The other side of agriculture

by Daya Dissanayake

“The worst mistake in the history of the human race”, was the title given by Prof. Jared Diamond, UCLA School of Medicine, for his paper, in the Discover, May 1987.

Diamond gives three sets of reasons that agriculture was bad for health. Instead of the varied diet of the gatherer, the farmer had to limit himself to the few plants he cultivated, limiting the nutrition that was available.

Today our diet is almost totally rice, wheat and corn, each one of which is deficient in some minerals, vitamins and amino acids.

Agriculture forced people to live together in large groups, and when they believed they had food a plenty, and did not have to move from place to place, the women produced more children, and population increased faster than they could grow the food needed.

Human population would have begun to increase only after the development of agriculture.

When the crop failed, it led to famine and mass starvation. When man was just gathering his food, he lived as a very small family unit or very small group and they could easily move to another location where there was food available.

He could not do that when he settled down in one place, built permanent shelters and accumulated material wealth which they could not lug around if they had to move.

Choice

Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh believes that gatherers began farming only when they had to, and not out of choice “and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity”.It is agriculture which created ‘agrivultures’, who fed on the blood and sweat of the poor people.

Agriculture is really the ‘grapes of wrath’ man has to suffer because man raised nature's wrath by all the devastation he caused.

Gathering food did not harm nature or any other living creature, because man too, like all animals, would have plucked or dug up only enough to appease his hunger. Planting crops for his food, resulted in disturbing nature, by clearing up the natural vegetation, by chasing away other creatures, by disturbing their habitat, depriving other creatures of their source of food.

To plant, man had to lay claim to the land, and the plants and the harvest. The more cunning and the more greedy would acquire more land, and plant more crops. They began to hoard their harvest, leading to more greed, and acquiring more power over those who had less land. This inevitably led to the acquisition of the smaller plots of land by the big landowners. In the end there were a few landowners and all the rest of mankind became their slaves. The landowners lived in luxury, while the others died of starvation. It continues to this day, with millions of people living below starvation levels even in countries where ‘surplus’ food stocks deteriorated or were destroyed.

Myth

There is also a myth that it was agriculture which allowed man enough idle time to create works of art and invent new technology. It was only after agriculture evolved, that man lost all his free time, because he had to slave non-stop for the landowners, for the non-productive elite. Before that man had more than enough free time, when he had filled his stomach, he had all the time in the world and he was his own master.

When the harvest was too big to be handled by the landowners, the intermediate traders evolved. They purchased the crop and marketed it and then gradually the traders began to control agriculture.

They would decide the crop for each region, each season, and would demand from landowners what they wanted. This led to vast monocultures, vast tracts of land with only one variety of plant on it.

Consumers were at the mercy of the traders. In the same manner they dictate terms to the farmers, they dictate terms to all mankind, as they decide what we should eat.

Since we do not have the freedom of going out into a virgin forest and plucking what we would like to eat, we have to go to the market and purchase what is available, whether we like it or not. When the food items thus offered do not give us the essential nutrients needed by our body, it is once again an opportunity for the trader to get supplementary food products manufactured and marketed, for which we have to spend more than for the unhealthy food we are forced to consume.

Invasive plants

In the monocultures, any other plant growing on it would be considered an invasive plant, a weed. Any creature which enters the plantation would be a pest.

A new expolitative business evolved, manufacturing weedicides and pesticides which poisons and kills not only the ‘invasive’ plants and animals, but also the rest of the world.

Man does not, or refuse to realise, that in his monoculture plantations, man himself is the invader, and not the other plants and animals. We use the correct term for the pathetic situation of our elephants, when we term it ‘human-elephant conflict’, because the conflict is created by man, in chasing away the elephants from his habitat, which we have invaded, occupied and then we blame the elephant for encroaching ‘our agricultural land'.

The latest Weapons of Mass Destruction in the name of agriculture are created by the new technology of Genetic Modification (GM). We are already absorbing into our bodies and introducing into the bodies of our children, all the poisons, that are used by farmers in the name of fertiliser, hormonal applications, and agrochemicals. We grow genetically modified plants, breed such animals, and it would take a few generations to begin suffering from whatever effects such modifications have on our children, and on the rest of the planet.

The GM plants would affect the other natural varieties, perhaps cross breed and spread around the natural vegetation.

The GM animals could produce monsters, to join human monsters which could evolve if scientists begin to use GM technology on human beings. One mistake done by man in developing agriculture results in making more and more mistakes till man would someday destroy himself and the rest of Mother Earth.

However, Diamond starts his paper on the wrong foot, perhaps, by saying that early man supported himself by hunting and gathering, and next that people began to domesticate plants and animals. It could also have been possible that early man lived on fruits, nuts and roots and a few tender leaves.

It is also possible that nature domesticated the human race, by inducing him to live close to their sources of food.

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