The Rational Optimist (18 page)

For example, many organic farmers happily adopted an insect-killing bacterium called
Bacillus thuringiensis
or bt, first commercialised in France as Sporeine in the 1930s, which they sprayed on crops to control pests. As a ‘biological’ not a chemical spray, it met their tests. By the 1980s lots of different variants of bt had been developed for different insects. All were regarded as organic. But then genetic engineers took the bt toxin and incorporated it into the cotton plant to produce bt-cotton, one of the first genetically modified crops. This had two huge advantages: it killed bollworms living inside the plant where sprays could not reach them easily; and it did not kill innocent insects that were not eating the cotton plant. Yet, though this was an officially organic product, biologically integrated into the plant, and obviously better for the environment, organic high priests rejected the technology. Bt cotton went on to transform the cotton industry and has now replaced more than a third of the entire cotton crop. Indian farmers, denied the technology by their government, rioted to demand it after seeing bootlegged crops growing in their neighbours’ fields. Now most Indian cotton is bt, and the result has been a near-doubling of yield and a halving of insecticide use – win/win. In every study of bt cotton crops across the world from China to Arizona, the use of insecticides is down by as much as 80 per cent and the bees, butterflies and birds are back in abundance. Economically and ecologically, good news all round. Yet merely to board a passing bandwagon of protest publicity, the leaders of the organic movement locked themselves out of a new technology that has delivered huge reductions in the use of synthetic pesticides. One estimate puts the amount of pesticide
not
used because of genetic modification at over 200 million kilograms of active ingredients and climbing.

This is just one example of how the organic movement’s insistence on freezing agricultural technology at a midtwentieth-century moment means it misses out on environmental benefits brought by later inventions. ‘I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food,’ writes the Missouri farmer Blake Hurst. Organic farmers are happy to spray copper sulphate or nicotine sulphate, but forbid themselves the use of synthetic pyrethroids, which swiftly kill insects but have very low toxicity for mammals and do not persist in the environment causing collateral damage to non-pests. They forbid themselves herbicides, which means they have to weed by hand, using poorly paid labour, or by tilling and flame-throwing, which can devastate soil fauna, accelerate soil erosion and release greenhouse gases. They forbid themselves fertiliser made from air, but allow themselves fertiliser made from trawled fish.

In her classic book
Silent Spring
, Rachel Carson called upon scientists to turn their backs on chemical pesticides and seek ‘biological solutions’ to pest control instead. They have done so, and the organic movement has rejected them.

The many ways of modifying genes

Of course, almost by definition, all crop plants are ‘genetically modified’. They are monstrous mutants capable of yielding unnaturally large, free-threshing seeds or heavy, sweet fruit and dependent on human intervention to survive. Carrots are orange thanks only to the selection of a mutant first discovered perhaps as late as the sixteenth century in Holland. Bananas are sterile and incapable of setting seed. Wheat has three whole diploid (double) genomes in each of its cells, descended from three different wild grasses, and simply cannot survive as a wild plant – you never encounter wheat weeds. Rice, maize and wheat all share genetic mutations that alter the development of the plant to enlarge seeds, prevent shattering, and allow free threshing from chaff. These mutations were selected, albeit inadvertently, by the first farmers sowing and reaping them.

But modern genetic modification, using single genes, was a technology that came worryingly close to being stifled at birth by irrational fears fanned by pressure groups. First they said the food might be unsafe. A trillion GM meals later, with not a single case of human illness caused by GM food, that argument has gone. Then they argued that it was unnatural for genes to cross the species barrier. Yet wheat, the biggest crop of all, is an unnatural ‘polyploid’ merger of three wild plant species and horizontal gene transfer is showing up in lots of plants, such as Amborella, a primitive flowering plant, which proves to have DNA sequences borrowed from mosses and algae. (DNA has even been caught jumping naturally from snakes to gerbils with the help of a virus.) Then they said GM crops were produced and sold for profit, not to help farmers. So are tractors. Then they tried the bizarre argument that herbicide-resistant crops might cross-breed with wild plants and result in a ‘super’ weed that was impossible to kill – with that herbicide. This from people who were against herbicides anyway, so what could be more attractive to them than rendering the herbicide useless?

