Agriculture employs half the world's
population outside the advanced countries, where
only one person in 40 still farms. In the United
States, the ratio is one in 50. By prevailing
standards of technology, 1.25 billion workers are
redundant, and nearly 3 billion people (including
their dependants) stand to be displaced. [1] The
good news is that Chinese and Indian farmers
comprise three-fifths of the world's total, and
have good prospects of eventual
integration into the world
economy. But that leaves more than a billion
people at risk, mainly in Africa, Latin America
and the Middle East.
Every great advance
in productivity of agricultural in history left in
the lurch a superfluous population that was ground
up in war. The Carolingian Renaissance of the High
Middle Ages brought the horse collar, the steel
plow, windmills for swap drainage, and three-field
rotation. The Teutonic Knights shifted some of the
excess population to the Baltic and Eastern
Europe, eradicating the local population in the
process. The Crusades absorbed more of the
surplus, until the Black Death of the 14th century
made people scarce again. The Napoleonic Wars
dealt with the peasants made redundant by the
agricultural revolution of the 18th century, and
World War I repeated the exercise a century later.
In his recent book Before the Dawn,
Nicholas Wade proposes that humankind has evolved
to become more peaceful. On the contrary, the 21st
century may produce war casualties on a scale
never before seen.
I do not mean to
propose a simple theory of war. Nothing
foreordains violence as the outcome of economic
problems. The United States, Canada and Australia
created many more homes for displaced European
peasants than the wars of the 19th and 20th
century provided graves. Not only Christian
America, but communist China and Hindu India have
found peaceful means to manage the great
transition to city from countryside. But where the
bonds of traditional society can be broken only by
force, the threat of war on a terrifying scale
remains high.
Mexico's present political
crisis is a case in point. The left-wing candidate
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has refused to accept
defeat in the recent elections, encamped hundreds
of thousands of followers in the capital, and
formed an alternative cabinet. Because Lopez
Obrador controls the police force of Mexico City,
where he was governor, he cannot be chased away,
leaving Mexico in a predicament of dual power. The
impoverished half of the Mexican people have
little to lose, leaving Mexico's long-term
prospects doubtful. The United States already has
taken in perhaps 20 million economic refugees from
its southern neighbor, so many that immigration
dominates the political agenda in many states,
repeating, as it were, the role the US played with
respect to Europe during the 19th century. If the
US were to restrict immigration, Mexico's safety
valve would close and the political situation
might worsen.
During the 1930s, Mexico's
post-revolutionary leaders imported Josef Stalin's
collective-farm model to keep peasants on the land
and out of trouble. [2] This policy left half or
more of Mexicans in unrelieved rural misery. Now
the lid has blown off the pot.
As
Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos told the
London Financial Times on September 19, violent
crime is the greatest threat to most of Latin
America. Caracas is now the world's most dangerous
city, despite (or because of) the populism of Hugo
Chavez, just ahead of Sao Paolo. The street price
of cocaine has fallen from US$250 a gram in the
late 1980s to as little as $50 today despite
US-sponsored efforts to suppress coca production,
because there are too many farmers. Latin American
cities already are in collapse and cannot absorb
more people from the countryside. Short of
starving out several million farmers in Peru and
Colombia, there is no way to suppress cocaine
traffic. That is the sort of thing Stalin was
happy to do, but not George Bush.
Seventeen million Africans, for that
matter, have become economic refugees, Der Spiegel
reported recently, and many thousands die in open
boats or the desert in their attempt to reach
Europe.
No peace agreement ever will
emerge between Israel and the Palestinians, I
believe, because economics should have dispersed
the Palestinian population more than half a
century ago. Mechanization of agriculture, rather
than Zionist political aims, began displacing the
rural Arab population in the 1930s, I observed in
another location. The Zionist agency bought farms
from absentee landlords, displaced the
fellaheen engaged in near-subsistence
agriculture, and made the land profitable and
productive. From an economic standpoint, that is,
the Palestinians were Okies, but with no
California to go to. This led to the 1936-39 Arab
uprising against the British Mandate and Jewish
settlement.
Rather than disperse gradually
like other agrarian populations, the Palestinian
Arabs became wards of the United Nations after the
1947-48 War of Independence. Their numbers surged
because of better medical care and nutrition than
they previously enjoyed as well as child
subsidies. That is why the 700,000 Arabs who fled
or were driven from Israel grew into the 4 million
"refugees" registered with the UN in 2002. I place
the term "refugees" in quotation marks because in
no other case has the third generation following a
population transfer retained official refugee
status.
Despite the best intentions of
Shimon Peres and the Israeli socialists, it seems
delusional to imagine that any combination of
light industry and tourism will provide a
livelihood for a Palestine with 5 million
inhabitants (including the non-refugee West Bank
population). The Palestinian entity cannot exist
without subsidies, and it cannot extract subsidies
from the West or from the Muslim world without
constituting a military threat. The existential
choices for Palestinians come down to dispersal or
perpetual war.
This bears on the eccentric
behavior of Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad,
who took the opportunity of his appearance before
the United Nations last week to predict the early
appearance of the Mahdi. A third of Iran's
population remains in agriculture, according to
the US Central Intelligence Agency's World
Factbook, but this third produces only a tenth
of the country's gross domestic product. Iran's
farmers and the urban jobless (unemployment
officially is estimated at more than 11%) form a
hard core of support for Ahmadinejad, that is, a
constituency with no prospects and nothing to
lose.
Again, I do not propose an economic
explanation of Iran's intransigence on the matter
of nuclear-weapons development. It is not Iran's
economic misery as much as the mortal wound this
misery deals to traditional society that motivates
Iran's leaders. Islam constitutes the revenge of
traditional society against encroaching empires, I
have argued (see Sistani and the end of
Islam, September 8), and the
dissolution of agricultural communities as well as
the formation of an immiserated urban proletariat
threatens the existence of Islam. Modern Islamism
responds not so much to the economic problems as
to their expression in the form of a crisis of
faith.
The dreadful circumstances of Latin
America, Africa and the Middle East set China's
enormous accomplishment in relief. Each year China
shifts between 12 million and 15 million people to
cities from the countryside - that is to say, it
manages migration on the scale of the aggregate
African exodus to Europe every year and a half.
Nothing like this ever has happened in history,
surely not in an orderly fashion. As I wrote last
year (China must wait for
democracy, September 27, 2005):
In the mere span of five years
between 1996 and 2000, China's urban-rural
population ratio rose to 36:64 from 29:71, and
the UN Population Division projects that by
2050, the ratio will shift to 67:33 urban.
Chinese cities, the UN forecasts, will contain
800 million people by mid-century. By 2015, the
population of cities will reach 220 million,
compared to the 1995 level of 134 million.
Well over half a billion souls will
migrate from farm to city over the space of half
a century.
That is both good and bad
news for the rest of the world. China's success
demonstrates that peaceful population transfers
are neither impossible nor an expression of
Western values. But China's capacity to employ
half a billion migrants depends on a ferocious
competitiveness in global manufacturing that sets
an extremely high threshold for new market
entrants. Chinese industry is so efficient that
prospective competitors will enter the world
market only with extreme difficulty.
Grounds for optimism about the Middle
East, Africa and Latin America are thin. The most
likely outlet for the surplus population appears
to be the same as in the past: war.
Notes [1] See Feeding
the World: An Economic History of World
Agriculture, 1800-2000 by Giovanni Federico
(Princeton University Press 2005). [2] See
Textos Hereticos by Enrique Krauze
(1992).
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