Biodiversity and Capitalism Pt. 2

The history of agriculture in the post-war period is for the most part a history of what has rather pompously come to be known as ’The Green Revolution’. The seed companies and international organizations have over the course of decades produced new genotypes of the main cultivated species; pure strains capable of producing extremely high yields, in the presence of other factors of production (fertilizers, water, pesticides).

Between 1940 and 1960 international selection centres were established in Mexico and the Philippines with the aim of increasing food production as quickly as possible. The high-yield varieties would supposedly pave the way to a revolution of increased returns in the third-world countries. But lurking behind the hypocritical humanitarian aim of eliminating hunger was the wish to eliminate the risks of political instability which hunger gives rise to. China had had to be surrendered to „the communists”; Great Britain was fighting communism in Malaysia; there was an unstable situation in the Philippines; France was about to be kicked out of Indo-China; rural uprisings were breaking out in USA backed Korea and so on. Even if the Americans were quite happy to supply troops, arms and finances they nevertheless understood that a fair bit of the discontent was the result of hunger.

The scientists in the research centres dedicated themselves to increasing agricultural productivity through the selection and distribution of high yield varieties, particularly cereals. The principal biological mechanism employed to further this aim was through the insertion of dwarfist traits, by means of which part of the biomass could be shifted to the seeds. The production of nitrogenous fertilizers was made possible by technology which had been developed during the 2nd World War to produce bombs. The new varieties were highly responsive to fertilizers and could utilise the increased fertility to boost the yield. The use of new seeds and fertilizers led to a growth in output of anywhere between 10% to 100%. In short, millions of hectares were given over to the cultivation of the new crops.

But even if the Green Revolution did cause an increase in food production, hunger still remained; in fact, thanks also to the population explosion, the planet’s inhabitants continued to suffer from this ancient evil, which is as old as class society itself, more than ever before. A series of studies by the International Labour Office showed that hunger and malnutrition increased much more rapidly precisely in those areas blessed by the Green Revolution. Soon enough it became apparent that the new seed products weren’t „neutral”. They systematically grew better in the fields of the rich proprietors than in the fields of the poor peasants. For a high output to be obtained, fertilizers and irrigation were needed. These provided nutriment not just to the crops but to the arable weeds too, making herbicides necessary as well. Insects were attracted to the uniformity of these new varieties and quickly adapted to them; thus insecticides were needed as well. Those peasant farmers who couldn’t afford these products were simply swept away resulting often in profound changes of social composition over wide areas.

In fact the expression ’High-yield variety’ isn’t particularly appropriate because it implies that the new seeds produce high yields through the possession of some innate quality. Instead, the distinctive characteristic of these seeds is that they respond well to specific factors of production such as fertilizers, irrigation etc. It would be better instead to call them „High response varieties”. In any case, in the absence of these additional productive factors the new seeds produce less than the indigenous varieties. In fact, in terms of overall vegetal biomass, the varieties associated with the Green Revolution may even reduce the overall crop yield. This is not insignificant when you consider that in the Third World, in economies which depend only partially on the market, all of the crop is generally used in some way or another: as well as the grain, a crop can produce animal fodder, fuel, building materials, craft materials, etc, etc.

Anyway, the Green Revolution responded to the problems of hunger and the hardships of the countryside with an increase in production, something which, among other things, could be distinguished by its capacity to enrich layers of the local and international bourgeoisie; nothing however was done to increase employment, or bring about agricultural reform. A technical solution was offered to solve a social and political problem.

The real and enduring consequence of introducing the high yield varieties has been the driving out or marginalisation of the old varieties, everywhere, even in the centres of diversity, with the consequent disappearance of much diversity, and the endangering of what remains.

Harlan tells us about a type of wheat he collected in Turkey in1948. It was small, stunted, with small seeds, sensitive to the cold and to various diseases. It was not suitable for bread-making, and no-one attached any importance to it for 15 years until the striped rust epidemic exploded: then it was seen that this wheat, which wasn’t even dignified with a name, was resistant to 4 types of striped rust, 35 types of common rust, 10 types of dwarf rust and showed good resistance to white mildew. From then on Harlan’s miserable wheat has been used in all the USA’s improvement programmes and has prevented enormous damage.

Testimonies to the importance of the old germplasm are provided by a multitude of similar stories about other species on which the lives of millions depend, such as barley, rice, millet, sorghum and potato, and the same can be said about other species such as fruits, peas, okra, sugar-beet and so on and so forth.

