A NEW GREEN HISTORY OF THE WORLD

THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE COLLAPSE OF GREAT CIVILISATIONS

CLIVE PONTING

VINTAGE BOOKS              2007

PART XII

Chapter 11: The Weight of Numbers (Cont.)

Agriculture in the developing world

The recent agricultural history of the developing world has been very different from that of the industrialized world. These countries had only limited access to the products of the new lands opened up by the Europeans after 1800 and most of the newly cultivated land in Latin America was used to provide food for export. The amount of new land in Asia, particularly in places such as China, was extremely limited because production was already relatively intense and took up most productive land. These countries faced two additional problems. European control of the empires meant that increasing amounts of land were devoted to growing crops for export that the imperial power wanted. In addition, land was very unequally distributed. In Latin America two-thirds of the land is now owned by 1.5% of landowners and a third of the population own just 1.0% of the land. (Many of the rest are landless labourers). In Africa three-quarters of the agricultural population own just 4% of the land. Apart from the appalling social problems caused by this inequality, food output was lower than it might have been because the large landholdings tended to concentrate on export crops.

Given this background the rapidly rising populations of Asia, Africa and Latin America have caused acute agricultural problems. The amount of arable land per head of population began to fall – in China from the 1870s and in Java after 1920. Production had to become more intensive in order to produce enough food. After the Second World War this was achieved mainly through the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ – the use of new high-yield varieties of wheat and rice. These were developed in Mexico (wheat) in the 1940s and the Philippines (rice) a decade later. Their impact in raising production was immediate. Mexican agricultural production rose at 5% a year in the 20 years after their introduction and after they were first used in India and Pakistan in 1965 wheat yields doubled in a decade. The new rice varieties had the same effect.

• Part of the motivation behind the ‘Green Revolution’ was political. The United States, which funded much of the research through the Rockefeller Foundation, saw it as a way of countering social discontent and the threat of Communism in the newly independent developing countries.
• In practice the social, economic and environmental impact of the ‘Green Revolution’ has been disastrous for the majority of the population.
• Some countries did benefit, in particular South Korea, China and India, but sub-Saharan Africa was hardly affected by the new crops.
• Overall the revolution did not give developing countries food independence.
• The new crops were also highly energy-inefficient – only a quarter as efficient as hand and hoe agriculture in paddy fields.
• This was because although the new varieties increased yields they required large amounts of fertilizer, water and pesticides. (In the 40 years after 1950 fertiliser use in Asia rose 38-fold.).
• Farmers were also tied to the seed companies (located in the industrialized world) for new seeds because the new varieties were sterile and covered by patents.
• Only farmers who could afford the higher inputs could hope to benefit from the ‘Green Revolution’.
• Small peasant farmers did not have enough land and capital to benefit from these new varieties.
• Large landowners became richer, expanded their holdings, bought up peasant land and turned the peasants into landless labourers.
• In Mexico 80% of the extra production from the ‘Green Revolution’ came from just 3% of farms, the number of days worked per year by landless labourers fell from 194 to 100 and their real income fell by a fifth.
• In many cases, for example Ethiopia in the 1980s, the effects of these changes actually increased social and economic tensions and led to revolution.

 

World agriculture at the end of the twentieth century

Despite the large increases in production during the 20^th century there were signs of increasing fragility in the world’s agricultural system by the end of the century. Most of the increase in production had been achieved through a massive increase in inputs. The agriculture of the industrialized world is not any more ‘efficient’ than that of the rest of the world – what it is able to do is purchase more inputs and therefore obtain higher output. That process is now near to its theoretical limits. The level of fertilizer use is such that increased application no longer produces a bigger crop because most of the cultivated varieties are near to their maximum possible output. Production also depends on a very limited number of crops and varieties. During the 20^th century about ¾ of the world’s crop plants were lost and no longer cultivated. 90% of the world’s calories now come from just 20 species and half the world’s food intake comes from just four – rice, maize, wheat and potatoes. Of these four, 60% of the output comes from specialized high-yield varieties. This makes the world potentially very vulnerable to any disease that affected one of these varieties.

• The rise in agricultural productivity began to slow at the end of the 20^th century. From 1950 to 1990 productivity rose at about 2% a year – since 1990 it has only been at half this rate, which is lower than the growth in population.
• The amount of land devoted to grain production reached a peak in 1981 but has since fallen by over 11% as land has gone out of production as the result of environmental degradation.
• From 1950 until 1984 world grain production per person rose by 37%. 1984 was the peak and in the last two decades grain production per head has fallen by 18%.
• World cereal production has been on a plateau since 1994 and since 1999 grain stocks have fallen every year because consumption has been greater than production.
• By the 1980s fifty countries in the developing world which had been self-sufficient in food in the 1930s were net importers of food.
• In the 30 years after the Second World War, in 34 countries, affecting a quarter of the population of the developing world, food output did not keep pace with population. The worst affected area was Africa where food supply per head fell steadily after 1967.

