The rush of stunning headlines in 2001 shoved many significant events from our collective memory, just as others were indelibly burned in. No doubt, the report from The Economist about a surplus of wheat in India fell into the category of the lost. Still, it held some jarring descriptions for those of us raised to think of India as a famine center:
Rats and buffaloes in the Punjab, India’s breadbasket, are in fine fettle. The rodents are feasting on millions of tons of wheat and rice stored in government warehouses (or, frequently, in the open air), the cattle on discarded potatoes. But no one else is happy. The government cannot afford the huge cost of buying and storing the grain coming from the farms in the Punjab and elsewhere in India, nor can the poor afford to buy it.
This ought to have been sobering news to a generation of food experts whose reason for being was to raise grain yields. This is one result of their good work. The fundamental shift in the basis of agriculture that we examined in the previous chapter spread many of its problems, while at the same time creating some new ones when overlain on conditions in the developing world. The Green Revolution has proved to be an ambiguous blessing.
There can be no doubt that the Green Revolution had benefits; it did indeed stave off famine, and India is in fact the best measure of
its success. Nonetheless, we are left wondering how much of this success we can stand. This is a question in the United States, but technically, the United States was not the focus of the Green Revolution. American farmers have always grown commodities in surplus. Our country is almost unique in having never known famine. Even during the worst of the breadlines in the Great Depression, there was surplus grain. Furthermore, with the introduction of hybrid varieties of maize, dramatic yield increases in the United States preceded the Green Revolution. Nonetheless, the Green Revolution abroad not only paralleled developments in the United States but fed its burgeoning yields into the same global markets as did (and do) American farmers. The differences that demarcated the developed world from the undeveloped world at the outset of the twentieth century faded over the next few generations, at least down on the farm. Rats feeding on surplus grain in the Punjab are one measure of that change.
Indeed, given the history of the Green Revolution, the Punjab in particular and India in general are fine places to begin tracing its effects as they bear on communities and individuals. So, too, is Pakistan. Better still, the Yaqui Valley of Mexico, where Norman Borlaug began his work.
The region that holds the Yaqui Valley is most strongly associated in North American consciousness with places like Mazatlán, Cabo San Lucas, Acapulco, and Puerto Valtarta—tourist traps and colonies of gringo resorts. Among environmentalists, the region has a different claim to fame; the Sea of Cortez (the Gulf of California to many) is one of those sad seas of the world dying from dewatering, overfishing, and increased salinization. The biggest share of the blame for this goes to farming. The Colorado River is the Sea of Cortez’s primary source of freshwater, flowing into its northern edge; before the Colorado River crosses the border, Americans are pumping it dry for irrigation and, increasingly, municipal water. Between the tourist drek in the south and the problems from the north, about halfway down the sea’s eastern shore, lies the Yaqui Valley, a discrete little laboratory for measuring the aftershocks of the Green Revolution.
As you come to the edge of Ciudad Obregón, the Yaqui Valley’s urban hub, you turn down Avenida Norman Borlaug, a main drag. Then you enter a compound that consists of a clutch of low sheds and greenhouses surrounded by squared-off test plots of wheat. It is a field station like any field station around the world, distinguished only by its seminal role in the history of agriculture. For this is Borlaug’s original work station, now operated by CIMMYT, the Spanish acronym for the International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat. CIMMYT is the eldest among what is now a series of similar institutions known collectively as the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research, or simply the CG system. The Rockefeller Foundation seeded the network as a way of institutionalizing the Green Revolution and still foots a good share of the bills.
Inside the station, we are greeted by Ravi Singh, a plant pathologist, and Ivan Ortiz Monasterio, an agronomist. They represent the mix of international expertise one can expect to find at almost any CG system station around the world. The mix is a key part of the revolution, as important as the increase in yield per acre. As the system developed, the foundations involved consciously promoted the training of scientists from the developing world, usually at land grant colleges in the United States. Singh is Indian. Ortiz Monasterio, a Mexican, earned his Ph.D. in the United States. They are part of a second generation of scientists that has come into its own and now runs what is truly an international system.
