1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

by Charles C. Mann

  Every day we cut until 7:00 or 8:00 a.m., then ate a breakfast of rice gruel sent by the [Yunnan Army] Corps kitchen. We recited and studied Chairman Mao’s “Three Articles” and struggled against capitalism and revisionism. Then it was back to work until lunch break, then more work until 6:00. After we washed and ate, there were more hours of study and criticism meetings.

  Sneering at botanists’ admonitions as counterrevolutionary, the youths repeatedly planted rubber trees at altitudes where they were killed by storms and frost. Then they planted them again in the exact same place—socialism would master nature, they insisted. The frenzy laid waste to hillsides, exacerbated erosion, and destroyed streams. But it didn’t actually yield much rubber. In the late 1970s the nation began its economic reforms. The educated young people fled back to their home cities, precipitating a labor shortage. Local Dai and Akha villagers were finally permitted to establish rubber farms. They were effective and efficient. Between 1976 and 2003 the area devoted to rubber expanded by a factor of ten, shrinking tropical montane forest in that time from 50.8 percent of the prefecture to 10.3 percent. The prefecture was a sea of Hevea brasiliensis.

  Unlike the flat Amazon basin, Xishuangbanna is a mass of hills. Planting on slopes exposed the trees to sunlight and ensured that they didn’t grow in pools of water, a constant risk in the Amazon because it damages the roots. In addition, according to Hu Zhouyong of the Tropical Crops Research Institute in Jinghong, the prefecture capital, the relative extremes of temperature let growers select for exceptionally robust trees that would produce more rubber in every circumstance. “Xishuangbanna is ahead of everywhere else in the world in terms of productivity,” Hu said to me.

  Even as burgeoning China became the world’s biggest rubber consumer, its rubber producers were running out of space in Xishuangbanna—every inch of land was already taken. They looked enviously over the border at Laos; with about six million people in an area the size of the United Kingdom, it is the emptiest country in Asia. A few villages in northern Laos had begun planting as early as 1994. But the real push didn’t begin until the end of the decade, when China announced its “Go Out” strategy, which pushed Chinese companies to invest abroad. The country had already changed the old military farms into private enterprises—corporations with abundant political clout. As part of Go Out, Beijing announced that it would treat rubber growing in Laos and Myanmar as an opium-replacement program, making the former military farms eligible for subsidies: up to 80 percent of the initial costs for companies to grow rubber across the border, as well as the interest on loans. In addition, it would exempt incoming rubber from most tariffs. (Which companies are receiving the money is unclear; “the subsidy distribution process,” economist Weiyi Shi told me, “lacks transparency and appears to be plagued with cronyism.”)

  Duly incentivized, companies and smallholders flowed over the border. They hired Dai and Akha who lived in China to work with their distant relatives in Laos. Most Laotians lived in hamlets without electricity or running water; schools and hospitals were a distant dream. Seeing a chance to improve their material conditions, villagers jumped starry-eyed on the rubber bandwagon, cutting deals with firms and farms in China. “In China, they were as poor as us,” one village head told me. “Now they are rich—they have motorcycles and cars—because they planted rubber. We want to have the same.”

  No one knows exactly how much H. brasiliensis is now in Laos; the government doesn’t have the resources for surveys. According to anthropologist Yayoi Fujita of the University of Chicago, in 2003 rubber covered about a third of a square mile in Sing District, next to the border. Three years later it covered seventeen square miles there. Similar growth has occurred in many other districts. The Laotian government estimated that rubber covered seven hundred square miles of the nation by 2010, eight times more than it covered just four years before. And the pace of clearing will only accelerate, along with the effects of that clearing.5

  “To harvest a couple thousand square miles of rubber, you need a couple hundred thousand workers,” Klaus Goldnick, a regional planner in the northern provincial capital of Luang Namtha, said to me. “The whole province has only 120,000 people. The only solution is to bring in Chinese workers.” He said, “Many people here live off the forest. When the forest is gone, it will be difficult for them to survive.” He said, “Foreign companies are paying a concession fee”—about $1.50 per tree—“to the government. The more trees, the more fees.”