By 2008, less than twenty-five years after they were first invented, fully 10 per cent of all arable land, thirty million acres, was growing genetically modified crops: one of the most rapid and successful adoptions of a new technology in the history of farming. Only in parts of Europe and Africa were these crops denied to farmers and consumers by the pressure of militant environmentalists, with what Stewart Brand calls their ‘customary indifference to starvation’. African governments, after intense lobbying by Western campaigners, have been persuaded to tie genetically modified food in red tape, which prevents them being grown commercially in all but three countries (South Africa, Burkina Faso and Egypt). In one notorious case Zambia in 2002 even turned down food aid in the middle of a famine after being persuaded by a campaign by groups, including Greenpeace International and Friends of the Earth, that because it was genetically modified it could be dangerous. A pressure group even told a Zambian delegation that GM crops might cause retroviral infections. Robert Paarlberg writes that, ‘Europeans are imposing the richest of tastes on the poorest of people.’ Ingo Potrykus, developer of golden rice, thinks that ‘blanket opposition to all GM foods is a luxury that only pampered Westerners can afford.’ Or as the Kenyan scientist Florence Wambugu puts it, ‘You people in the developed world are certainly free to debate the merits of genetically modified foods, but can we eat first?’

Yet it is Africa that could stand to benefit the most from GM crops precisely because so many of its farmers are smallholders with little access to chemical pesticides. In Uganda, where a fungal disease called Black Sigatoka threatens the staple banana crop, and resistant strains with rice genes are still years from market because of regulations, the experimental GM plants have to be guarded by padlocked fences, not to protect them from tram pling titled protesters, but to protect them from eager users. Per capita food production in Africa has fallen 20 per cent in thirty-five years; some 15 per cent of the African maize crop is lost to stem-borer moth larvae and at least as much again is lost in storage to beetles: bt maize is resistant to both pests. Nor is corporate ownership a problem: Western companies and foundations are keen to give such crops royalty-free to African farmers, through organisations like the African Agricultural Technology Foundation. There are glimmers of hope. Field trials begin in Kenya in 2010 of drought-resistant and insect-resistant maize, though years of safety testing will follow.

Ironically, the main result globally of the campaign against GM crops was to delay the retreat of chemical pesticides and ensure that only commodity crops could afford to find their way through the regulatory thicket to market, which effectively meant that the crops were denied to small farmers and charities. Genetic engineering remained for longer than it would have done the preserve of large corporations able to afford the regulations imposed by the pressure of the environmentalists. Yet the environmental benefits of GM crops are already immense – pesticide use is falling fast wherever GM cotton is grown and no-till cultivation is enriching soil wherever herbicide-tolerant soybeans are grown. But the benefits will not stop there. Plants that are resistant to drought, salt and toxic aluminium are on the way. Lysine-enriched soybeans may soon be feeding salmon in fish farms, so that wild stocks of other fish do not have to be plundered to make feed. By the time you read this, plants may already be on the market that absorb nitrogen more efficiently, so that higher yields can be achieved with less than half as much fertiliser, saving aquatic habitats from eutrophic runoff, saving the atmosphere from a greenhouse gas (nitrous oxide) that is 300 times as potent as carbon dioxide and cutting the amount of fossil fuel used to make fertiliser – not to mention saving farmers’ costs. Some of this would be possible without gene transfer, but it is a lot quicker and safer with it. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth still oppose it all.

There is one respect in which the environmental critique of modern agriculture has force. In the pursuit of quantity, science may have sacrificed nutritional quality of food. Indeed, the twentieth-century drive to provide a growing population with an ever faster-growing supply of calories has succeeded so magnificently that the diseases caused by too much bland food are rampant: obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and perhaps depression. For example, modern plant oils and plentiful red meat make for a diet low in omega-3 fatty acids, which may contribute to heart disease; modern wheat flour is rich in amylopectin starch, which may contribute to insulin resistance and hence diabetes; and maize is especially low in the amino acid tryptophan, a precursor of serotonin, the ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitter. Consumers will rightly be looking to the next generation of plant varieties to redress these deficiencies. They could do so by eating more fish, fruit and vegetables. But not only would this be a land-hungry option, it would suit the wealthy more than the poor, so it would exacerbate health inequalities. Arguing against vitamin-enriched rice, the Indian activist Vandana Shiva, echoing Marie-Antoinette, recommended that Indians should eat more meat, spinach and mangoes rather than relying on golden rice.

