Starving for Science

The founder of the Earth Policy Institute avows “We are in the midst of the most severe food crisis in the world’s history.” This news might not fire the imagination like pictures of a president bowing to a nominal emperor, but it holds painful significance for the two hundred-odd million in China who live on less than a dollar a day. It’s also a lesson in how science is man’s best friend when used to fill his belly, and his insidious enemy when turned to quixotic ends, such as biofuel and Great Leaps Forward.

Common sense and Robert Ziegler of the International Rice Research Institute tell us that spikes in rice prices can be attributed to converting more and more arable land to raising biofuel crops, as well as the effect of unchecked urbanization on land and water resources.Rice is simply following the inflationary spiral of other staple crops like wheat and corn, whose scarcity is already causing under-reported food riots in places as far-flung as Pakistan and Mexico.

Be slow to dismiss famine as a possible consequence of our collective shortsightedness. Science is far from infallible, in that its application is frequently subordinate to political maneuvering. At its worst, socio-politicaly bred famines can lead to the kind of scenes witnessed by E.H. Cressy, who visited Sun Yat Sen’s troubled China in 1912, and reported on widespread famine to the New York Times:

“The man of means sells first his cow, the water buffalo that plows his fields, then his farm utensils, and finally his household goods. One by one all are ‘eaten up.’ Finally the doors and windows are taken from the mud-brick hut and carried to the market, and at last the few timbers that support the roof go to nourish the family and nothing remains but for the man to sell, first his daughters, and then his wife, even then facing at last beggary, starvation, and death. Children are sold into slavery or degradation in these times of stress some-time for their weight in rice, more often for $1 or $2.”

Wait, that’s not famine at its worst. For that, we can look to China circa ’59 to ’61, when Mao decided to basically halt agricultural production and industrialize China in five short years, all in the name of scientific progress. The cost in human life, as estimated by the rare disinterested historian – 25 to 30 million. The memories of eating corpses and children are still too horrible for those who remember it to discuss.

But such hell-on-earth suffering is hardly the work of one man. Rather, it springs from the well-intentioned boobery that holds with Malthus, who convinced generations of economists and other pseudo-scientists that because the earth’s resources were limited, that humans must restrain their proliferation as well. Luminary BuckminsterFuller dismantled the myth scientifically, and economically we need look no further than Bill Gates’ legacy to see that innovation can create value and prosperity out of thin air, inspiration, and perspiration, leaving the earth’s physical resources almost entirely out of the equation.

When the heroes of science work synergistically with Mother Earth, the results can be astounding. Here’s a revolution worth remembering – the Green Revolution, started in 1970 when hardy dwarf wheat and rice grains, early to mature and resistant to disease, were brought from Mexico and planted large-scale throughout Southeast Asia. Yield per hectare was doubled within a few harvests, in the face of dire predictions from experts like Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich, who stated in 1967, “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” No doubt Malthus was required reading on his syllabus.

The concept bears repeating; ideas, not physical resources, are the catalysts for abundance, as they are for scarcity. Here’s a true Chinese hero, forgotten for his lack of sexy rhetoric and fiery politics – Yuan Longping. Born into a poor farmer’s family in 1931, Yuan suffered the pangs of the Great Leap into Starvation firsthand, but reemerged with a concept for a miracle hybrid rice grain, one that he painstakingly perfected, tripling yield per hectare, and single-handedly assuring gluten-filled Chinese bellies for the foreseeable future. The hybrid was groundbreaking enough to be introduced to the United States in 1979, the first case of intellectual property rights transfer in China since silk.

Thus the choice before us, to continue in the delusion that there’s only so much to go round, justifying all sorts of misery, or to take the examples of Gates and Yuan to heart. In any event, let’s not forget that while starving masses rarely make front-page news, they leave indelible stains on our collective record.

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