  Most of the first plantations were created by villagers who knocked down a few acres on their own or worked with equally small plantations in China. Later the bigger Chinese operations moved in, among them the former state farms. Because rubber trees take seven years to mature, companies naturally want to make long-term arrangements with the people who plant and tend them. I was allowed to look at one of the resultant contracts, between the Chinese firm Huipeng Rubber and three hamlets in Luang Namtha Province.

  Written in both Chinese and Lao, the contract consisted of twenty-four numbered paragraphs. Three were boilerplate: legal descriptions of Huipeng and the villages. Eighteen explained the rights and privileges of the company. One listed the villagers’ rights and privileges. In the confusion of the moment, I may have got the numbers slightly wrong—the papers were shown to me while a village head and the rubber agent were telling me their views, each in a different language. But it was impossible to miss that Huipeng’s executives had affirmed the contract with their signatures whereas the villagers had affirmed it by rolling their thumbprints onto the page. Each village would plant a certain amount of its land with rubber, the contract explained. Huipeng would in return improve both the roads within the village and the highway to it. But the firm could then sell its rights to the land at its own discretion and hire anybody it wanted to tend the trees, including people from China. Some 70 percent of the proceeds from rubber would go to the villages, “depending on the effective results of the planting”—a big loophole, it seemed to me. Contracts of this sort between companies and villages are common in China (the tobacco plots I visited in the Fujianese hill village in Chapter 5 were governed by one). But such arrangements seemed less benign in Luang Namtha. To my eye the contract looked like the kind of document that emerges when one party has a lawyer looking after its interests and the other party doesn’t know what a lawyer is.

  In Ban Songma, the next settlement down the road, the village leader who negotiated the contract was about thirty years old. On the day we met he wore a white T-shirt and soccer shorts with a Munich logo. Beside him stood his wife, holding a baby girl wrapped in a faded Hello Kitty blanket. I asked him the name of the rubber company, how much land the village was supposed to provide to it, and the split of the proceeds. He couldn’t answer these questions. This was not because he was stupid—he was obviously a shrewd, sparky man—but because the questions were beyond his frame of reference. To be a modern economic agent requires a huge set of habits, assumptions, and expectations. Few of them had been needed in Ban Songma even ten years before. Indeed, they may have been counterproductive. Venturing onto the clawed ground of global capitalism, the village head was as out of his element as Neville Craig was on the Madeira River. That he wanted the fruits of capitalism—Chinese motorbikes and Japanese televisions and nylon shorts emblazoned with the logos of European sports teams—didn’t make the likelihood of a happy outcome any greater.

  Already Huipeng had imported Chinese workers to plant the seedlings. The village head didn’t know whether he and his neighbors would be taught how to graft trees themselves, or to tap latex, or to do the initial processing for rubber. But he did know that people who worked for the Chinese ended up with motorbikes, which liberated them from hours of walking up and down the steep hills. The baby in the Hello Kitty blanket will grow up knowing more than her father about the whirling new world Ban Songma is entering. Huipeng’s contract will be in force for forty years. It will be interesting to see at its end how that child regards the deal tha
t her father signed.

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  The morning had been clear and bright, an ominous sign. On the pedestrian bridge that leads to the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden I could see the faintest skirl of fog on the hills. Researchers had drawn their office curtains on the building’s sunny side. Founded in 1959, the garden grew up with Xishuangbanna’s rubber industry. Its scores of scientists monitored the impact of the refashioning of the regional ecosystem and didn’t like what they saw. “We all hate rubber,” one researcher told me. “But then we’re all ecologists here.”

  Although the Golden Triangle receives as much as one hundred inches of rain a year, three-quarters of it falls between May and October. The rest of the year the forest survives largely on dew from morning fog. “Back in the 1980s and 1990s there was still fog at lunchtime,” XTBG ecologist Tang Jianwei told me. “Now it’s gone by eleven.” The “very obvious” change, he said, is a symptom of a profoundly altered hydrological regime.

