Man's Greatest Mistake

I never thought one of the random conclusions I make when I am thinking to myself could actually be (sort-of) supported by a renowned academic. You see, normally I read, and what the brainy people say kind of influences me, so this coincidence really kind of struck me. So what was that controversial conclusion? Here it is: Agriculture is the root of all evils and problems that humans are facing (well one of the roots, at least).

I should elaborate. Agriculture is considered to be essential to our lives. It provides us with our nutritional requirements. It allows civilizations to feed millions of hungry mouths. It’s become so deeply rooted in our mindsets that when we find resource problems, more often than not, we ask if agriculture can help (think biofuels from palm and other rubbish along those lines). Heck, some even wish money grew on trees! Looking at that, agriculture should be good right? WRONG! It’s not! In fact, it’s evil, and mankind is so hopelessly stuck in this situation, we can’t hope to get out of it for the next 20 generations, or we destroy ourselves because Mother Earth decides to purge humankind, whichever comes first.

Putting all your eggs in one basket

The history of “civilized” mankind has been marked by numerous famines due to crop failures. Agriculture is one of the great examples of putting all your eggs in one basket. Sure, you can plant corn and potatoes and whatever plant that can be grown, but when the drought comes, it’s placing like your basket of eggs (maybe different types of eggs signifying different crop types) with a weasel – they’d all be gone. Then what happens? Famine, death and disease. With the current severe winter going on in China, Japan and Europe, we might see this repeat itself all over again. Of course, the problem can be alleviated a little by having stores and stockpiles, but it doesn’t really solve the problem, does it?

Agriculture resulted in the flourishing of human cultures, or does it?

The advent of agriculture has been deemed to be one the events in the history of man that allowed cultures to develop, because supposedly, it allows people time to think, where the “savage” hunter-gatherers would be running around the whole day trying to find food. I believe that is widely off the mark. The Inuit are still hunter-gatherers, so too the Kalahari bushmen. Dare we say they do not have a culture? Or that we have a superior culture? With regards to time, the bushmen spend a maximum of 19 hours a week gathering food only. Compare that with the farmers, especially here in Asia, where it is considered a virtue to be in the fields from daybreak to sunset (hardworking or just plain inefficient?). The amount of leisure time is a no-go argument right from the beginning. Hunter-gatherers had even more free time than the farmers.

Health

Another argument put forth by many is that agriculture allowed the improvement of nutrition for humans. However, by now, we all know that most of agriculture is skewed towards carbohydrate-rich crops like potato, rice, wheat, etc., and certain meat and milk producing livestock, e.g. cattle, sheep, goat. Modern diets are lacking in variety. These in turn limit the nutritional values of our diet. In Asia, people cannot do without rice (not me though) but rice itself, besides being a carbohydrate source, really has much of little else. Including things like Vitamin A, which was found to be lacking in the rural poor (farmers) in India, and there had to be a Golden Rice Project to try and fix the problem (see, agriculture again). In fact, paleontologists have found that rather than indicators proving good health, like longer life and bigger build, early farmers had a smaller build and appeared to live shorter and were disease-riddled. The phenomenon of size has still not recovered, as modern Mediterranean populations, like the Greeks, Turks, and Italians, are still considerably smaller sized that their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Agriculture also meant that populations have had to be clustered where resources are, in order to have access to them. The increase in population and livestock densities thus results in the easy spread of disease, like tuberculosis, (bird) flu, etc. (By the way, I believe that bird flu is firmly the fault of farming, and not fault should be put upon migratory birds.) The clustering and the emphasis on storage of food and resources also resulted in another evil.

War

As agriculture gained importance, so did the necessity of fertile, arable land. The lack of such land will bring down any agricultural city state, and in order to get more land, a population cluster would have to expand, until they meet another population cluster, and tensions would rise. More often than not, the overwhelming desire for more land would result in the invasion and annexation of the lands of other populations. It is the same with any resource that is land-locked. Like oil. This doesn’t happen often with hunter-gatherer communities, as they are often nomadic tribes. The less physical people resorted to economics, but as the Chinese say, trade-zones are no different from war-zones.

Overpopulation

Well as many of us attest, the world is overpopulated. This is a result of agriculture too. Instead of a large forest with good food scattered through the area, we have now grown a lot of not-so-good food in a smaller plot of land, and exchanged quality for quantity. Nonetheless, it means that people are now able to feed more mouths, and so they they reproduce at an increasing rate. The limitations on quantity of food have been shown to limit the population growth rate in hunter-gatherer populations to a new child every 4 years, versus one every 2 years, in agricultural societies. This is because hunter-gatherer mothers had to raise a child until he or she is old and strong enough to keep up with the adults, something which is not necessary in a farming community where the family or population is much less mobile.

Class Divisions

Hunter-gatherers do not have stores of food. Essentially, they ate what they had gathered or hunted, and so there was no concentration, or “wealth”. Where there is a concentration of resources attached to individuals, then there are bound to be social “parasites”, like kings, and governments, which tax people, because there is a gain in doing so. You can’t tax people when they have nothing to tax from, and even harder when because you can’t bully similarly strong people as you into listening. On the other hand, in farming communities, it becomes possible for a small group of healthier elites to rule over the weaker masses, basically by bullying them into submission. Nevertheless, one hundred weak, hungry people can still overpower one healthy person, and so, social upheavals are commonplace in such societies (Also because everyone wants to sit and get fat while doing nothing).

The paper that I just saw that was similar was written in 1987 by UCLA academic, Professor Jared Diamond. The essay, “The Worst History in the History of the Human Race” (Discover – May 1987, pp. 64-66) is available online and you can get it just by googling around. He has just about the same points but he had a different order of thought, and he also mentioned sexual discrimination against women, which is an interesting point.

Agriculture is now probably an irreversible part of our lives. We cannot do without it anymore, at least in the next 20 generations. It has contributed in some good sense (we still get food after all), but is part of the problem as well. The over-reliance on agriculture has resulted in the over-reliance on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and economics. We humans have basically screwed ourselves. However, we are the only species that have the ability to reflect, come up with solutions, and convince ourselves to endure certain pains in lifestyle changes (although we haven’t evolve to WANT to use that ability), and our species might still get away with it. We need to reduce our population that is for sure, as there are too many mouths to feed, even with agriculture. What would the future be like? Stay tuned, and find out, 20 generations from now.