The system’s lineage, however, can be traced directly to Borlaug, who keeps an apartment at CIMMYT’s headquarters near Mexico City. Most of the scientists have worked with him, and mention his Nobel Prize a few minutes into any discussion. Their reverence for him shows as Singh explains the chain of logic—and a pivotal decision—that rebuilt agriculture almost by happenstance.
Borlaug showed up in the Yaqui Valley in 1944 to work on a wheat disease called stem rust. At the time, the disease was raising hell with the wheat crop in the United States’ breadbasket, and also with Mexico’s wheat crop, which is grown in winter. Outbreaks would begin in Mexico and spread north, so Borlaug headed for the source
and set up a breeding program to develop a variety resistant to the disease. That early breeding work involved a decision that was to alter the course of global agriculture.
Plant breeding is a tedious business. A breeder crosses varieties that exhibit desired traits, hoping by this roll of the dice to produce an offspring with a combined set of traits like disease resistance, shorter ripening time, higher grain quality, drought tolerance, and increased yield. All of the stars must align.
Getting progeny with the hoped-for traits is not, however, the end of the line. The traits must hold up in successive generations; typically, a project will go through a decade of breeding and growing to confirm that the breeder has come up with a winner. Mexico, however, offered Borlaug a unique opportunity Its lowland desert in the Yaqui Valley would produce a crop in winter, while more temperate highlands would produce a summer crop. If he worked with varieties that would grow under both conditions, in both long- and short-day growing seasons, he could cut the breeding period in half by producing two generations a year. More significant in its implications, though, was his choice of varieties that would grow in such a wide range as his foundation stock. He would produce a global wheat, a one-size-fits-all seed that would travel around the world. From a seemingly practical decision to cut field time emerged a defining hallmark of Green Revolution agriculture.
Borlaug began tackling rust resistance, but soon decided to breed dwarf varieties already developed in Asia into his foundation stock. Gradually, the shortness of the plants became more important than their disease resistance. In 1960, Borlaug released his first semi-dwarf variety. By definition, dwarfs are more efficient plants, because they trade stem for grain. As we have seen, though, the exchange also results in a stronger architecture that allows farmers to pump up the grain yield with chemical fertilizers. The most important fertilizer in this process was nitrogen. Because the dwarf varieties’ potential range was global, the extensive use of nitrogen spread with the seed. As a result, the nitrogen problem is global, too.
It is this problem that Singh and Ortiz Monasterio are now studying
in the Yaqui Valley, which has once again provided an ideal setting for research. Unlike most of Mexico, the arid Yaqui River valley surrounding Obregón doesn’t have an agricultural history stretching back to Aztec farming but was colonized only in modern times by large-scale commercial wheat farmers. The Yaqui is a leading edge of large-scale commercial agriculture in Mexico and, as such, a predictor of the shape of developing world farming. What we see today in the Yaqui is what the world will become, in the absence of a fundamental change.
The valley was a solid predictor of the nitrogen boom. Farmers in the Yaqui Valley make their counterparts in the American Midwest look like nitrogen misers. Some farmers apply about 250 kilograms per hectare of land, more than double the U.S. rate. National average rates vary widely around the world, from a low of 10 kg/hectare in sub-Saharan Africa to a high of 216 kg/hectare for a region in East Asia. The world average is 83 kg/hectare. Globally, the growth in the trend of fertilizer consumption is weighted to the developing world, largely because Green Revolution methods emphasized its use and spawned a series of government subsidies and investments. In 1960, the developing world accounted for 12 percent of all consumption; today that figure is 60 percent. The developing world has already overtaken the developed in its ability to replicate the Dead Zone.
The Yaqui Valley’s connection to water also makes it a particularly apt case study. It is an isolated splotch of 225,000 hectares of irrigated agriculture surrounded by desert, by and large a single watershed formed by the Yaqui River. It is heavily watered by old-fashioned flood irrigation, creating a network of nitrogen flows that drain to the Sea of Cortez, a relatively discrete system, but one that embraces a vital web of estuaries, tidepools, mangroves, and marine life.
Yaqui made sense as a laboratory because the problem there was well-defined, the scale was graspable, and the threat was clear. Or so concluded Rosamond Naylor, an economist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Environmental Science and Policy, and Pamela Matson, then an ecologist at the University of California
at Berkeley. The two joined forces at a conference on global change in Aspen, Colorado, in 1992, when the discussion led to agriculture, and from there to nitrogen.
