by Tom Standage
FOOD AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION
What caused the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991? According to Yegor Gaidar, a senior Russian politician who served in Boris Yeltsin’s government in the era after the fall of the Soviet Union, the regime disintegrated in large part because it could not feed its people. The food crisis crept up on the Soviet Union over the course of several decades, but it had its roots in Stalin’s industrialization program, back in the late 1920s. The leadership’s obession with industrial transformation meant that farm workers were less highly valued than industrial workers, and received much lower wages. As a result, those in the countryside took any opportunity they could to move to the cities and take a job in industry. As the urban population expanded, agricultural productivity stagnated.
When Nikita Khrushchev came to power after Stalin’s death in 1953, he observed that grain yields had fallen by one fifth since 1940. As more of the shrinking food supply went to feed the growing urban population, there was less grain left over for export, so threatening the industrialization program. The Soviet Union found itself between the closing jaws of a trap: The food demands of its urban population were growing, and supply could not keep up. What could be done? One solution was to pay farmers more for their produce and give them incentives to increase output. But that would have been tantamount to reversing the collectivization program—a huge political U-turn. So instead Khrushchev decided to boost agriculture by bringing virgin land under cultivation, and by paying the farmers who worked on it the higher wages granted to industrial workers. Existing farmers’ wages were left unchanged.
For a while, everything seemed to be going well. Grain production increased for the first few years. But then it leveled off. Even with the new land, the amount of food being produced per head of population was still lower than it had been in 1913, and the state grain reserves actually declined between 1953 and 1960. The new initiative had not solved the problem. So the Soviet leadership tried another tack: boosting agricultural output by investing in tractors, combine harvesters, and other equipment. Agricultural output did grow slowly in the 1960s and 1970s, but consumption grew faster still. A turning point came in 1963, when the Soviet Union stopped exporting food and grain to its satellite states in Eastern Europe—payments that had helped to maintain stability and political support in these satellites. Instead it bought foreign grain, using 372 tons of gold—more than a third of the country’s gold reserves—to pay for it. This was humiliating. Khrushchev told his comrades it was vital to build up grain reserves again. “We must have a year’s supply of grain in seven years,” he said. “The Soviet regime cannot bear such shame again.”
At the time, the need to resort to grain imports was blamed on a one-off poor harvest in 1963. But there was a deeper problem. Much of the newly cultivated land turned out to be in regions where the size of the harvest was heavily dependent on the weather. During the early 1970s imports and exports were roughly in balance, but by the early 1980s the Soviet Union had become dependent on food imports, and by the mid-1980s it had become the world’s largest grain importer by a considerable margin—despite having been the world’s largest exporter at the beginning of the twentieth century. It had to agree to long-term contracts to buy grain, guaranteeing annual purchases of nine million tons a year from the United States, five million from Canada, and four million from Argentina. The Soviet Union resorted to foreign loans, hard-currency reserves, and gold reserves (in particularly bad years) to pay for these imports. But this was not sustainable. Nor was exporting manufactured goods an option; most Soviet-made goods could not compete with those made in other countries. The Soviet Union had tried to industrialize using the proceeds from huge grain exports, but in the process it had undermined its agricultural productivity, a vital source of wealth.
Food prices continued to rise, and shortages became more widespread. Employees of government agencies and the military were allowed to buy food at reduced prices in special shops that were not open to the public. By 1981, according to Gaidar, “the USSR’s po lit-i cal leadership was trapped, with no way out. It was impossible to speed up agricultural production sufficiently to meet the growing demand.” The exploitation of oil reserves helped for a while. But the Soviets overexploited their oil fields for short-term gain, reducing their long-term prospects. High oil prices from the mid-1970s helped to pay for food imports, and for military spending to keep up with the United States. But the Soviet leaders assumed that oil prices would remain high indefinitely, and therefore they did not build up their foreign-currency reserves before the oil price fell sharply in 1985–86. Indeed, the Soviet Union’s borrowing increased.
The Soviet leaders were all too aware of the danger of relying on their Cold War adversaries for food. But they had little choice. Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power as the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, began to introduce economic reforms, but to little avail as infighting paralyzed the regime. Soon all of the Soviet Union’s oil revenue was being consumed by interest payments; and poor global grain harvests in 1989–90 drove up prices, in particular of wheat. The Soviet Union began to miss payments to foreign suppliers for food imports, causing some shipments to be halted. Many foodstuffs and consumer items became hard to find in shops; lengthy lines for sugar, butter, rice, salt, and other basic foods became commonplace.
On March 31, 1991, one of Gorbachev’s aides wrote in his diary: “Yesterday the Security Council met on the food issue . . . more concretely, bread . . . In Moscow and other cities there are lines like the ones two years ago for sausage. If we don’t get it somewhere, there may be famine by June. Of the republics, only Kazakhstan and Ukraine can (barely) feed themselves. That there is bread in the country turns out to be a myth. We scraped the bottom of the barrel to find hard currency and credit to buy it abroad. But we are no longer credit worthy . . . I drove around Moscow . . . the bakeries are padlocked or terrifyingly empty. I don’t think Moscow has seen anything like this in all its history—even in the hungriest years.” By this time many of the individual republics of the Soviet Union, starting with the Baltic states, and followed by Moldova, Ukraine, Belorussia, and Russia, had declared themselves sovereign states. Food shortages were a major cause of social unrest and of a collapse of the Soviet government’s authority. “It remains difficult to ensure the presence of bread and other foodstuffs in a number of regions,” noted the deputy minister of the interior. “Long lines form outside stores, the citizens criticize the local and central authorities in strong language, and some of them call for protest actions.”
