1The Intelligent Citizen’s Guide to His World: Food Grain

Paleoanthropologists often portray our distant ancestors as meat-eaters who made their way in the world as hunters, but as our information on the ways of life of early man has become more balanced, partly through the study of the refuse they left behind and partly by having learned more about the few remaining primitive societies, we have come increasingly to see that roots, fruits, nuts, seeds and vegetables played a more consistent and more supportive role than meat. People may not have lived by bread alone, but they certainly could not have survived by meat alone; man may have been a hunter, but women dug up, picked or gathered most of what he ate.

Among the edible findings would have been the seed of wild grasses. The ones we know most about were found along the ring of Middle Eastern hills known as “Fertile Crescent.” There, about 10,000 years ago, probably accidentally, some of the seed was spilled where the ground happened to be moist. As “volunteers” spouted near where little bands of hunter-gatherers camped, seed was obvi-ously easier to gather than far away. So, after many trials and errors, accidents and experiments, more seed was allowed to spill. The next step was to select the seed that grew the best. Then, instead of just spilling the seed, the smarter of our ancestors began to poke holes in the earth with pointed sticks to give the seed a better chance to germinate. Some time, or more accurately many times, around 6000 B.C., we can say that what has been called “the agricultural revolution” began.

From that start a series of steps continued. The next step was to keep the seedlings moist. Prob-ably this required no great imagination at first since everyone would have had to live near some source of water, a river, a spring or a lake. But, it was not always possible just to drop seed adjacent to a water source so the early farmers began to bring the water to the seed. Men in southern Mesopotamia (Iraq) began to trap in ponds some of the water that flooded down the great rivers and then to dig shallow ditches to spread it on nearby land. That was the first time we learn of any language having a word for “furrow.” The physical record of how this began is, of course, lost, but already about 5,000 or more years ago, furrows began to be dug on a scale that have left traces on the ground that are still visible, as Robert McCormick Adams has shown (The Uruk Countryside) on aerial photographs. That relatively sophisticated – that is, irrigated -- agriculture produced much more grain than could be gathered from wild grasses or grown by poking holes in the temporarily moist earth. This was the origin of the first large-scale collections of people and animals, cities.

Food grain was the cause and the salvation of the city. And like grass seed, cities sprouted along

the water ways. Some grew prodigiously: By 4,500 years ago, the city of Uruk reached a population of

Food GrainCh a p t e r 9

2The Intelligent Citizen’s Guide to His World: Food Grain

about 50,000 people. Through control of food grain, governments and religious establishments grew

beyond narrow kinship ties; it is then that we hear of the first kings who were known as “Big Men.”

Kings lived privileged lives, but, when they were unable to ensure adequate supplies of food grain, their

rule was often challenged. Revolutions overthrew them or populations fled. As society after society

learned, often violently, in the following centuries, an adequate supply of food grain was the necessary

basis of society and the justification for government. It also was the stimulus to colonization.

Colonization grew out of hunger. Among the first colonists, the Greek city-states routinely ex-

pelled their “surplus” population when they ran short of food grain. Little groups of refugees ranged

across the then known world so that the great Greek traveler Herodotus could always depend on Greek

colonists to guide him into the lore of Egyptians, Persians, Scythians and Indians. Skipping down the

centuries to Rome, we hear that governments had learned that domestic peace rested on “bread and

circuses” (panem et circenses). To get the wheat to make bread was one of the main causes of the Roman

thrust toward empire – Egypt, Cyrenaica, the Levant and the Black Sea became Rome’s granaries. As

Rome lost them and ceased to produce enough itself, it was doomed.

Over the centuries, many societies have failed to balance their need for food grains with their

population; famines are one of the recurring tragedies of history. In the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, terrible periods of starvation have decimated populations in Ireland (“the great hunger”),

India (the starvation of over three million Bengalis during the Second World War), Russia (in 1921

and 1932, perhaps 20 million died) and China (where perhaps 50 million people starved between

1958 and 1962). As we see today in Somalia, starvation is still a major threat despite the creation of

international, state and private relief agencies. Food grain is still at the very foundation of human life

– and organized society.

Percentage of populations affected by “under-nutrition” by country, according to UN statistics; image surce: Wikipedia

3The Intelligent Citizen’s Guide to His World: Food Grain

Today, the rapid rise in population – up from roughly 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion when I was

born to 7 billion today – raises the specter of what has been termed “food insecurity.” This can be

defined simply. In many Asian and African countries, nearly half of the children below the age of five

are malnourished and so are “stunted,” susceptible to disease, unproductive and prone to early death.