 

World food in the twentieth century

Although the world’s agricultural system now supports just over 6 billion people it does so very unequally. The result is hunger, malnutrition and even famine on a major scale. Overall there is enough food in the world to feed everybody at an adequate level – the problem is its unequal distribution. Put simply, the people of the industrialized countries eat half the world’s food although they are only a quarter of the world’s population. Grain consumption per head in the United States is 5 times higher than in sub-Saharan Africa. More food is sent from the poorest countries to the richest than goes in the opposite direction. Most developing countries are net exporters of food. For example between 1995 and 2005 the food output per head in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania and DR Congo (countries which make up 60% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa) fell by a fifth yet agricultural exports per head rose. A large proportion of this trade is, as it was in the past, in luxury items to provide more variety in the diet for those who are already well fed.

The result is a world where there is growing obesity and diabetes in the rich countries of the world caused by too much food and too much sugar and continuing malnutrition across much of the rest of the world. However, although the average American eats 50% more food than the average person in the developing world there have always been marked inequalities within the industrialised world. In the late 1980s about 15 million people in the United States did not earn enough to consume a well-balanced diet and another 15 million were constantly hungry (a total of over 10% of the population). The situation was far worse in the early 20^th century, particularly during the depression of the 1930s. Then people starved to death on the streets of New York and in Britain it was officially estimated that a third of the population was too poor to buy the minimum diet the League of Nations thought essential to maintain health.

• Much of the food in the rich countries is wasted.
• Overall 40% of the world’s grain harvest (over 70% in the industrialized world) is used inefficiently by being fed to animals to produce meat rather than being eaten directly by humans.
• Pets in the richest countries of the world eat more meat than the people of the poorest countries in the world.
• About a fifth of the world’s grain harvest is eaten by rodents.

In the 1930s about one billion people (half the population of the world) suffered from malnutrition. By the early 1950s this had risen to about one and a half billion or six out of ten people in the world. During the 1950s the proportion of the world’s population that was malnourished fell slightly but because of the rapidly rising population the numbers affected rose to nearly two billion. The situation improved more rapidly from the early 1960s so that by the early 1980s about a quarter of the world’s people were malnourished. However, because of the continuing rise in population the number of people affected was still over one billion, about the same as in 1950. After 1980 the situation began to deteriorate again. By the end of the 20^th century about one billion people in the world suffered from chronic malnutrition and another billion had to live on a grossly inadequate diet. Overall a third of the people in the world do not get enough food to live a healthy life and another substantial group live on the margins of subsistence, facing the constant threat of food shortage. About 40 million people a year die from hunger and its related diseases – equivalent to 300 Jumbo jets crashing every day, with half the passengers being children.

• In Europe the spectre of famine disappeared in the 18^th and 19^th centuries as production increased and more food was imported from abroad. (It only returned because of the social and economic dislocations brought on by revolution and the First and Second World Wars.)
• In the poorest countries in the world it remained a constant threat.

The requisitioning of grain illustrates a central fact in all famines – there is no absolute shortage of food. The people affected by famines are those who are too poor to buy food at the highly inflated prices that prevail during a shortage. In 1943 about 3 million people died in Bengal after rice prices quadrupled in two years and fishing was disrupted by the war. The British government did little to help and the famine occurred after the largest ever rice crop, when food stocks were at record levels. In Ethiopia in 1972-74 about 200,000 people died in the provinces of Tigre and Wollo after only a small fall in the harvest but at a time when food was still being exported from the two provinces and from the country as a whole. In Bangladesh, in 1974 when rice prices doubled in three months after severe flooding, one and a half million people died of starvation. But there was no shortage of food – production, both in absolute and per head terms, was the highest ever. Once again it was those who lacked the resources to buy food who starved. The number who died in the famines of the 20^th century is unknown but a conservative estimate would suggest at least 100 million.

• In 1963 President John Kennedy stated: ‘We have the means to wipe hunger and poverty from the face of the earth in our lifetime.’
• In 1974 the World Food Conference agreed to eradicate hunger within a decade.
• In 1996 the World Food Summit agreed a much more modest aim – to halve the number of people suffering from hunger (to 400 million) by 2015.
• Efforts so far have failed abysmally. They have failed because of a failure to correctly analyse the problems and the use of food aid as a political weapon.
• There is no shortage of food in the world, only a maldistribution. This unequal access to food is made worse by the agricultural subsidies of the rich world.
• There is a strong suspicion that much food aid is simply a way of getting rid of some of the huge agricultural surpluses generated by the policy of high subsidies.
• Over 90% of food aid (99% in the US) is tied to purchases in the donor country and the United States also insists that the overwhelming majority of aid is carried on US ships.
• Overall food aid costs the recipient half as much again as buying food locally and a third more than buying from other countries.

 

Agriculture and the environment