“We began thinking about this as a place that could go down the tubes,” says Matson. “Anoxia [oxygen depletion as a result of nitrogen pollution] drives off anything that can swim, and it kills everything else.”
Now Matson is at Stanford, and the Yaqui Valley project includes not only economists and ecologists but agronomists, engineers, geologists, hydrologists, climatologists, biogeochemists, political scientists, and geographers, all combining efforts to model and measure the interweave of social, biological, and physical flows of the valley. Based at Stanford, the project has grown to a $2-million-a-year endeavor to study intensively how world agriculture threatens biodiversity, and has made the Yaqui the most closely observed case study of agricultural nitrogen use in the world.
Not far into the project, Matson and Naylor teamed up with Ortiz Monasterio, the CIMMYT agronomist. The three began testing an idea.
Agricultural nitrogen, unlike most pollutants, is not a by-product of an industrial process. It is a purchased input. The nitrogen that finds its way into waterways as runoff is waste—an asset that got away. Field trials in the United States have shown that typically 50 percent, and sometimes as much as 70 percent, of the fertilizer applied simply dissipates. A good measure of this waste can be attributed to government policies and subsidies that make nitrogen too cheap to conserve.
The researchers put together trials to compare the practices of Yaqui farmers with simple alternatives that timed the application of nitrogen with stages of plant development and the irrigation cycle. The idea was to apply less fertilizer, but apply it exactly when the wheat would most readily absorb it, thereby minimizing runoff. The researchers concluded in a 1998 paper in the journal Science that these alternatives could cut fertilizer use to 180 kg/hectare, compared to the 250 typically applied by Yaqui farmers, thus greatly reducing nitrogen flows to the atmosphere and to the water without decreasing
crop yield. The bottom line was a 12 to 17 percent increase in a farmer’s net profit. To a conservationist, such a result is not just a number but a tool, the elusive win-win that motivates change.
This sort of gain is of particular concern to those who work in the developing world. The United States has a long history of regulating pollutants but still is hard pressed to regulate nitrogen flow from farms, which is diffuse and difficult to control. It’s worse in the developing world, where lax, ineffective government on one hand, and the ubiquity of hunger and poverty on the other, make governments even less willing to experiment with policies that might jeopardize grain yields. Enter the unseen hand of the market. The investigators quickly found out they had a potential market solution to an environmental problem, and set out to test it.
In a multipronged effort to spread the glad tidings, they used a series of contacts with local elites, set up farmer field schools, planted demonstration plots, and pamphleteered. The interdisciplinary program took into consideration the fact that farmers ranged from major commercial operations like those in the United States to twenty-acre dirt farms and dirt-poor cooperatives called ejidos, part of the peasant land-distribution system set up by the Mexican Revolution. The message was tailored in content and delivery to reach each stratum in the complex social structure.
In the spring of 2001, Naylor, Matson, Ortiz Monasterio, and I visited a cross-section. The researchers went into the field expecting a payoff for the years of demonstrating their idea, especially as they had gotten an unexpected boost from a recent turn in global markets. Fertilizer was already the costliest element of a farmer’s annual investment when they had done their initial analysis in 1998, but in the interim, there had been a sudden 50 percent surge in its cost. Conservationists in the United States have suggested that even a relatively modest tax on nitrogen could help stem the flow, so the Yaqui Valley was offering a real-life test in the extreme.
Juan Dorame has a simple little farm smack in the middle of the Yaqui. We walk his neat field of raised durum wheat beds as he details
for us with some pride his bounty yields, which are accomplished with less irrigation water (read: less runoff) and on average about 20 percent less nitrogen than the norm. Oritz Monasterio uses some of Dorame’s fields for trials, making for a clear demonstration to his neighbors. Dorame tells us through a translator how he has invited his neighbors to come to his fields, to literally count every stalk in a square meter and to weigh every seed head to check his yield. Their response? They don’t believe him, and they change not a thing on their own farms.
“It’s hard to change these people,” he says. “They think it is not necessary to change what they have done for twenty years.”