  Rubber is to blame, Tang said. H. brasiliensis usually sheds its leaves in January and new leaves begin budding in late March. The absence of leaves means that the forest has fewer surfaces to retain dew, which reduces water absorption during the dry season. Surface runoff rises by a factor of three—which in turn jacks up soil erosion by a remarkable factor of forty-five. Worse, the new leaves’ most intense growth occurs in April, at the dry season’s hottest, driest point. To propel growth, the roots suck up water from three to six feet below the surface. Tapping begins as the new leaves appear and continues until they fall. To replace the lost latex, the roots suck up still more water from the ground. How much water? Tang did some rough estimates with pen and paper. Half a kilogram of latex a day, twenty days a month tapping, 180 trees to the acre … good latex is 60 to 70 percent water … 4,400 pounds of water a year per acre. Rubber producers are effectively putting all the water in the hills into trucks and driving it away. “A lot of smaller streams are drying up,” he said. “Villages have had to move because there’s no drinking water.” Now spread this impact across Laos and Thailand, he said. It would be a slow-motion remaking of a huge area. “It’s not easy to tell what the effects would be,” Tang said.

  Beginning to heed ecologists’ worries, Xishuangbanna effectively banned new rubber planting in 2006 by freezing all land rotation. The scheme is unlikely to have much effect. To begin with, as Shi notes, it seems to violate China’s newly reformed land laws. But even if Xishuangbanna farmers were to stop planting H. brasiliensis tomorrow, its area would keep rising—on their own, rubber trees are invading the remaining forest.

  Almost every bit of Xishuangbanna that can support rubber trees has been cleared and planted (top), a change that is profoundly altering the environment—the region’s morning mists are vanishing, along with its water supply. With China’s rubber companies running out of suitable land in China itself, they have moved across the border to northern Laos (above, a freshly logged hillside). (Photo credit 7.8)

  Hillside rubber plantations surround Tang’s office in the botanical garden. Because trees are grafted from the wood of high-yielding specimens, the great majority of the rubber trees in Southeast Asia are clones. And the majority of the trees used to create those clones descended from the few sprouts that survived from Henry Wickham’s original expedition—a slice of a slice of a slice. These are the trees that Weir brought to Fordlândia, the varieties so highly susceptible to M. ulei. The trees make a canopy of green so unbroken that Beijing legally describes rubber plantations as “forests”; locals can fill fallow farmland with rubber and fulfill government conservation dictates. As the area of rubber increases, it becomes an increasingly inviting target for pests. “That’s the lesson of biology,” Tang said. “Diseases always come in. Sooner or later, they find a way.”

  For a century, isolation—the isolation of Southeast Asia from Brazil, of Southeast Asian nations from each other—has spared the rubber plantations. But the world is knitting itself together ever more closely. There are still no direct flights between Amazonia and Southeast Asia, but they will come. And in April 2008 the governments of Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand opened a brand-new highway that for the first time links all of these nations and connects them to Malaysia and Singapore. Trucks will be able to zoom in three days from Singapore to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. If and when M. ulei arrives from Brazil, this will provide transportation. “In ten or twenty years, Xishuangbanna’s trees could be wiped out,” Tang said. “So would everyone else’s trees, probably.”

  The disaster would take a long time to repair. The industrial revolution, one recalls, depends on three raw materials: steel, fossil fuels, and rubber. If one member of that triad suddenly vanished, it would have unwelcome effects. Imagine transportation networks without tires, electric power plants without gaskets and seals, hospitals without sterile rubber hoses and gloves. Industrial civilization could face such disruption worldwide that organizations from the United Nations to the U.S. Department of Defense list Microcyclus ulei as a potential biological weapon. Synthetic rubber will be deployed to replace it, but only as an imperfect replacement. “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be in a 747 about to land on synthetic tires,” the director of the U.S. National Defense Stockpile Center has said.