In autumn of 1991, an official memo reported: “The low harvest and the inability to expand imports, together with the refusal of farms to turn over their grain to the state, may put the country and the republic on the brink of famine. The only way out of this situation is to allow the farms to sell grain freely at market prices with further liberalization of retail prices for bread. Without a transition to free pricing in conjunction with an accelerated reduction of state control in agriculture and trade, there will be no incentive for growth in production.” Finally, the penny had dropped. The Soviet policies of centralizing control of agriculture and controlling prices had failed. The only way forward, politicians conceded, was free trade and liberalization—in other words, capitalism. By this time the Soviet Union’s disintegration was well advanced, and it formally ceased to exist on December 26, 1991, dissolving into its constituent states.
THE DEMOCRACY OF FOOD
Is it a coincidence that the worst famine in history happened in a Communist state? Not according to Amartya Sen, an Indian economist who won the Nobel prize in Economics in 1998. In his view, the combination of representative democracy and a free press makes famines much less likely to occur. “In the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any indepen-dent and democratic country with a relatively free press,” he wrote in 1999.
We cannot find exceptions to this rule, no matter where we look: the r
ecent famines of Ethiopia, Somalia, or other dictatorial regimes; famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; China’s 1958–61 famine with the failure of the Great Leap Forward; or earlier still, the famines in Ireland or India under alien rule. China, although it was in many ways doing much better economical ly than India, still managed (unlike India) to have a famine, indeed the largest recorded famine in world history: Nearly 30 million people died in the famine of 1958–61, while faulty governmental policies remained uncorrected for three full years. The policies went uncriticized because there were no opposition parties in parliament, no free press, and no multiparty elections. Indeed, it is precisely this lack of challenge that allowed the deeply defective policies to continue even though they were killing millions each year.
Famines, Sen pointed out, are often blamed on natural disasters. But when such disasters strike democracies, politicians are more likely to act, if only to maintain the support of voters. “Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to in dependence (the last famine, which I witnessed as a child, was in 1943, four years before independence), they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press,” Sen wrote.
The rise of democracy, which Sen calls “the preeminent development” of the twentieth century, would therefore explain why the use of food as an ideological weapon, like its use as a military weapon, has become much less widespread. A rare but striking example, at the time of writing in mid-2008, is its use by Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s dictator. He has presided over a collapse of Zimbabwe’s agriculture, which has turned the country from a regional breadbasket into a disaster area. Between 2000 and 2008 agricultural output fell by 80 percent, unemployment increased to 85 percent, inflation rose to more than 100,000 percent, life expectancy fell below forty, and three million Zimbabweans, or about one fifth of the population, fled the country. With Zimbabwe in crisis, Mugabe maintained his grip on power through violence and intimidation, by rigging a series of elections, and by channeling food aid to members of his government and regions where his support was strongest, while denying it to people in areas known to be sympathetic to the opposition.
In June 2008 Mugabe was accused of offering food to people in opposition areas only if they gave up the identification documents needed to vote in the presidential election, to prevent them voting for the opposition candidate. A spokesman for the U.S. State Department, Sean McCormack, told reporters that Mugabe was “using food as a weapon, using the hunger of parents’ children against them to prevent them from voting their conscience for a better kind of Zimbabwe.” Mugabe responded that it was Western aid agencies that were using food for political ends, and he banned them from distributing food in opposition areas. “These western-funded NGOs also use food as a political weapon with which to campaign against government, especially in the rural areas,” he said.
The overt use of food as a weapon in this way is now mercifully rare. In Western democracies, however, food has found another, more subtle political role. It is no longer a weapon, but has instead become a battlefield on which broader political fights take place. This is a consequence of the variety of food now available to Western consumers as a result of global trade, growing interest in the consequences and politics of food choices, and food’s unusual status as a consumer product that acts as a lightning rod for broader social concerns. For almost any political view you want to express, there is a relevant foodstuff to buy or avoid.
Concerns over the environment can therefore be expressed by advocacy of local and organic products; “fair-trade” products aim to highlight the inequity of global-trade rules and the buying power of large corporations, while also funding social programs for low-paid workers and their families; arguments about genetically modified foodstuffs give expression to worries over the unfettered march of new technologies, and the extent to which farmers have become dependent on large agribusinesses. Shoppers can buy dolphin-friendly tuna, bird-friendly coffee, and bananas that support educational programs for growers in Costa Rica. They can express a desire for reconciliation in the Middle East by buying “peace oil” made in olive groves where Israelis and Palestinians work side by side. They can signal opposition to large companies by boycotting supermarkets in favor of small shops or farmers’ markets.