Instead, genetic modification provides an obvious solution: to insert healthy nutritional traits into high-yielding varieties: tryptophan into maize to fight depression, calcium transporter genes into carrots to help fight osteoporosis in people who cannot drink milk, or vitamins and minerals into sorghum and cassava for those who depend on them as staples. By the time this book is published soybeans with omega-3 fatty acids developed in South Dakota should be on the way to supermarkets in America. They promise to lower the risk of heart attacks and perhaps help the mental health of those who cook with their oil – and at the same time they can reduce the pressure on wild fish stocks from which fish oils are derived.

Imports are Christmas morning; exports are January’s MasterCard bill.

P.J. O’R
OURKE
On The Wealth of Nations

A modern combine harvester, driven by a single man, can reap enough wheat in a single day to make half a million loaves. Little wonder that as I write these words (around the end of 2008), for the very first time the majority of the world’s population lives in cities – up from just 15 per cent in 1900. The mechanisation of agriculture has enabled, and been enabled by, a flood of people leaving the land to seek their fortune in the city, all free to make for each other things other than food.

Though some came to town with hope and ambition, and some with desperation and fear, almost all were drawn by the same aim: to take part in trade. Cities exist for trade. They are places where people come to divide their labour, to specialise and exchange. They grow when trade expands – Hong Kong’s population grew by thirty times in the twentieth century – and shrink when trade dries up. Rome declined from a million inhabitants in 100
BC
to less than 20,000 in the early Middle Ages. Since people have generally done more dying than procreating when in cities, big cities have always depended on rural immigrants to sustain their numbers.

Just as agriculture appeared in six or seven parts of the world simultaneously, suggesting an evolutionary determinism, so the same is true, a few thousand years later, of cities. Large urban settlements, with communal buildings, monuments and shared infrastructure, start popping up after seven thousand years ago in several fertile river valleys. The oldest cities were in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq. Their emergence signified that production was becoming more specialised, consumption more diversified.

It seems that farmers on the rich alluvial soils of the southern Euphrates valley began to grow sufficiently prosperous, in a period of high rainfall, to exchange their grain and woven wool for timber and precious stones from the people in the hills to the north. From about 7,500 years ago, a distinctive ‘Ubaid’ style of pottery, clay sickles and house design spread all across the Near East, reaching up into the mountains of Iran, across to the Mediterranean and along the shores of the Arabian peninsula, where fishermen sold fish to Ubaid merchants in exchange for grain and nets. This was a trading diaspora, not an empire: the domestic habits of the distant people who adopted Ubaid style remained distinctive, showing that they were not colonists from Mesopotamia, but locals aping the Ubaid habits.

The ur-city

So Ubaid Mesopotamia, by exporting grain and cloth, drew its neighbours into exporting timber and later metal. The Ubaids must have become rich enough to support chiefs and priests. Inevitably, these had ideas above their stations, for when, after 6,000 years ago, the Ubaid culture disappeared, it was replaced by something that looks much more like an empire – the ‘Uruk expansion’. Uruk was a large city, probably the first the world had ever seen, housing more than 50,000 people within its six miles of wall (King Gilgamesh may have built the wall – having plundered his trading partners’ lands and earned their enmity). All the signs are that Uruk, its agriculture made prosperous by sophisticated irrigation canals, had in the words of the archaeologist Gil Stein ‘developed centralized institutions to mobilize surplus labour and goods from the hinterlands in a meticulously administered political economy’. To put it more succinctly, a class of middlemen, of trade intermediaries, had emerged for the first time. These were people who lived not by production, nor by plunder and tribute, but by deals alone. Like traders ever since, they gathered as tightly together as possible to maximise information flow and minimise costs. Trade with the hills continued, but increasingly it came to look like tribute as Uruk merchants’ dwellings, complete with distinctive central halls, niched-façade temples and peculiar forms of pottery and stone tool, were plonked amid the rural settlements of trading partners in the hills. A cooperative trade network seems to have turned into something much more like colonialism. Tax and even slavery soon began to rear their ugly heads. Thus was set the pattern that would endure for the next 6,000 years – merchants make wealth; chiefs nationalise it.