Perhaps as many as 1 billion people world-wide suffer hunger. And, as Ecologist Lester Brown has

memorably written (World on the Edge), “Tonight, there will be 219,000 people at the dinner table

who were not there last night, many of them with empty plates.”

Percentages of hungry people by areas

(2011 World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics, based on UN Food and Agricul-

ture Organization statistics), but this may

understate the total number.

Yet, societies – considered globally –

now produce enough food for all living

people. As the World Hunger Education

Service reported (based on UNFAO,

statistics), “World agriculture produces 17

percent more calories per person today

than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 per-

cent population increase.” As the FAO

estimated in 1996, this is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,700 calories/day.”

That is several hundred more than most adults are thought to need (about 2,100 calories/day. Like

many statistics, however, this is an average that does not accord to reality. Some people consume a

great deal – Americans, for example, consume an average of 3,830 calories/day – while hundreds of

millions live on the brink of starvation.

But the statistics do tell us an important fact: since, on average, there is enough food for everyone,

the problem – at least for now – is not production but distribution. So observed the Nobel Laureate

Economist Amartya Sen in Poverty and Famines. The inescapable fact is that about one in each seven

people alive today simply cannot afford to buy or cannot himself raise enough food to live a secure and

healthy life. This, of course, particularly affects children. Well over a billion people now live on the

equivalent of between $1 and $1.25 a day. The FAO has estimated that 8 in 10 malnourished children

in the third world live in countries that produce food surpluses. They simply cannot get it.

Mal-distribution also affects, in the opposite way, many of the world’s relatively well-off: As Erick

Assadourian and Eddie Kasner wrote in The Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2010, “about 1.6

billion people are either over-weight or obese.” The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) referred

4The Intelligent Citizen’s Guide to His World: Food Grain

to obesity as an American epidemic, reporting that in 2010 in 12 states about 1 person in 3 was obese,

as shown in the following map.

Obesity has obvious consequences for health and span of life. A study of long-lived societies by

John Robbins (Healthy at 100), found that they kept their consumption down to about 1,800 calories/

day, ate primarily food grain and consumed very little meat. While eating meat does not necessarily

cause obesity, it contributes if it takes the form of fatty cheeseburgers, a favorite in America. In the

year 2007, global consumption of meat reached 275 million tons or as much as 42 kilograms (92.4

pounds) per person a year. As people become more wealthy, they “move up the food chain.” That is,

they consume more meat. Nutritionist Anthony McMichael said (The Lancet, September 12, 2007)

need no more than 90 grams (3.17 ounces)/day of which only about half should come from red meat

whereas people in the richer countries consume twice or nearly three times that amount.

Heavy consumption of meat has more than individual health consequences. According to a study

by David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agricultural science at Cornell University, production

of a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of beef requires 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of hay and 4 kilograms (10

pounds) of grain. So a yearling steer would have consumed about 2,000 kilograms (roughly 4,500

pounds) of grain.

Beef is the most inefficient food produced, requiring an energy input of 54 units to 1 unit of output

whereas chickens require only 4 units of input to 1 of output. Fish farming is roughly equivalent to

chicken farming. Inefficient or not, the demand for meat is great so that more than 50% of the food

5The Intelligent Citizen’s Guide to His World: Food Grain

grains grown in America (and about 40% of those grown worldwide) are fed to animals. Cornell University Science News estimated in 1997 that 800 million people could be fed with the grain

consumed just by American animals. Overall, directly (as bread) or indirectly (as grain-fed beef ),

Americans consume roughly 1,600 pounds (727 kilograms) of grain per capita yearly,

Production of grain, of course, requires water. Arjen Hoekstra, quoted by John Parker ((“The 9 billion-people question,” The Economist, February 26, 2011)) shows that to produce a kilogram of wheat requires between 1,150 and 2,000 liters (300-520 gallons) of water but to produce a kilogram of beer takes between 8 and 15 times as much water. to also points out that to produce the fodder for just 1 kilogram of beef would require 100,000 liters, 26,000 gallons, of water while chickens require only 3,500 liters (910 gallons). In fact, roughly 70% of the water used in America is to produce grain.

If, as most students believe, we now have enough grain, even if it is so badly distributed as to cause massive hunger and occasional famines, what does the future hold for production?

Consider these factors: weather, water availability, land and cost. First is the issue of weather.