  Breeders are working on new, resistant plants, but progress is slow. “All control measures against this disease have been unsuccessful,” stated the Annals of Botany in 2007. Even the most modern techniques “have failed to prevent large losses and dieback of trees.” Asian scientists pulled some more trees from Brazil in 1981 to increase plantations’ genetic diversity. These are being evaluated and cross-bred with more productive plants. Researchers in France announced in 2006 that they had fully resistant clones. But few plantation owners want to take up these varieties, which are new and therefore risky. Every ecologist I spoke with in Brazil, China, and Laos believed that Asia was almost as unprepared for leaf blight today as it was fifty years ago.

  When I visited Xishuangbanna, I wore the same shoes that I had worn a few months before in Brazil. Because the spores are fragile, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t cause an epidemic. Still, I sprayed my shoes with fungicide. At the border neither the Chinese nor the Laotian customs officials batted an eye at the two Brazilian visas in my passport, or the entry stamps that said I had passed through Manaus, epicenter of leaf blight. I wanted to do my work, so I didn’t say anything.

  Someday, though, there will be a problem. The cycle of the Columbian Exchange will be complete, taking away what it once gave. Trees will die fast. The epidemic will cover an area large enough to be visible from space: black-leaved splotches scattered from the tip of China to the end of Indonesia. There will be a major international mobilization of resources to fight the outbreak. And planters will suddenly be aware that they are living in the Homogenocene, an era in which Asia and the Americas are increasingly alike.

  1 Gough, blind since birth, demonstrated this by touch: he pulled apart the ends of a wide rubber strip and touched it with “the edges of the lips,” which are highly sensitive to heat. He also discovered that rubber shrinks when it is heated up—unlike most other substances, which increase in volume when they get hotter.

  2 In general, long-molecule substances are called polymers. Many types of polymers are familiar: fibers like silk and wool, for instance, and proteins like the gluten in bread or the albumin in egg whites. Elastomers, with their puzzling behavior, are a special type of polymer.

  3 Casement was rewarded with a knighthood. Soon after, Sir Roger quit the Foreign Office to devote himself to the cause of Irish independence. He traveled to Germany to persuade the kaiser to provide arms for an uprising. The plot was discovered and Casement arrested as a German submarine deposited him on the Irish coast. Convicted of treason, he was sentenced to death. Influential friends begged the court for mercy. Casement was unlucky enough to be gay and unwise enough to detail his sex life in diaries. Their discovery after the trial
sealed his fate. He was stripped of his honors and hanged on August 3, 1916.

  4 In 1727 the Brazilian diplomat Francisco de Melo Palheta visited Cayenne, in French Guiana, to negotiate a border dispute. Somehow he obtained coffee seeds—he is said to have received them as a farewell gift from the governor’s wife, whom he had seduced. Under French colonial law coffee seeds were strictly forbidden to foreigners. Melo Palheta smuggled them to Brazil, the rubber historian Warren Dean wrote, launching “a plantation industry that was the mainstay of the Brazilian economy for a century and a half.”

  5 Jefferson Fox of the East-West Center in Hawaii, who is working with colleagues to evaluate rubber’s impact in Southeast Asia, notes that Vietnam plans to increase its companies’ rubber area by 1,500 square miles—a quarter of that in southern Laos. In January 2009 Fox visited big plantations in southern Laos, he told me, “from which smallholders had been removed from their land in order to grant land concessions to Vietnamese investors.”

  PART FOUR

  Africa in the World

  8

  Crazy Soup

  JOHNNY GOOD-LOOKING

  In the 1520s a solitary man constructed a small chapel on the western highway out of Mexico City, just beyond the causeway that led to the city’s western gate. No description of the chapel survives, but it was probably just two whitewashed adobe rooms: one for the shrine itself, with an altar and cross; one for the man who built and maintained it. Nearby were a few small fields on which he grew crops. The structure was known as the Chapel of the Martyrs or, more impressively, the Chapel of the Eleven Thousand Martyrs. It may have been the first Christian church in mainland America.