Jorge Castro runs his family’s farm of 250 hectares, big by the valley’s standards. An innovator, he has allied himself with a couple of neighbors to found a research organization and is experimenting with marketing his own brand of seed maize. He grows safflower, soybeans, potatoes, and, of course, durum wheat. He practices conservation tillage, which reduces runoff. He and his banker have begun thinking in terms of maximum economic yield, which is to say he will accept some decline in his yields as long as the reduced costs maximize profit. This sort of thinking and Ortiz Monasterio’s demonstrations have caused him to cut nitrogen rates from 250 to 180 kilos per hectare.
So here is a bellwether farmer, one whose practices can be counted on to provide the example that will sway neighbors. We ask Castro about this. He shakes his head for a moment and fiddles with his cell phone. The agronomist’s tool for spreading the word is to hold field days, when neighboring farmers can see for themselves the profitability of progressive practices.
“We have held many, many, many field days,” he says through a translator. “There has been no impact. This culture is deep-rooted. It is hard to change.”
Enrique Orozco Parra is not just a farmer with five hundred tilled acres under his control. He is also president of the Patronato, an organization responsible for research, innovation, and information to which every farmer in the valley belongs. A conversation in his office runs from water use to subsidies, global markets, and costs of capital.
He has a solid command of it all. And, yes, he has heard the business about reducing fertilizer use, has seen the test plots, and, yes, the 50 percent price increase has been a terrible burden on profit.
So how has he responded on his own land? No change. In fact, sometimes he lays down as much as 300 kilos of nitrogen per hectare, an amount off the global scale. In his excellent English, he tells us that nitrogen is cheap insurance.
Anecdotal, all, so after our visits, Ortiz Monasterio followed up with a survey of farmers. After five years of work, no change. The Sea of Cortez is bearing the same burden as always—in fact, as we shall see, probably more. Nor should it really surprise anyone. Expecting farmers to respond to market signals now is a bit like expecting an alcoholic to order the herbal tea at an open bar. This is the legacy of subsidy. Governments, including Mexico’s, got in the business of making nitrogen cheap, and farmers lapped it up, but it created a welfare state. Emblematic of that state is a deep-seated irrationality that ignores cause and effect. Farmers worldwide operate in an economic never-never land where governments escalate subsidies and other protectionist measures as a sort of arms race, a system that has taken on a logic of its own. No single set of market solutions will turn that system around.
It has long been argued that intensive agriculture is a sort of global sacrifice zone that, in the end, benefits biodiversity. That is, surrendering land to intensive and efficient agriculture frees surrounding lands from extensive agriculture uses like grazing, and effectively saves habitat. The researchers didn’t go into the Yaqui expecting to test that notion, but Naylor says that test is happening. The scientists from a range of disciplines who have been scrutinizing the Yaqui for these years can’t help but notice that change happens.
Monoculture is not just a problem for nature; the lack of diversity threatens farmers as well, especially when pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement plunge them into global markets, and especially when an entire valley relies on a single crop like wheat for most of its income. The farmers of the Yaqui understand this better
than anyone, so they are using that access to markets as well as capital generated by past development to diversify. Expect this to happen in the rest of the developing world as well. Is this a good thing? It can be, when, for instance, farmers diversify row crops into something like chickpeas, as many have. Because chickpeas are a legume, they fix free nitrogen from the air, reducing the need for synthetic nitrogen applications—at least on paper. In interviews, though, farmers said they regarded this as simply a shift to another crop and were not taking advantage of well-planned rotations to cut back on nitrogen applications. Nor have agronomists in the region developed such rotation systems. And Ortiz Monasterio says experiments have demonstrated that legumes actually decrease their rates of fixing free nitrogen from the atmosphere when synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is in the soil, so in the Yaqui’s environment, a potential solution fails.
More significant, however, is the valley’s growing diversification into livestock and aquaculture. The former is attractive to farmers because it provides a huge sink for surplus crops, a sort of value-added operation that turns superfluous grain into meat readily snatched up by global markets. There is a lesson here that is significant for all of the developing world. Ostensibly, the Green Revolution boosted yields to feed the poor, but as its successes leave the globe awash in cheap grain, the tendency is for that grain to go to livestock that feed the world’s rich. Further, grain-fed livestock operations act like nitrogen factories.