Climate is obviously crucial. As Ecologist Lester Brown has written (World on the Edge, also see, “The Food Issue,” Foreign Policy, May-June 2011) , ”Crop ecologists use a rule of thumb that for each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum during the growing season, we can expect a 10-percent decline in yield of grain…At 104 degrees [40ºC], photosynthesis ceases entirely… Accord-ing to scientists in the Philippines where rice production has been intensively studied, the pollination of rice falls from 100 percent at 93 degrees Fahrenheit [34 ºC] to nearly zero at 104 degrees Fahrenheit [40 ºC], leading to crop failure.” During the European heat wave of 2003, according to David Archer & Stefan Rahmstorf (The Climate Crisis), “The productivity of plants (‘gross primary production’) in Europe dropped by 30%…”

Hundreds of measurements throughout the world show that the climate is changing and that the atmosphere, the earth and the sea are getting warmer. In the world’s largest producer of cereals, China, the average temperature rose 0.5-0.8ºC (0.9-1.4 ºF) during the twentieth century. Computer models indicate that northern areas will benefit in the short term from a rise in temperatures, as the growing season will lengthen; but over the long run, they too will suffer. Production will “start to fall once temperatures reach 3 or 4ºC,” according to the report by Lord Stern (The Economics of Climate Change) and “by 4ºC [7ºF] rise, entire regions may be too hot and dry to grow crops.” (See essay #1 Climate Change.) Already the effects of climate change, with severe droughts and destructive floods (See essays # 5 and #6 on Droughts and Floods), are evident in increasingly frequent crop disasters like

what happened in China in 2011.

In 2009, China produced almost twice as much wheat as the United States or Russia and more

than five times as much as Australia as well as roughly a fifth of the world’s corn (maize). But, in the

6The Intelligent Citizen’s Guide to His World: Food Grain

spring of 2011, according to Keith Bradsher (New York Times, February 8, 2011), the Chinese govern-

ment advised that “Shandong Province, the cornerstone of Chinese grain production, was bracing for

its worst drought in 200 years” and the FAO found that 5.16 million hectares (12.75 million acres) of

China’s 14 million hectares (34.6 million acres) of wheat fields had been affected by drought…”

Of critical importance is access to water. As I have indicated above, it was access to water that car-

ried the Agricultural Revolution forward. (See essays #12-15 on water.) In brief, we get water from

the giant distillery run by the Sun. Some of this water falls as rain. Most of that makes its way down

rivers into the sea where it is recycled. Some penetrates the earth to form aquifers. Some is trapped in

lakes (either man-made or natural), swamps or wetlands and some is stored in glaciers. As demand for

increased cereals has grown, so has the drawdown of water from all these sources. The most obvious

and least controlled is drawing water from aquifers.

Deep aquifers contain “fossil” water that was laid down in “geological” ages and like oil can be de-

pleted. Saudi Arabia has now effectively done that. Drawing water by deep wells to run center-pivot

irrigation equipment, it had a burst of food grain production, but as Andrew England reported in The Financial Times three year ago, it saw the end coming and decided to phase out the growth of wheat by

2016. So, in just about 30 years, the country went from total reliance on imports to self-sufficiency to

total reliance on imports. (On the American Great Plaines’ fossil aquifer, see essay #15.)

Shallow aquifers can be replenished by rain seeping into the earth, but they can be pumped faster

than they can be replenished. As this happens, the water table falls and, as wells go dry, deeper and

deeper wells must be dug. What has happened in many areas is that the traditional means of draw-

ing water by animal or human labor has been replaced by mechanical pumps. Since such pumps are

relatively cheap and very efficient, millions of people all over the world are using them. According to

a 2005 World Bank study (India’s Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future), 175 million Indians

are raising food grain by pumping more than their aquifers can replenish. Another World Bank study

(China: Agenda for Water Sector Strategy), showed that 130 million Chinese are similarly drawing down

their water future. As The New Scientist reported, already 7 years ago in August 28, 2004, “Asian

farmers are sucking the continent dry.” Indeed, 14 years ago in 1998, participants in the Stockholm

Water Symposium were warned that “the world is on the verge of a water crisis as people fight over

ever dwindling supplies.” (See essay #11 on water-related conflicts).

Erosion, caused by pushing agriculture into marginal lands (as in Kazakhstan, Mongolia and many

parts of Africa) and cutting trees (Brazil and America), allowing excessive animal populations (China

and sub-Saharan Africa) – to name only a few of the dangers – is removing the top soil on which plant

life thrives and is also filling with silt the reservoirs built at vast expense along rivers. (See essay #4 on

Dust Storms.) All of these effects stem ultimately from the quest for more land. The quest is on-going:

as Dickson Despommier, wrote in Scientific American (November 2009), to provide the additional

7The Intelligent Citizen’s Guide to His World: Food Grain

food [by current methods] as population grows from 6.8 billion to 9.5 billion will require another

2.1 billion acres ( nearly 1 billion hectares) – an area the size of Brazil. “That much new, arable earth

simply does not exist.”