The story of Ubaid and Uruk is familiar and modern. You can imagine the Ubaid merchants displaying their cloths and pots and groaning sacks of grain to the wide-eyed peasants of the hills. You can see the Uruk nabobs in their privileged enclaves, surrounded by subservient natives, like the British in India or Chinese in Singapore. It is with a start that you recall this is still essentially the Stone Age. Only towards the end of the Ubaid period is copper being smelted, and well into the Uruk times, sickles and knives are still made of stone or clay. Late in the Uruk period clay tablets appear with uniform marks on them meticulously accounting for merchants’ stocks and profits. Those dull records, dug into the surfaces of clay tablets, are the ancestors of writing – accountancy was its first application. The message those tablets tell is that the market came long before the other appurtenances of civilisation. Exchange and trade were well established traditions before the first city, and record keeping may have played a crucial role in allowing cities to emerge full of strangers who could trust each other in transactions. It was the habit of exchange that enabled specialists to appear in Uruk, swelling the city with artisans and craftsmen who never went near the fields. For instance, there seems to have been almost mass production of bevelled-rim bowls that appear to have been disposable. Handed out at communal events like temple constructions, they were undoubtedly made in something like a factory, by workers paid to make them, not by moonlighting farmers.

Uruk did not last, because the climate dried out and the population collapsed, aided no doubt by soil erosion, salination, imperial overspending and uppity barbarians. But Uruk was followed by an endless series of empires on the same ground: Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, neo-Assyrian, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman (briefly, under Trajan), Parthian, Abbasid, Mongol, Timurid, Ottoman, British, Saddamite, Bushite ... Each empire was the product of trading wealth and was itself the eventual cause of that wealth’s destruction. Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.

Cotton and fish

The urban revolution on the banks of the Euphrates was repeated on the banks of the Nile, Indus and Yellow rivers. Ancient Egypt could grow nearly two tonnes of wheat per hectare on land irrigated and replenished with nutrients by the annual flood of the Nile, providing an ample surplus of food, if peasants could be persuaded to produce one, to exchange for other goods, not excluding pyramids. Even more than in Mesopotamia, Egypt followed the path of irrigation, centralisation, monument building and eventual stagnation. Dependent on the flow of the Nile for their crops, the peasants became subject to whoever owned the boats and sluice gates, and he took most of the surplus. Unlike hunter-gatherers or herders, farmers faced with taxes have to stay put and pay, especially if surrounded by desert and dependent on irrigation ditches. So once Menes had unified the upper and lower valley and made himself the first pharaoh, the productive Egyptian economy found itself nationalised, monopolised, bureaucratised and eventually stifled by – in the words of two modern historians – the ‘leaden authoritarianism’ of its rulers.

On the banks of the Indus, an urban civilisation arose without spawning an emperor, at least not one whose name is known. Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro are known for the precisely standardised size of their bricks and their neat sanitary arrangements. The port of Lothal was distinguished by what appears to be a dock and tidal lock, and a factory for making beads. There is less sign of palaces or temples, let alone pyramids, but the anthropologist Gordon Childe’s preliminary conclusion that the whole thing appears to have been rather egalitarian and peaceful turned out to be largely wishful thinking. Somebody was imposing a neat grid of streets and building a hefty ‘citadel’ of pillars, towers and walls. Smells like a monarch to me. As Sir Mortimer Wheeler wrote in his autobiography: ‘I sat down and wrote to Gordon Childe in London that the bourgeois complacency of the Indus civilisation had dissolved into dust and that, instead, a thoroughly militaristic imperialism had raised its ugly head amongst the ruins.’

The Indus people were good at transport: bullock carts may have been used here for the first time and plank-built sailing boats. Transport allowed extensive trade. Some of the very earliest settlements in the region, such as Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, were importing lapis lazuli from north of the Hindu Kush mountains as early as 6,000 years ago. By the time of Harappa, copper came from Rajasthan, cotton from Gujarat, and lumber from the mountains. Even more remarkably, the archaeologist Shereen Ratnagar concluded that boats sent exports west to Mesopotamia, stopping at ports along the coast of what is now Iran – implying a seamanship that is surprising at such an early date. There can be little doubt that the great wealth of the Indus cities was generated by trade.