Miguel Olea walks us through his 6,000-sow hog farm, a typical confinement operation of the sort that has inflamed political debate in the American Midwest. The brood animals are penned in spaces no larger than their Harley Davidson—sized bodies. The hogs ingest a constant stream of feed at one end and send a constant stream of nitrogen-laden manure out the other. Because of inefficiencies in the way they process food, a typical hog will produce about triple the waste that a human will in a day, with the result that a hog farm of 6,000 sows and their young produces as much untreated sewage as a sizable city. Olea’s sows produce about 100,000 young hogs for slaughter each year, feeding a globally stratified market in which
the expensive cuts are shipped to Japan and the cheap cuts stay in Mexico.
A couple of generations ago, the phrase “living high on the hog” still had a direct meaning. In the United States, even well into the second half of the twentieth century, a few hogs were a part of every farm, providing a sort of living recycling system, especially on dairy farms. Waste milk, skim milk, waste grain, kitchen scraps, and garden leavings all went to the hogs, which dutifully converted them to protein, and then valuable manure. In the fall, the farmers butchered the hogs, and the family would recover the protein and fat. For a few days, the family would eat the expensive cuts, chops, which come from the soft muscle along the backbone, high on the hog. Later they would eat the rest.
Slowly, this system broke down as hog production industrialized, concentrating literally hundreds of thousands of hogs on a single farm. This evolution was somewhat gradual. At first, a few hogs went to a local butcher, who sold them, a few cuts at a time, to the community. Those who could afford to do so bought the more expensive cuts, living high on the hog all the time, and the less well off got the rest, a sort of hog hierarchy. My father tells of classmates in his rural Michigan community eating lard sandwiches for lunch every day during the Depression. Now, however, that stratification is global. It is easy to believe in progress when you export the lard, and the lard-sandwich eaters are conveniently out of sight, half a hemisphere away.
Out back of Olea’s massive steel barns, a simple slit of a drainage ditch carries a steady stream of manure slurry, where wading egrets look for an early cut of the nutrients. In the best case, this nitrogen-rich stream flows, as Olea’s does, to fields, in place of synthetic nitrogen. Even there it runs off in storms and after flood irrigation, to join the stream bound for the estuary. Already there are about thirty thousand sows in the district around Ciudad Obregón, 103,000 in the state of Sonora.
Along the drainage canals that parallel the valley’s straight roads heading for Tobari Bay and the Sea of Cortez there are no hogs in
sight, but everywhere there are billboards advertising bank financing for shrimp farmers. This is the more significant track of diversification, driven by a huge demand for shrimp in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Worldwide, shrimp farming has become an explosive threat to biodiversity, largely because it operates at such a high trophic level. Shrimp eat protein, fishmeal vacuumed from marine sea webs by factory trawlers. Moreover, in Southeast and South Asia, Latin America, and, increasingly, Africa, these farms are located next to estuaries, usually in mangroves, which are locally regarded as scrub land but are in fact the biological key to the productivity of tropical estuaries. The farms concentrate nutrients and disease, providing an effluent enriched not only in nitrogen but also phosphorus, antibiotics (routinely fed to the shrimp), and fungal diseases. The area of Mexico surrounding the Sea of Cortez now holds at least 26,000 hectares of shrimp ponds, which send about 3,000 tons of nitrogen to their waste streams annually. Potentially, these numbers could multiply by a factor of ten.
The term for this artificial feeding of confined fish to produce food is “aquaculture,” but do not imagine that we have left our subject and gone to sea. Aquaculture is an extension of agriculture, an attempt to shoehorn the marine world into the system of farming. It represents yet another dramatic and largely unnoticed trespass of agriculture beyond the limits of arable land.
Human reliance on fish protein predates farming. As we have seen, fishing played a key role in allowing the sedentism ten thousand years ago that led to the domestication of plants. Aquaculture itself is ancient, especially in Asia, where carp have been farmed for millennia; the book Fish Culture Classics was in its first printing in 460 B.C. By and large, though, most of the fish people have eaten have been wild, and today’s fishermen are our best remaining example of hunter-gatherers. At least hypothetically, fishing is sustainable, in that it relies on intact ecosystems to produce a surplus of fish, a harvest that can go on forever. Of course, it hasn’t. The world’s oceans have been exploited as heavily as the rest of the planet, especially as the technological means for doing so have increased. Today’s fishermen rely on multimillion-dollar vessels, computers, satellite-assisted
geographic positioning systems, radar, and sonar to find fish. Thanks to these methods and population pressure, fish stocks are in peril worldwide.
