Feeding the Ten Billion Part 4

FEEDING THE TEN BILLION

PLANTS AND POPULATION GROWTH

L.T. EVANS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS                  1998

PART 1V

Chapter 5: Towards the First Billion (1500-1825)

5.1 Introduction: from subsistence to commercial farming

Although there had been several bursts of population growth, e.g. following the Neolithic Revolution and in early medieval times, sustained rapid growth really began in the 16^th century, particularly in Europe and China.

Late medieval agriculture in Europe was still largely for the subsistence of the predominantly rural population, within a manorial framework, and with a strong focus on the cereals of the Near Eastern origin. But over the three centuries following the discovery of the New World by Columbus, farming in Europe became more commercial and based on a wider range of crops used more systematically in rotations designed to improve soil fertility and to minimize the problem of weeds.

• Freed from the constraints of communal ownership and rotation, the more enterprising began to replace the fallow in the universal three-course rotation with turnips for winter feed, thereby increasing their carrying capacity for livestock and the supply of manure for their cereal crops, while still cultivating for weed control.
• This led on to ‘convertible husbandry’ in which the three-course rotation was followed by a ley pasture for several years. These leys were then improved by the sowing of clover and ‘artificial’ grasses, ie species like ryegrass not prominent in the natural grasslands.
• Gradually, also, as surplus cereals were imported from the Baltic, the Low Country farmers began growing the more profitable ‘industrial’ crops, such as hemp and flax for weaving, woad and madder for dyeing, hops for brewing and coleseed for oil.
• New World crops such as tobacco and potato were also grown following the voyages of Columbus and his successors.
• The breakdown of feudalism began somewhat later in England than in the Low Countries but enclosure of the commons, the key to agricultural improvements, was initiated there in the 16^th century and proceeded throughout the 17^th and 18^th centuries.
• The population of England trebled over this period, road and canal systems were greatly extended, industry burgeoned and cities multiplied. On the one hand, therefore, there was a growing demand for the ‘export’ of food from the countryside to the cities while on the other there was an accumulation of capital to be invested in country estates and their improvement.
• Although the writings and example of the gentry were important, the real pioneers were often small farmers, as they had been in the Low Countries.
• For the years 1660-1780, scientific institutions had little effect on agricultural progress.
• Although much of the increase in agricultural production to meet the doubling of world population came from extension of the area of arable land, new crops, more frequent cropping and higher yields also played an important part.
• These increases were accompanied by a doubling of the productivity of farm labour in England as improvements in management became widely adopted between 1700 and 1850.
• More labour was freed for industrial development, and so the synergistic interactions between agricultural improvement, industrial development, population growth and the rising demand for food continued, with no clear indication of a prime mover.
• It may seem ironic, therefore, that The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) published his pessimistic concerns about population towards the end of this era of progress and optimism.
• Malthus’ concerns were shared on the other side of the world, where the population of China more than doubled during the 18^th century.
• ‘The Chinese Malthus’ Hung Liang-chi (1746-1809) wrote two essays on the population problem in 1793 in which he also argued that increase in population could outstrip the means of subsistence, bringing misery, sickness and famine to many because ‘the government could not prevent the people from multiplying themselves’.
• Until the beginning of the 19^th century, despite the global population being less than one billion, the majority of the people in the world, including those in Europe and China, were probably in a chronic state of hunger.

However, at least the frequency of famines in western Europe decreased through the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the last being in the 1620s in England, 1732 in Germany and Scandinavia, 1795 in France, and 1845 in western Europe as a whole (in Ireland). Although the Irish famine occurred about 20 years after the world population reached one billion, its seeds were sown and its likely occurrence predicted by several writers at the end of the 18^th century. Often viewed as an example of the Malthusian scenario, recent research suggests that it was not demographically inevitable, and that Ireland was more under-industrialized than over-populated.

