A History of World Agriculture, from the Neolithic age to the current crisis.

A History of World Agriculture, from the Neolithic age to the current crisis

By Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart and translated from the French by James H. Membrez. (2006) Earthscan, London/Stirling VA.

528 pages. Many charts and graphs.

'An army marches on its stomach', was one of Napoleon's statements which has constantly been repeated, no doubt because that truth is easily forgotten--not of course by soldiers themselves, but by those who become famous, safe and rich on the inhuman foundation of their bent backs and piled up corpses. At the 2007 Forum on Sustainable Development at DWU only one presentation addressed food security. This was Bryant Allen's, on PNG's most basic and under-researched staple, kaukau (sweet potato).

On a much wider canvas, how many of us realise that all the more glamorous and fashionable achievements of modern civilisation rest on the producers of food, and on the social systems which allow these people to interact with technologies, nature, and politico-economics? We know of many crises affecting our modern world, but how many are aware of the deep-seated crisis in world food production? If they are, for how long at a stretch?

Since the 1950s the world has been heading towards a chilling future, already present in many parts of both the First and the Third/Fourth World--islands of wealth, privilege and high competence walled off against growing masses of shanty town or slum dwellers, totally desperate people. PNG has developed a bad reputation in this area, but it is a heaven compared with larger Third World countries. While most restrained on apocalyptic rhetoric, this book's authors point out what seems to be the only way to avoid that ugly future.

This politically difficult way is to keep some degree of globalisation, but to group poor countries together in similar customs unions (not mixed up with the most developed countries, as in ASEAN and NAFTA), to have differential tariffs decided by a UN body, favouring the poor peasant farmers of the poorer countries, and then (and only then) to industrialise parts of the weakest countries, selectively. Food imports, not food exports, should be taxed. Various unified moves must be made, world wide, to put a brake on excessive currency fluctuations, and on excessive speculation (the Tobin tax is not mentioned).

This must come from a UN agency, and cannot be 'one size fits all', massive top-down, command reform. The creativity and knowledge of the remaining small farmers will need to be tapped to the full, and under no conditions can they all be allowed to migrate excessively to the slums of the cities, much less die out as a whole class. Surprisingly, the advanced, hi-tech world still needs them, and far more than it knows.

This large volume is far more than a history of agriculture. It emphasises systems of food production which link up natural resources, social structures, technologies, religion (in the past at least), and economic systems. It is a total history of civilisation in the 20th C French tradition of Braudel, Bloch, Le Goff, Duby, Le Roy Ladurie, a tradition which has its Anglo reflection, far less sophisticated and far more dubious in argument, in Jared Diamond in his recent blockbusters Guns Germs and Steel, and Collapse.

There are also some patches of fascinating detail (on Ancient Egypt and the Inca), but, unfortunately, not on PNG, which is listed as needing far more investigation into its traditional systems of agriculture. New Guinea is at least presented as one of the hearths and diffusion points (six in all) for the 'Neolithic revolution', the beginnings of a move out of hunting and gathering to slash-and-burn styles of agriculture. The story of hominisation and the Old and Middle Stone ages is a conventional one, but its errors do not affect the main period of this book, the last 10,000 years of our species. Other than us, only some rare species of ants, it seems, practise gardening of plants, and the maintaining and care of captive animals for their food.

Systems spread gradually and require complex social changes to endure, as populations sometimes need new systems even to survive themselves. Causation in life forms (and perhaps in non-living systems) is always mutual. The reduction of the forests, population growth, desertification and erosion forced some Neolithic groups to search for new ways of growing food, leading to later revolutions and new systems. Systems have definable, measurable limits (there are a lot of figures and calculations in the book) and both population and wealth suddenly find they cannot grow further until a new boundary is crossed.