The new seeds are part of a process of transformation of agriculture which foresees greater technical input, greater access to the world market and a concentration on the production of genotypes which are most adapted to the world market; thus, loss of diversity and transformation of agricultural societies (with a corresponding loss of social and cultural diversity). Agriculture is becoming more and more controlled by industry, by the capitalists and their scientists, and less and less by farmers.

As regards diversity, the phenomenon by which less and less genotypes are cultivated, and ones which are obsolete and less profitable are forgotten about and therefore lost for ever, is called genetic erosion. This can also affect entire groups of species as well, as in the case of pulses: where a monoculture is widespread, proteinic supplements (pulses) are no longer produced, thereby impoverishing the diets of peoples which live directly off the land’s produce (a horrifying example from the recent past has been the cultivation of maize in certain areas of the Po valley).

The new agriculture certainly isn’t bothered about destroying natural habitats: dams, cementification, roads, extension of pastureland at the expense of natural forests, desertification, deforestation, these are all phenomena caused directly or indirectly by man, and which all share the common characteristic of causing the destruction of environments needed for the survival of precious and unrepeatable genotypes. But diversity’s worst enemy of all, because of the genetic substitution it performs, is agriculture itself. Which are the species whose diversity is most in peril? They are the ones going through programmes of genetic improvement in order to produce new varieties, and these, in general, are also the ones which are of most importance for the human race.

To get an idea of the genetic uniformity of the principal crops, we need only glance at the situation in the USA as depicted in this table:
 

Making the situation worse is the fact that generally the most widely used cultivars have a very restricted genetic base, and one which is for the most part shared between them. In other words, often we are dealing with cultivars which have little to distinguish themselves from each other, which have one or more parents in common and whose only distinguishing features are largely of a technical nature (ripening time, number of ears, resistance to environmental factors, dwarfism etc). Thus the different varieties aren’t so varied after all.

The first farmers brought about a reduction in the number of species used (compared to the gatherers) but over the millennia agriculture would increase diversity within these species.

We are destroying that diversity without producing anything in exchange except capitalist wealth; a wealth which can’t solve humanity’s problems. A huge part of the diversity which has been created over millions of years of plant evolution, and thousands of years of agriculture, has been destroyed just in order to produce this miserable profit.
 

THE RAIN FORESTS

Although nobody knows for certain exactly how many species of animals and plants there are it has been estimated that there are about 13 or 14 million, of which only about 13% has been recorded scientifically.

Most of these species, probably about two thirds of them, live in the tropics and mainly in the tropical forests. In these environments a much greater variety and diversity of forms of life may be found than in the temperate zones. Panama, for instance, a tiny state in Central America, has greater variety of species by far than is found in the whole of Europe. A famous naturalist has written that on one small, extinct volcano in the Philippines, he discovered more species of trees than are to be found in the whole of the United States. How are differences on this scale possible? We have seen already that in the tropics the process of diversification has been uninterrupted for millions of years. Moreover, optimum temperatures and humidity have favoured the existence, the sustenance and the evolution of an incredible number of species. Each one occupies a precisely delineated space, and has acquired a high degree of specialization: this indicates too that the animals and plants which are living together are also interdependent on each other. The disappearance of just one species of bird could involve the disappearance of a number of species of trees and shrubs which depend on it for seed dispersal; the disappearance of one species of plant can sound the death knell for many of those species of insects, spiders and mammals which have specialised to feed on that plant; and in their turn, these creatures will never again, for example, be able to function as inadvertent transporters of pollen for other species, and so on and so forth.

Of course, species have become extinct in all preceding ages, and it is a process which will always continue: species which don’t adapt to new climatic situations disappear, others which are more flexible adapt. But in these cases the mutations take place over relatively long periods of time and many species have the chance to adapt, and to be selected by the new environment; any new spaces which open up in the system are filled with various new species. It is a very fascinating and complex subject which we can only trace here in its broadest outlines; and anyway we still only know very little about tropical diversity. But that isn’t really a problem, it just means that there’s some incredibly interesting work for the naturalists of the future to carry out. The problem is that the land occupied by forests is getting smaller and smaller, and at a frightening rate which is greater than the capacity of nature to adapt itself to the changes. It is the bulldozers, the chain-saws and the burning which is the problem.