Considering all the restraints on land use, the world has little additional suitable land: today,

agriculture occupies about 40% of the available land area which is worked by nearly 1 person in 4.

As drought, flood, temperature rise and erosion affect large areas, the price of food grains has

dramatically risen. In the decade beginning in 2002 but before the crisis of 2010 – world wholesale

food prices rose about 65%. Even a slight change in wholesale prices translate into retail prices that

are pushing large numbers of already poor people across the line into hunger. According to the FAO,

the droughts, heat waves and floods of 2010-2011 have driven the price to an all time record of 238

points – a 40% rise in just one year. Not surprisingly, there have been food riots reported in a dozen

countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia with many more societies on the brink of desperation. The

journal Business Day (July 12, 2011) commented that in addition to “the spike in food prices in 2008

[that] pushed 100 million people into poverty…the 2011 hike had pushed another 44 million close

to starvation.”

The following FAO chart shows how food prices have been dramatically (and dangerously)

affected in recent years after a decade of relative stability.

8The Intelligent Citizen’s Guide to His World: Food Grain

In the desperate quest for higher production of food grain, technology has proved a double edged

sword: the old system of crop rotation of multiple species of food grains that had adapted themselves

to local conditions has been largely replaced by vast tracks of single crops grown from genetically uni-

form seed. As The Irish Seed Saver Association commented, half a dozen large companies control the

bulk of the $30 billion annual seed business world wide. The objective of genetically modified seed is

solely to maximize yield. High yield was the thrust of “miracle” wheat. Since the seed is not adjusted

to local conditions, it requires massive amounts of water, fertilizers and pesticides. “The result has

been a tremendous loss of biodiversity.” The FAO reports that “75% of crop varieties have disappeared

since 1900. Nine-tenths of the world’s calories now come from 20 crop species, with four making up

half the total calories: rice, corn, wheat, and potatoes.” This creates a danger of crop failure and disease

on the one hand and on the other creates an absolute dependence of farmers on the suppliers since seed

cannot be saved to be planted again as in the past.

The demand for food grain and the failure of local production has also promoted what can only

be considered a new form of colonialism. Driven by the urgency of domestic demand, a number of

governments and some major corporations are buying or leasing for the long term both lands and wa-

ter rights in other countries, some of which are already severely “food stressed.” This has already led to

violent reactions by disposed natives. (See essay #16 Land and the New Colonialism.)

Since more land is either not available locally or can be acquired elsewhere only by severe disloca-

tions of native populations with harmful environment impacts and angers that foment insurgency,

guerrilla wars or even international wars, the eminent science journal Nature editorialized (July 29,

2010) that what the world needs is a “second green revolution – an approach that Britain’s Royal So-

ciety defined as the ‘sustainable intensification of global agriculture.’”

Can we do it? In the attempt, as Nature’s editors pointed out, “not just biologists, agronomists

and farmers, but also ecologists, policy-makers and social scientists” must all contribute. The skills are

available. As John Parker wrote (“The 9 billion-people question, The Economist, February 26, 2011)

there are three kinds of agriculture: “African style,” without fertilizer or pesticides, which produces just

1-2 tonnes/hectare; “Green Revolution” style which can produce 4-5 tonnes/hectare; and what he calls

“modern” which is capable of producing as much as 10 tonnes/hectare. Parker continued, “feeding

the world in 2050 will be hard, and business as usual will not do it…Yields in mankind’s two most

important crops [wheat and rice] are now almost flat…The green revolution may have run its course…

Simply using more of everything to produce more food will not work.” We must go to new techniques

and new practices.

But, as Parker might also reasonably have added, intensifying production is almost certain to prove

easier – no matter how difficult or expensive a task that may be – than changing the habits and systems

of distribution among the world’s relatively affluent peoples, the major consumers.

9The Intelligent Citizen’s Guide to His World: Food Grain

However that challenge is answered, what is clear is that food grain production is still today what

it has always been: the foundation of a stable and peaceful world. We can see this graphically on the

face of a sixth century B.C. silver coin from Lucania in southern Italy showing a stalk of wheat. Even

then, wheat was the symbol and the basis of the economy of the Lucanians, a Samnite people who

were one Rome’s early victims. The Romans destroyed the Lucanians but wheat, as they already had

begun to understand, continued to dominate Rome until lack of it also destroyed the Roman empire.