Food can also be used to make specific protests against companies or governments. In 1999 when José Bové, a French political activist, wanted to express his opposition to the might of the United States and to the impact of multinational corporations on French traditions and local companies, he did so by dismantling a McDonald’s restaurant in the town of Millau, loading the rubble onto tractors, and dumping it outside the town hall. More recently, in South Korea in 2008 there were huge public protests against American beef imports, ostensibly on safety grounds; but the protests really gave voice to broader unease about the removal of trade barriers and to concerns that South Korea’s ruling party was allowing itself to be pushed around by the country’s superpower patron.
The idea of using food to make wider political points can be traced back to 1791, when British consumers who wanted to express their opposition to slavery began to boycott sugar. A stream of pamphlets ensued, including the Anti-Saccharine Society’s deliberately shocking manifesto, illustrated with a cross-section of a slave ship to show how tightly the shackled men were packed into it. A newspaper advertisement placed by James Wright, a Quaker merchant, in 1792 was representative of the mood: “Therefore being impressed with the Sufferings and Wrongs of that deeply-injured People, and also with an Apprehension, that while I am a Dealer in that Article, which appears to be a principal support of the Slave Trade, I am encouraging Slavery, I take this Method of informing my Customers, that I mean to discontinue selling the Article of Sugar till I can procure it through Channels less contaminated, more unconnected with Slavery, and less polluted with Human Blood.”
Campaigners claimed that if just thirty-eight thousand British families stopped buying sugar, the impact on the planters’ profits would be severe enough to bring the trade to an end. At the boycott’s peak, one of the leaders of the campaign claimed that three hundred thousand people had given up sugar. Some campaigners smashed teacups in public, since they were tainted by sugar. Tea parties became social and political minefields. It was a faux pas to ask for sugar if it was not offered by an abstaining hostess. But not all sugar was equally bad. Some people regarded more expensive sugar from the East Indies to be less ethically problematic—until it transpired that it, too, was very often grown by slaves. When the slave trade was abolished by Britain in 1807, it was unclear whether the boycott, or a series of slave revolts, had made the most difference. Some even argued that the boycott had made things worse: As planters’ profits fell, they might well have treated their slaves even more cruelly. But there was no doubt that the sugar boycott had drawn attention to the slavery question and helped to mobilize political opposition.
The same is true of today’s food debates. Their real significance lies not so much in their direct impact, but in the way in which they can provide a leading indicator to governments about policy, and encourage companies to change their behavior. Food has a unique political power, for several reasons: food links the world’s richest consumers with its poorest farmers; food choices have always been a potent means of social signaling; modern shoppers must make dozens of food choices every week, providing far more opportunities for political expression than electoral politics; and food is a product you consume, so eating something implies a deeply personal endorsement of it. But there are limits to its power. Real change—such as abolishing slavery in the nineteenth century, or overhauling world trade or tackling climate change today—ultimately requires political action by governments. Voting with your food choices is no substitute for voting at the ballot box. But food provides a valuable arena in which to debate difference choices, a mechanism by which societies indicate what they feel strongly about, and a way to mobilize broader pol
itical support. Those in positions of power, whether in politics or business, would be foolish to ignore such signals.
PART VI
FOOD, POPULATION, AND DEVELOPMENT
11
FEEDING THE WORLD
[Agriculture’s] principal object consists in the production of nitrogen under any form capable of assimilation.
—JUSTUS VON LIEBIG, 1840
THE MACHINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
Compared with the flight of Wright brothers’ first plane or the detonation of the first atomic bomb, the appearance of a few drips of colorless liquid at one end of an elaborate apparatus in a laboratory in Karlsruhe, Germany, on a July afternoon in 1909 does not sound very dramatic. But it marked the technological breakthrough that was to have arguably the greatest impact on mankind during the twentieth century. The liquid was ammonia, and the tabletop equipment had synthesized it from its constituent elements, hydrogen and nitrogen. This showed for the first time that the production of ammonia could be performed on a large scale, opening up a valuable and much-needed new source of fertilizer and making possible a vast expansion of the food supply—and, as a consequence, of the human population.
The link between ammonia and human nutrition is nitrogen. A vital building block of all plant and animal tissue, it is the nutrient reponsible for vegetative growth and for the protein content of cereal grains, the staple crops on which humanity depends. Of course, plants need many nutrients, but in practice their growth is limited by the availability of the least abundant nutrient. Most of the time this is nitrogen. For cereals, nitrogen deficiency results in stunted growth, yellow leaves, reduced yields, and low protein content. An abundance of available nitrogen, by contrast, promotes growth and increases yield and protein content. Nitrogen compounds (such as proteins, amino acids, and DNA) also play crucial roles in the metabolisms of plants and animals; nitrogen is present in every living cell. Humans depend on the ingestion of ten amino acids, each built around a nitrogen atom, to synthesize the body proteins needed for tissue growth and maintenance. The vast majority of these essential amino acids comes from agricultural crops, or from products derived from animals fed on those crops. An inadequate supply of these essential amino acids leads to stunted mental and physical development. Nitrogen, in short, is a limiting factor in the availability of mankind’s staple foods, and in human nutrition overall.