The loss of forests is considerable and is one of those phenomena of environmental damage best known to the ’public’. Figures for the five year period 1991 -1995 show that the average rate of deforestation was 11.27 million hectares per annum; as a point of reference, Italy is around 30 million hectares, including mountains (and so over a period of five years, almost twice the area of Italy was lost). In fact, the actual rate of loss of biodiversity is considerably greater than this: The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) consider an area deforested if the tree cover is reduced to less than ten per cent. Therefore, if a forest is cleaned out of the precious timber species it contains, technically deforestation hasn’t taken place; biodiversity has nevertheless received a mortal blow. The same goes if a forest is razed to the ground and some forest plantation is set up in its place, obviously with just one or very few timber species, there will be life in that woodland certainly, but it will inevitably be a much simplified system, if only because within a few decades it will be razed to the ground again. Moreover, reforestation and the creation of protected areas affect mainly the countries of the rich North, where the diversity is far less.

The history of agriculture is a history of deforestation. Mankind has always cut down trees in order to farm, to build houses and ships, for firewood, for metalwork etc. and, let’s be clear about this, there have also been ecological disasters in the past. But it used to be a matter of an activity proportionate to the population and to the level of development which production had reached. With the arrival of colonialism, this activity was greatly accelerated. Everything which was needed in Europe began to be cultivated in the lands where the colonial powers had achieved complete domination: and in order to farm, the trees had to be removed from the land. Cuba was one immense forest in Columbus’s time, now it imports wood due to the sugar cane which has replaced the local flora. It’s more or less the same story in the case of cocoa, coffee, bananas etc. Every time large areas of forest were destroyed, large numbers of people, sometimes imported like the Africans to America, were forced to live on the plantations.

When the plantation economy fails, and this has occurred even in recent times, these people lose their one source of sustenance and return to the forest: not as hunter-gatherers, as they have long since lost all knowledge necessary for that way of life, but as permanent or itinerant peasant farmers. Typifying this situation is slash and burn agriculture, which consists in exploiting a patch of deforested land for a number of years, then passing on somewhere else when the land’s fertility has been exhausted, something which doesn’t take that long. But the peasant farmers are not really to blame. The real beneficiaries of this phenomenon that is unraveling before our eyes are firstly the logging companies, and then the cattle breeders, who in countries like Brazil produce low quality meat for hamburgers in our fast-food chains. And the various governments which have come and gone have encouraged these tendencies, euphemistically describing them as ’improvements’.

It is not necessary to dwell at length on the importance of the forests in the tropical belt. Suffice to say the tropical forests contain the major part of existing species, and include the progenitors of most of our cultivated species (India-rubber, cocoa, cassava, coffee, cashew nuts, vanilla, pineapples, pomegranates; highly prized wood; important medicinal and pharmaceutical plants). Furthermore, they have a fundamental effect with respect to oxygen production, on erosion, on the greenhouse effect. To defend them is to defend humanity from ecological disasters.

Another often neglected aspect concerns the occupants of these threatened areas; that which we might refer to as cultural diversity. In Thailand, the inhabitants of just one forest village eat 295 different types of plants, and use 119 as medicines. The World Health Organisation has calculated that 3000 species of plants are used by tribal peoples for birth control alone. But this resource is fast disappearing as well: the combined forces of physical extermination (massacres that are happening still) and cultural extermination (the so-called ’civilizing’ of the so-called ’primitives’) is wiping out these peoples, their languages, their knowledge, which we presume to consider backward and inferior, but which is instead an integral part of human biodiversity.

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The world constructed by the bourgeoisie is characterized by a push towards uniformity and standardization, towards MacDonaldisation. Transportation and communications have made it very easy to move germplasm around, but far from enriching diversity this has in fact reduced it, insofar as every genotype which is highly valued has expelled or sometimes even eliminated a large number of other varieties. The high-yield wheats are like a chain of Benetton or Lacoste stores: to begin with they seem a definite improvement providing more choice, but little by little people begin to dress the same everywhere and the traditional tailors disappear. The bourgeoisie, which apparently is aware of the problem and is trying to deal with it, is in fact absolutely incapable of resolving the situation; not through lack of awareness, but because the economic forces which govern it render it impossible. It would be pointless to list all the initiatives which are supposed to protect the germplasm, but suffice to say they just serve to smooth the way for the rich North to get its hands on the genetic resources of the poor South for the same old reason, the only reason: to serve the great God profit. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the bourgeoisie is incapable of controlling the forces it has summoned up. Only a classless society can benefit from the socio-economic conditions which will allow the open wounds of class society to heal over. Only such a society which will be able to boast real knowledge, and real science.