The Rational Optimist (16 page)

Worse still, as Friedrich Engels was the first to argue, agriculture may have worsened sexual inequality. It is certainly painfully obvious that in many peasant farming communities, men make women do much of the hard work. In hunter-gathering, men have many tiresome sexist habits, but they do at least contribute. When the plough was invented around 6,000 years ago, men took over the work of driving the oxen that cultivated fields, because it required greater strength, but this only exacerbated inequality. Now women were treated increasingly as the chattels of men, loaded with bracelets and ankle rings to indicate their husband’s wealth. Now art became dominated by the symbols of male power and competition – arrows, axes and daggers. Now polygamy probably increased and the wealthiest men acquired harems and patriarchal status: at Branc in Slovakia, more women than men were buried with elaborate grave goods, indicating not that they were wealthy, so much as that their polygamous husbands were wealthy while other men languished in celibate poverty. In this way, polygamy enables poor women to share in prosperity more than poor men. It was an age of patriarchy.

Yet there is no evidence that early farmers behaved any worse than hunter-gatherers. Those few hunter-gatherer societies that became fat and prosperous on a dependable and rich local resource – most notably, the salmon-fishing tribes of the American north-west – soon indulged in patriarchy and inequality, too. The ‘original affluence’ of the modern hunter-gatherer !Kung was only possible because of modern tools, trade with farmers and even the odd helping hand from anthropologists. Their low fertility owed more to sexually transmitted infections than birth control. As for the deformities of early farmers, skeletons may not be representative and may tell you more about the injuries and diseases that were survived, rather than proved fatal. Even the gender equality of hunter-gatherers may prove wishful thinking. After all, Fuegian men, who could not swim, left their wives to anchor canoes in kelp beds and swim ashore in snow storms. The truth is that both hunter-gathering and farming could produce affluence or misery depending on the abundance of food and the relative density of people. One commentator writes: ‘All pre-industrial economies, no matter how simple or complex, are capable of generating misery and will do so given enough time.’

The chronic and perpetual violence of the hunter-gatherer world had not ended with the invention of farming. Oetzi died a violent death, shot from behind by an arrow that pierced an artery in his shoulder, after – so DNA suggests – killing two men with one of his own arrows and carrying a wounded comrade on his back. The blood of a fourth man was on his knife. In the process he sustained a deep cut to his thumb and a fatal blow to the head. This was no small skirmish. His position in death suggests that his killer turned him over to retrieve the arrow, but the stone arrow head broke off inside his body. The archaeologist Steven LeBlanc says that the evidence of constant violence in the ancient past has been systematically overlooked by Rousseauesque wishful thinking among academics. He cites his own discoveries of innumerable sling shots and doughnutshaped stones in Turkish sites from around 8,000 years ago. In the 1970s when he worked there he thought these were used by shepherds to chase away wolves and by farmers to weigh down their hoes. Now he realises that they were weapons of violence: the stones were mace heads and the sling shots were stockpiled for defence.

Wherever archaeologists look, they find evidence that early farmers fought each other incessantly and with deadly effect. The early inhabitants of Jericho dug a defensive ditch thirty feet deep and ten feet wide into solid rock without metal tools. In the Merzbach valley in Germany, the arrival of agriculture brought five centuries of peaceful population growth followed by the building of defensive earthworks, the dumping of corpses in pits and the abandonment of the whole valley. At Talheim around 4900
BC
, an entire community of thirty-four people was massacred by blows to the head and arrows in the back, apart from the adult women who are missing – presumably abducted as sexual prizes. The killers were doing no more than Moses later ordered his followers in the Bible. After a successful battle against the Midianites and a massacre of the adult males, he told them to finish the job by raping the virgins: ‘Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.’ (Numbers 31)

Likewise, wherever anthropologists look, from New Guinea to the Amazon and Easter Island, they find chronic warfare among today’s subsistence farmers. Pre-emptively raiding your neighbours lest they raid you is routine human behaviour. As Paul Seabright has written: ‘Where there are no institutional restraints on such behaviour, systematic killing of unrelated individuals is so common among human beings that, awful though it is, it cannot be described as exceptional, pathological or disturbed.’