5.2 The impact of Columbus

• The earliest recorded plant collecting expedition is that of Queen Hatshepsut to Punt, on the southern shores of the Red Sea, about 3,500 years ago.
• That was preceded by the demic diffusion of plants and people westwards across Europe, eastwards to India and south to Ethiopia from the Fertile Crescent; by the transfer of sorghum and finger millet from East Africa to India; and by the westwards movement of sugar cane and bananas from New Guinea and south-east Asia.
• The two-way redistribution of crops in the years following the voyages of Columbus dwarfs all others in its impact on world food production.
• About one quarter of all the plants that have been domesticated come from the Americas.
• One reason for the quick success of the American crop plants, the majority of which came from high altitudes in Mexico and the Andes, was their better adaptation to cooler growing conditions than that of many of the crops from Asia and Africa.
• Also operating in their favour was the fact that crops taken to distant new environments often leave many of their pests and diseases behind and may therefore perform better than in their original habitat.
• Their pests and diseases may eventually catch up with them, with disastrous consequences as we shall see, but even today, for most crops, their average yield beyond their centers of origin is substantially higher than that within it.
• In China the population had hovered around 60 million for several centuries but increased to 150 million by 1640 AD.

 

5.3 The potato in Europe

Although it originated and was domesticated in South America, and was introduced to Ireland, unheralded, only late in the 16^th century, the potato was already known as the ‘Irish potato’ by the middle of the following century. The so-called ‘potato famine’ of Ireland was still two centuries in the future.

• Coming as they did from high altitudes but low latitudes, andigena potatoes were well adapted to the cool conditions but not to the long days of European summers.
• Although it was not understood at the time, the long days of summer prevented tuber formation until close to the autumn equinox, leaving little time for tuber growth.
• In Ireland, where both climate and soils were favorable, the potato became what Redcliffe Salaman in History and Social Influence of the Potato describes as ‘the universal and staple article of the people’s food in the greater part of the island’ within fifty years of its introduction in the late 16^th century.
• Described as ‘The greatest gift of the New World to the Old’, the potato was an excellent crop for those with very small holdings, particularly in areas where the law of primogeniture did not apply, so that even small peasant holding were progressively subdivided.
• Its cultivation required only a spade or a hoe; it took only 3-4 months for the crop to mature; it could be grown on a wide variety of soils, it yielded 3-4 times more food than cereals and often flourished when cereal crops failed; nutritionally it combined well with milk, and a single acre (0.4 hectares) of the crop, plus a cow, could feed a family for much of the year.
• Therein lay its popularity, and its threat.

 

5.4 High farming in the Low Countries

• Because the Low Countries relied to a considerable extent on relatively cheap grain imported from the Baltic, their farmers could intensify their farming practices and concentrate on more profitable crops.
• They transformed farming from a subsistence to a partly industrial activity.
• Just as the inhabitants of the Low Countries became expert in the arts of canal and lock building, so also did they develop those of agricultural drainage, reclamation and survey.
• In his great history of English farming, Lord Ernle repeatedly emphasizes the need for improved drainage on both pasture and arable land.
• The Low Countries contributed more than better drainage to the intensification of agriculture. Their specialization on industrial crops, horticulture, fruit-growing and livestock farming shifted the perspective on farming profoundly, bringing an influx of capital for land reclamation and improvement.
• Farming in the Low Countries also laid great emphasis on livestock, particularly cattle, whose manure fertilized the crops.
• Pastures were no longer merely the pickings available on fallow land, but were treated as a sown crop for livestock and for improvement of the soil, the beginnings of ‘convertible husbandry.’

Driven by population pressure and partly by emergent industrialization under conditions where alternative sources of the staple cereals were available at reasonable cost, the farmers of the Low Countries initiated the intensification of agriculture by which cereal yields there and in England rose sharply in the 17^th century and were not matched elsewhere in Europe for many years. Henceforth, as Slicher van Bath put it ‘farmers became conscious of the market economy and farming practice was influenced by the price level for agricultural products’. Dutch farming became a Mecca for agriculturists from all over Europe.

5.5 The Norfolk agricultural ‘revolution’