the racked-by-secrets industrialist Gouveia family, who were all very good-looking and loaded up with desirable possessions: motorcycles, chandeliers, racing bicycles, airplane tickets, French high-heeled shoes. The widow Gouveia, resolute and admirable, had three kids. Well, four, but one was a secret because he was born out of wedlock and had been shipped off to Italy in infancy because…uh, never mind. The point is that there were not many Gouveias, nor were there big families anywhere else in the unfathomably complicated plotline.

“We asked them once: ‘Is the Globo network trying to introduce family planning on purpose?'” says Elza Berquó, a veteran Brazilian demographer who helped study the novelas' effects. “You know what they answered? ‘No. It's because it's much easier to write the novelas about small families.'”

And, finally, number 6: Make all your women Brazilians.

This is volatile territory, Brazil and women. Machismo means the same thing in the Portuguese of Brazil as it does in the rest of the continent's Spanish, and it has been linked to the country's high levels of domestic violence and other physical assaults on women. But the nation was profoundly altered by the
movimento das mulheres,
the women's movement of the 1970s and '80s, and no American today is in a position to call Brazil retrograde on matters of gender equity. When President Dilma Rousseff was running for office last year, the fiercest national debates were about her political ideas and affiliations, not whether the nation was ready for its first female president. One of Rousseff's strongest competitors, in fact—a likely contender in future elections—was a female senator.

Brazil has high-ranking female military officers, special police stations run by and for women, and the world's most famous female soccer player (the one-name-only dazzling ball handler Marta). When I spent an evening in the city of Campinas with Aníbal Faúndes, a Chilean obstetrics professor who immigrated decades ago to Brazil and has helped lead national studies of reproductive health, Faúndes returned again and again to what he regards as the primary force pushing fertility change in his adopted country. “The fertility rate dropped because women decided they didn't want more children,” he said. “Brazilian women are tremendously strong. It was just a matter of them deciding, and then having the means to achieve it.”

The Cytotec episode offers sober but illuminating evidence. Cytotec is the brand name for a medication called misoprostol, which was developed as an ulcer treatment but in the late 1980s became internationally known as an early-abortion pill—part of the two-drug combination that included the medication known as RU-486. Even before the rest of the world received the news about pill-induced abortion, though—it entered the French and Chinese marketplaces in 1988, amid great controversy, and was subsequently approved in the U.S. for pregnancy termination—Brazilian women had figured it out on their own. No publicity campaign explained misoprostol; this was pre-Internet, remember, and Brazilian law prohibits abortion except in cases of rape or risk to the woman's life.

But that law is ignored at every level of society. “Women were telling each other what the dose was,” says Brazilian demographer Sarah Costa, director of the New York City–based Women's Refugee Commission, who has written about Brazil's Cytotec phenomenon for the medical journal the
Lancet.
“There were street vendors selling it in train stations. Most public health posts at that time were not providing family planning services, and if you are motivated to regulate your fertility, even if you have poor services and poor information, you'll ask somebody, What can I do? And the information
will
flow.”