Nor can it be denied that such violence was habitually accompanied by cruelty to a degree that turns the modern stomach. When Samuel Champlain accompanied (and assisted with his arquebus) a successful Huron raid upon the Mohawks in 1609, he had to watch as his allies sacrificed a captive by branding his torso with glowing sticks from the fire, periodically reviving him with buckets of water if he passed out, from dusk till dawn. Only when the sun rose were they permitted by their tradition to disembowel and then eat the unfortunate victim, during which procedure he gradually died.

The fertiliser revolution

The Neolithic Revolution provided posterity with almost limitless calories. There would be famines aplenty in the millennia to come, but they would never again reduce human population density to the hunter-gatherer level. Inch by inch, trick by trick and crop by crop, people would find a way to coax food from even the poorest soils, and calories from even the poorest foods and would crystallise insights of almost miraculous perspicacity as to how to do so. Fast-forward from the Neolithic a few thousand years to the industrial revolution, when population began to explode rather than expand and stand amazed that you and your ancestors came through that explosion better fed, not starving. In 1798 Robert Malthus famously predicted in his
Essay on Population
that food supply could not keep pace with population growth because of the finite productivity of land. He was wrong, but it was no easy matter; in the nineteenth century it was at times touch-and-go. Even though steamships, railways, the Erie Canal, refrigeration and the binder-and-reaper enabled the Americas to send vast amounts of wheat back east to feed the industrial masses of Europe, directly and in the form of beef and pork, famine was never far away.

It would have been worse but for a strange windfall discovered in about 1830. On dry bird islands off the South American and South African coasts, where no rain leached away the cormorant, penguin and booby droppings, immense deposits of nitrogen and phosphorus had accumulated over centuries. Guano mining became a very profitable, and very grim, business. The tiny island of Ichaboe yielded 800,000 tonnes of guano in a few short years. Between 1840 and 1880, guano nitrogen made a colossal difference to European agriculture. But soon the best deposits were exhausted. The miners turned to rich mineral saltpetre deposits in the Andes (which proved to be ancient guano islands lifted up by South America’s westward drift), but these could barely keep pace with demand. By the turn of the twentieth century the fertiliser crisis was desperate. In 1898, the centenary of Malthus’s pessimistic prognostication, the eminent British chemist Sir William Crookes gave a similar jeremiad in his presidential address to the British Association entitled ‘The Wheat Problem’. He argued that, given the growing population and the lack of suitable new acres to plough in the Americas, ‘all civilisations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat,’ and unless nitrogen could be chemically ‘fixed’ from the air by some scientific process, ‘the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence by races to whom wheaten bread is not the staff of life.’

Within fifteen years his challenge had been met. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a way of making large quantities of inorganic nitrogen fertiliser from steam, methane and air. Today nearly half the nitrogen atoms in your body passed through such an ammonia factory. But an even bigger factor in averting Crookes’s disaster was the internal combustion engine. The first tractors had few advantages over the best horses, but they did have one enormous benefit as far as the world was concerned: they did not need land to grow their fuel. America’s horse population peaked at twenty-one million animals in 1915; at the time about one-third of all agricultural land was devoted to feeding them. So the replacement of draught animals by machines released an enormous acreage of land to grow food for human consumption. At the same time motorised transport was bringing land within reach of railheads. As late as 1920, over three million acres of good agricultural land in the American Midwest lay uncultivated because it was more than eighty miles from a railway, which meant a five-day trip by horse wagon costing up to 30 per cent more than the value of the grain.

In 1920 plant breeders developed a vigorous and hardy new variety of wheat, ‘Marquis’, by crossing a Himalayan and an American plant, which could survive further north in Canada. So thanks to tractors, fertilisers and new varieties, by 1931, the year in which Crookes had chosen to place his potential future famine, the supply of wheat had so far exceeded the demand that the price of wheat had plummeted and wheat land was being turned over to pasture all over Europe.