The Harappan people ate a lot of fish and grew a lot of cotton, things they had in common with citizens of another valley on the far side of the world. Caral in the desert of the Supe Valley in Peru was a large town with monuments, warehouses, temples and plazas. Discovered in the 1990s by Ruth Shady, it lies in a desert crossed by a river valley and was only the biggest of many towns in the area, some of which date from more than 5,000 years ago – the so-called Norte Chico civilisation. For archaeologists there are three baffling features of the ancient Peruvian towns. First, their people had no cereals in their diet. Maize was yet to be invented, and although there were several domesticated squashes and other foods, there was nothing so easily accumulated and stored as the grain which was the staple of Mesopotamia. The idea that cities are made possible by largescale hoarding of grain thus takes a blow. Second, the Norte Chico towns have yielded no pottery of any kind: they were ‘preceramic’. This surely made both the storage and the cooking of food more difficult, again undermining one of the favourite tenets of archaeologists trying to explain how cities began. And third, there is no evidence of warfare or defensive works. So the conventional wisdom that cereal stores made cities possible, that ceramic containers made them practical and that warfare made them necessary takes quite a knock from Norte Chico.

So what was driving people together into these South American towns? The answer, in a word, is trade. The settlements on the coast harvested fish in huge quantities, mainly anchovies and sardines, but also clams and mussels. For this they needed nets. The settlements in the interior grew huge quantities of cotton in fields irrigated with Andean snowmelt. They fashioned the cotton into nets, which they bartered for fish. There was not just mutual dependence, but mutual gain. A fisherman need only catch some more fish rather than spend time making his own nets; a cotton grower need only grow some more cotton rather than spend time fishing. Specialisation raised the standard of living for both. Caral lay at the centre of a large web of trade, reaching high into the Andes, over into the rainforest and far along the coast.

The flag follows trade

To argue, therefore, that emperors or agricultural surpluses made the urban revolution is to get it backwards. Intensification of trade came first. Agricultural surpluses were summoned forth by trade, which offered farmers a way of turning their produce into valuable goods from elsewhere. Emperors, with their ziggurats and pyramids, were often made possible by trade. Throughout history, empires start as trade areas before they become the playthings of military plunderers from within or without. The urban revolution was an extension of the division of labour.

When a usurper named Sargon founded the Akkadian dynasty by conquest in the middle of the third millennium
BC
, he inherited the prosperity of the Syrian city of Ebla and its trading partners: a world in which grain, leather, textiles, silver and copper flowed easily between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Managing to resist the temptation of bureaucratic authoritarianism rather more than their Chinese and Egyptian contemporaries, the Akkadians allowed this trade to expand until it made fruitful contact with Lothal near the mouth of the Indus and bought the cotton and lapis lazuli of India with the wheat and bronze of Mesopotamia. A great free trade area stretched from the Nile to the Indus. An Akkadian merchant could handle Anatolian silver from a thousand miles to the west and Rajasthani copper from a thousand miles to the east. And that meant that he could raise the standard of living of the consumers he supplied, whether they were farmers or priests, by connecting them with distant producers of diverse goods.

Who was such a merchant? The economist Karl Polanyi argued in the 1950s that the concept of the market cannot be applied to any time before the fourth century
BC
, that until then instead of supply, demand and price, there was reciprocal exchange, state-sponsored redistribution of goods and top-down treaty trade in which agents were sent abroad to acquire things on behalf of the palace. Trade was administered, not spontaneous. But Polanyi’s thesis or those of his fellow ‘substantivists’ has not stood the test of time well. It now seems that the state did not so much sponsor trade, as capture it. The more that comes to light about ancient trade, the more bottom-up it looks. While it is true that some Akkadian merchants may well have eventually seen themselves partly as civil servants sent abroad to acquire goods for their rulers, even they earned a living by trading for a profit themselves. Polanyi depicted a reflection of his own planning-obsessed times. The dirigiste mentality that dominated the second half of the twentieth century was always asking who is in charge, looking for who decided on a policy of trade. That is not how the world works. Trade emerged from the interactions of individuals. It evolved. Nobody was in charge.