Such boundaries in more recent times have involved new types of implements, greater use of animal and machine traction, reduction of fallowing (letting the ground 'rest'), rotations of crops, and integrating cropping with animal manuring, and an accelerating growth in transport and trade. Every boundary crossed has involved traumatic changes in lifestyle, dwelling place, and employment (or lack of it!). Some shocking possibilities are urged on us by this 'systematic' approach. It is claimed that the Roman Empire, just to maintain such an empire in that stage of history, simply had to have massive slavery. True or not, this warns us to look for deeper structural causes for surface successes and disasters, one of the strengths of the soft-Marxist style of doing and writing history. One sensitive area common to both PNG and the Greco-Roman world was population control, involving high levels of infanticide. If it was necessary, how was it 'immoral'?

Some other scraps of interest can be pulled from what is a very integrated discussion. It is amazing how the humble turnip stood right at the centre of the pre-industrial 'Agricultural Revolution' of carts, animal traction, dung and straw, various rotations of crops and abandoning of fallowing. Going further back, we see that creeping deforestation was an essential component of the Neolithic revolution, though the book is less concerned with the massive acceleration of tree loss involved in shipbuilding and then the early modern version of the age of iron. And enough is shown of slash and burn to show that it was as benign as the presence of mankind on this earth can ever be, up to a very critical level of population.

Naturally, the huge, basic question of man's actual presence on earth is never 'unpacked', to use a modish term. It is however obvious from the whole enterprise of the book that our presence at this precise point of the universe inherently involves massive changes and losses to all other living things. The hinted prediction is that this jerky series of 'revolutions' will continue into the future and that new 'systems' will periodically have to be devised. Assumed, perhaps, is that misery and disruption will precede each new step in the process of cultivating the earth, and in the building of the superstructures that are increasingly being mounted on that foundation.

One of the avoidable tragedies lightly alluded to in this non-apocalyptic book is the loss of the unique 'system' of the Inca. In most unpromising terrain this group managed a widespread empire and considerable food security without, apparently, many of the oppressive evils of most other empires. Gold-hungry conquistadores from one of Europe's more backward social systems put a surprisingly quick end to that, as the Macedonian Greeks had done 1900 years before to the Egypt of the Pharaohs. But the Greeks had improved Egypt's agricultural production. The damage done by Spanish actions and attitudes is still painfully apparent, with the tragic combination of the huge estate and the too-small family farm, 'lati-minifundism' for readers comfortable with big new words.

If it were not for the looming crisis of fossil fuels, global warming, and universal water shortages, modern industrial agro-business could possibly feed the whole world, but only at the expense of destroying crucial socio-economic structures. The Third and Fourth world countries have huge populations which are heavily rural, and on the verge of disappearing as a class. We close our eyes and ears to their desperation, until they invade our cities and prey on our privileged facilities and neighbourhoods. Who is concerned about the epidemic of suicides among 2007's Indian cotton farmers, pinned in between a drought, moneylenders, and a downward blip in world prices for their single product?

We are still privileged in PNG, but a look over the fence at the horrors happening around our region, a look into the mirror at our real situation, and what will most likely happen in one or three generations should help us turn our comfortable rhetoric about rural development into something more solid. It is not only the top levels of PNG government who don't take it seriously. As regards the history of human food provision--many stages of that long development are described and analysed here, before our very eyes. To see how each of these was realised in other countries, mainly in the past, would give us far more understanding of what is really going on in our world, under all the superficial noise and nonsense. In countries where slash and burn is still viable, we have extra reasons to look at the history of that system all over the world.

The authors know, as we probably all do, that in modern times no single nation or even group of them can avert the various world crises. National politics is, as we see here, slow to move. International politics seems incapable of movement except in the most tragic and disastrous periods, such as in 1944 when the Bretton-Woods agreement was miraculously inaugurated. The professional economists still in favour these days seem to be shocked by little other than opposing ideologies and bottom lines, but even they must see the disastrous effect on world economies of what seems to be an inevitable decline of world consumer demand. Since the end of Bretton-Woods in 1973, rampant, ideological neo-liberalism has ruled over all other, saner voices. Let us be hope that seemingly inevitable, horrible disasters will strike other countries than ours first, and that we, or the next generation, will be ready to grasp some fairly obvious, but very difficult, solutions.

Br P. Maurice McCallum