Borlaug’s genes

The twentieth century would continue to confound the Malthusian pessimists, most spectacularly in the 1960s in Asia. For two years in the mid-1960s, India seemed to be on the brink of mass famine. Crops were failing in a drought, and people were starving in growing numbers. Hunger had never been absent from the subcontinent for long, and memories of the great Bengal famine of 1943 were raw. With over 400 million people, the country was in the midst of an unprecedented population explosion. The government had put agriculture at the top of its agenda, but the state monopolies charged with finding new varieties of wheat and rice had nothing to offer. There was little new land to bring into cultivation. Five million tonnes of food aid a year from America were all that stood between India and a terrible fate, and those shipments could surely not continue for ever.

Yet even amid such defeatism, India’s wheat production was taking off, because of a sequence of events that had begun more than twenty years before. On General Douglas MacArthur’s team in Japan at the end of the Second World War was an agricultural scientist named Cecil Salmon. Salmon collected sixteen varieties of wheat including one called ‘Norin 10’. It grew just two feet tall, instead of the usual four – thanks, it is now known, to a single mutation in a gene called Rht1, which makes the plant less responsive to a natural growth hormone. Salmon collected some seeds and sent them back to the United States, where they reached a scientist named Orville Vogel in Oregon in 1949. At the time it was proving impossible to boost the yield of tall wheat by adding artificial fertiliser. The fertiliser caused the crop to grow tall and thick, whereupon it fell over, or ‘lodged’. Vogel began crossing Norin 10 with other wheats to make new short-strawed varieties. In 1952 Vogel was visited by a scientist working in Mexico called Norman Borlaug, who took some Norin and Norin-Brevor hybrid seeds back to Mexico and began to grow new crosses. Within a few short years Borlaug had produced wheat that yielded three times as much as before. By 1963, 95 per cent of Mexico’s wheat was Borlaug’s variety, and the country’s wheat harvest was six times what it had been when Borlaug set foot in Mexico. Borlaug started training agricultural scientists from other countries, including Egypt and Pakistan.

Between 1963 and 1966 Borlaug and his Mexican dwarf wheats faced innumerable hurdles to acceptance in Pakistan and India. Jealous local researchers deliberately underfertilised the experimental plots. Customs officials in Mexico and America – not to mention race riots in Los Angeles – delayed shipments of seed so they arrived late for the planting season. Overenthusiastic fumigation at customs killed half the seeds. The Indian state grain monopolies lobbied against the seeds, spreading rumours that they were susceptible to disease. The Indian government refused to allow increased fertiliser imports, because it wanted to build up an indigenous fertiliser industry, until Borlaug shouted at the deputy prime minister. To cap it all, war broke out between the two countries.

But gradually, thanks to Borlaug’s persistence, the dwarf wheats prevailed. The Pakistani agriculture minister took to the radio extolling the new varieties. The Indian agriculture minister ploughed and planted his cricket pitch. In 1968, after huge shipments of Mexican seed, the wheat harvest was extraordinary in both countries. There were not enough people, bullock carts, trucks or storage facilities to cope with the crop. In some towns grain was stored in schools.

In March of that year India issued a postage stamp celebrating the wheat revolution. That was the very same year the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich’s book
The Population Bomb
was published declaring it a fantasy that India would ever feed itself. His prediction was wrong before the ink was dry. By 1974, India was a net exporter of wheat. Wheat production had tripled. Borlaug’s wheat – and dwarf rice varieties that followed – ushered in the Green Revolution, the extraordinary transformation of Asian agriculture in the 1970s that banished famine from almost the entire continent even as population was rapidly expanding. In 1970 Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In effect, Borlaug and his allies had unleashed the power of fertiliser, made with fossil fuels. Since 1900 the world has increased its population by 400 per cent; its cropland area by 30 per cent; its average yields by 400 per cent and its total crop harvest by 600 per cent. So per capita food production has risen by 50 per cent. Great news – thanks to fossil fuels.