Fish farming advocates argue that farmed fish take the pressure off wild species. In fact, farming has filled a void. Between 1986 and 1996, the amount of fish produced by farming more than doubled, with the growth concentrated in two species, salmon and shrimp. Well over half the salmon eaten worldwide comes from farmed fish.
Has this helped wild salmon, a species clearly on the ropes in much of its habitat range? Both salmon and shrimp are carnivores, that is, protein eaters. Further, they are evolved to eat only fish protein. In a paper in the journal Nature, Naylor, along with a team of biologists, concluded that each kilo of salmon raised by aquaculture requires 3.16 kilos of wild fish for meal and oil. A kilo of shrimp requires 2.81 kilos. As with hogs, there is an issue of equity here. Fish farmers argue that they are laboring to feed a hungry world, but overwhelmingly, farmed fish and shrimp go to wealthy tables in Europe, Japan, and the United States. Increasingly, living high on the hog means living high on the food chain.
The protein that supports this practice comes from what are called “trash” fish, such as sardines and herring, as well as fish waste. Many of these species, however, are not trash at all, but a key link in the ocean’s food chain and an important part of local fisheries and diets in the developing world. Left to their own devices, wild fish (especially salmon) eat the fish that factory trawlers are now scooping up and grinding into fish meal to feed to farmed fish. Absent the trawlers, local fishers in skiffs or pirogues would catch a few anchovies to feed local protein-starved communities. Instead, this protein is sucked up, reduced by a factor of three, and shipped to Red Lobsters across suburban America. The three pounds of protein that raise a pound of salmon for rich tables come from the protein budget /of the poor.
A walk through a thousand-hectare shrimp farm, one of several now winding around the valley’s border with the sea, reveals a flat landscape completely stripped of vegetation and diced into ten-hectare “tanks,” which are simply rectangular ponds held in by bulldozed
berms. Each hectare will produce more than two tons of shrimp. An intake canal pulls salt water from the sea, two kilometers away. Eight 250-horsepower diesel pumps suck salt water to the ponds. A discharge canal sends effluent back at the same rate.
The managers of this operation, a cooperative that includes eleven local ejidos, make a point of telling us they have carefully situated the farm inside the ring of mangroves. This is true, but as we walk along the outlet canal—flush with juvenile heron, egrets, kingfishers, and pelicans—we also notice that the canal cuts straight across a tidepool, effectively damming tidal flows from a mangrove area easily the size of the shrimp farm. Along this stretch, the mangrove’s trees are dead. The canal discharges straight into a mudflat that is shiny with algal slime at low tide. We can hear a cacophony raised by shorebirds and migratory waterfowl that depend on this key section of the Pacific flyway, but in the distance. The canal has washed old tires downstream with the rest, and they stand upended in the mudflats, planted like tombstones.
Paredoncito is a fishing village just coming awake on a sunny morning in January. Kids head toward school while women sweep the dirt streets and chickens scratch and peck. We stop and speak with Bernal Guadalupe, a fisherman in this village since 1970. He catches the estuary’s native shrimp, crab, and fish and sells them, on a good day, for enough to buy a day’s worth of gas for his boat and food for his house. A year before our visit, Paredoncito fomented a significant event, and Guadalupe wants to show us the scene, so he climbs into our beat-up Suburban and we bounce the back roads for a couple of kilometers to a broad, flat stretch of bermed shrimp ponds. This was to be a shrimp farm, but it lies dry and abandoned. Guadalupe and his wife, Marialena Garcia, take us to the discharge canal to show us why. They describe the day when all the people in the village and several neighboring fishing villages marched to the canal and filled it in, digging with shovels and their hands.
