Two Cheers for Revolution: The Virtues of Regime Change in World Agriculture

Despite the facts that only about 1% of the American labor force is involved in agriculture and that agriculture accounts for less than 1% of GDP, food and farming are definitely trendy these days. Who would have thunk it? Certainly not me. Over the years I've written a number of pieces on the lack of interest in agriculture in academia, the lack of respect accorded agricultural historians, the lack of knowledge regarding agriculture among contemporary students, etc., etc.

Even after food and food studies became hot over the course of the past decade or so, what with the advent of the Food Network, glossy mags like Gastronomica, and best sellers such as Fast Food Nation and Omnivore's Dilemma, there wasn't all that much spillover into the fields and pastures themselves. To be sure, monographs on individual crops and commodities also began to multiply, and we now have scholarly studies on plants ranging from cacao to maize, and from rhubarb to wheat. One prolific author, Mark Kurlansky, is seemingly single-handedly working his way through the food chain, with individual books in recent years on oysters, cod, and salt—not to mention others on European Jewry, Basques, and the year 1968!

But however much Michael Pollan pollinates and Marian Nestle nettles, it wasn't until last year that I really knew for sure that agriculture itself was hot. Why? First, because two global hyperpowers—Bill Gates and the World Bank—signaled their interest in agriculture, in the case of Gates with a pledge of over $300 million to support agriculture in poor countries, and in the case of the Bank, by focusing on agriculture for the first time in decades in its annual World Development Report. Second, because food prices, particularly commodity prices, skyrocketed in the first half of 2008. With the blessing of these two iconic "institutions" and with our pocketbooks stretched in large part because of the run-up in food costs, perhaps the world has again been made safe for agriculture, and, by implication, for agricultural historians and agricultural history.

At least I hope so, because Gates, the World Bank, and the spike in food costs notwithstanding, there is still a lot of suspicion out there regarding agriculture, both among those who study the subject and among a broader group, i.e, those who eat, particularly in the developed countries. Indeed, we hear far more about the horrors of high-fructose corn syrup, recalls of Chinese vegetables, "Frankenstein" foods, so-called CAFOs (confined animal-feeding operations), and anti-globalization activists such as Jose Bové than we do about the crucial importance of the Doha Round, the possibilities opened up by "Roundup Ready" soybeans and other GMOs (genetically modified organisms), and the manner in which cell phones and other technologies are transforming agriculture in less-developed countries.

This is not surprising perhaps, but it is troubling in profound ways. Along with problems relating to spreading waistlines, increasing body-mass indexes, and obesity epidemics—problems that are as real as they are stubborn—we shall, ironically, soon face another problem: how to feed the world's growing population in the next half century? By the year 2100 our key demographic problem may well be too few people rather than too many; but world population is still projected to grow steadily over the next half century or so, despite falling fertility rates worldwide. Indeed, most demographers believe that total world population will exceed 9 billion by midcentury before beginning to fall. This means that the world's farmers will somehow have to step up, and step up in a big way. A soil scientist at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, the Philippines, captured the situation quite well in a conversation with me in the summer of 2004. Farmers, he told me, will by midcentury somehow have to find ways to produce about 50% more food than they are producing now—on less land, with reduced supplies of water, and fewer inputs of fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides. And he may have been underestimating the problem, for as...