He tells us the villagers had heard that the shrimp farm would
harm the native fishery. He’s right; shrimp farming kills wild shrimp. So they stopped the farm. Such matters are taken seriously in the Yaqui, where there has already been one murder stemming from confrontations between fishers and shrimp farmers. The protest brought police. Then Mexico’s Secretary of State came. The villages had tried to stop the farm through more formal action, but that had failed to get the government’s attention. The dig-in did, though, and the government pulled the farm’s permit.
If we return to what it was that Henry A. Wallace intended, what the Rockefeller Foundation and the Green Revolutionaries intended for the Yaqui Valley, it would have been something like progress. Progress—a belief that we can make things better, that as time passes we and our technology improve lives—is an article of faith that organizes American society. Set this against a conversation we have at Paredoncito with one of the ejidatarios, a fisherman. We ask him how he makes ends meet now that fishing is bad, and he says he gets work now and again on a neighboring commercial farm, only he does not refer to his employer, a rich man, as a farmer. He tells us he works for the patron, a politically charged term if ever there was one. It is a term of feudalism, a way of life the Mexican Revolution was supposed to erase almost a century ago.
I have come to think of agriculture not as farming, but as a dangerous and consuming beast of a social system. I think of an insect I once heard about that plagued a particular crop, chickpeas, until evolution finally taught the plant to secrete a protein that killed the pest. Then the bug evolved to convert that same lethal protein to its own use.
Progressives like Henry Wallace and Norman Borlaug went to work to help poor people. Wallace’s hybrid corn did indeed do that for a time, making life better for a generation of farm folks. But in the end, it only enlarged the pile of surplus grain, which the system evolved to digest for its own purposes. The patrones of the world, the men made increasingly wealthy as the lot of small farmers has deteriorated,
are testimony to the power of that system to sap progressive energy. Sixty years after it started, the foundations are still in the business of promoting agriculture as a cure for poverty.
People can and do thrive without cereal, or grains of any sort. Personally, I try to, although it’s difficult to steer clear of its ubiquity. When I am in complete control of my diet, not traveling, choosing and cooking all of my own food, I get my carbohydrates from fruits and vegetables. The less cereal I eat, the better I feel, a reflection of my body’s genetic legacy set during a couple of million formative years as a hunter-gatherer. Yet we as humans passed that point ten thousand years ago. There can be no doubt that a certain amount of cereal does have value—staff of life and so on. The pertinent question is not whether cereal has value, but, as an economist would put it: What is the value of more cereal? I offer the persistent need for farm subsidies worldwide (overwhelmingly for corn and wheat) as the market’s expression of the value of more cereal. We can argue about foreign competition and preserving family farms from farm bill to farm bill, but the very existence of the subsidy means the market values that extra bushel of corn at less than what it costs to produce it. The endurance of those subsidies, year after year, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike, is the prima facie evidence that farming has evolved its own inertia, independent of human needs. The piles of surplus grain amid the poverty of the Punjab make the same case. Humanity’s role is not to shape agriculture to its needs; rather, it is humanity’s job to figure out how to pay for and dispose of all of that grain agriculture chooses to grow.
We live in an era of hyper-agriculture, and, as one would expect, the result is an exacerbation of agriculture’s effects, especially a widening of caste, the gap between wealth and poverty. The gap exists within every agricultural society, but increasingly it has taken on a geographical overlay. In this sense, we translate the terms “rich” and “poor” into “developed” and “undeveloped” or “underdeveloped” or “developing” countries. Simply put, in the developed world, people derive about 31 percent of their calories directly from rice, maize, and wheat. In the developing world, that total is 56 percent (again directly): 18 percent from wheat, 27 percent from rice, 7 percent
from maize, and 4 percent from other cereals. Yet even this equation masks the great divide, because the developing countries all have significant populations of wealthy people, and the wealthy don’t eat grain gruels; meaning these percentages are concentrated on the poor. About half of humanity, three billion people, live on less than two dollars a day. Close to half of these, one-fifth of humanity, live in absolute poverty, on less than a dollar a day. Most of these poorest : people are simply undernourished; that is, they don’t have enough food. Most of the larger group, half of all people, are malnourished, in that they, like American livestock, eat mostly grain (which contains little protein, little fat, and few vitamins and minerals) washed down with filthy water. This is how grain agriculture invades bodies, just as it invaded streams.