1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (33 page)

Eventually the terraces on the steepest slopes collapsed completely, and farmers found themselves trying to eke out a living on hills almost too steep to stand on.

In the most marginal areas farmers planted maize. North of Zuitou, at the edge of the Gobi Desert, I walked around plots of maize growing in almost pure sand. Until the 1960s the region had been covered with thorny forest scrub. Then Mao ordered aggressive planting. It was like forcing people to farm a beach. Astounding to me, the locals had actually coaxed some maize from the sand—drying cobs made little yellow heaps on rooftops and barren yards. On carts hauled by tiny Chinese motorbikes men were driving around piles of maize stalks tall as two-story buildings. In the light wind the air was intensely gritty. The Loess Plateau, which once caught dust from the desert, was now producing it.

The People’s Republic had initiated plans to halt deforestation. In 1981 Beijing ordered every able-bodied citizen older than eleven to “plant 3–5 trees per year” wherever possible. Three years before, Beijing had initiated what may be the planet’s biggest ecological program, the “Three Norths” project: a 2,800-mile band of trees running like a vast screen across China’s north, northeast, and northwest, including the frontier of the Loess Plateau. Scheduled to be completed in 2050, this Green Wall of China will, in theory, slow down the winds that drive desertification and dust storms.

Despite their ambitious scope, these efforts did not directly address the soil degradation that was the legacy of Dazhai. Confronting the destruction was politically difficult, though: it had to be done without admitting that Mao had made mistakes. (When I asked local officials if the Great Helmsman had erred, they politely changed the subject.) Only in the last decade did Beijing chart a new course.

Today many of the terraces Zuitou’s farmers hacked out of the loess are reverting to nature. In what locals call the “3-3-3” system, farmers replant one-third of their land—the steepest, most erosion-prone slopes—with grass and trees, natural barriers to erosion. They cover another third of the land with harvestable orchards. The final third, mainly plots on the gully floor that have been enriched by earlier erosion, is cropped intensively. By concentrating their limited supplies of fertilizer on that land, farmers can raise yields enough to make up for the land they have sacrificed—that’s the theory, anyway. To help the transition along, farmers are compensated with an annual delivery of grain and a small cash payment for up to eight years. By 2010, the program covered more than 56,000 square miles of gully villages, an area the size of Iowa.

At first glance, it seems that a dictatorship would be perfectly suited to accomplish this task. The government can simply order loess dwellers to stop growing millet and plant almonds without worrying about property rights or political protest. It can direct whole villages to go into the hills en masse and plant saplings, millions upon millions of them, in small pits shaped like fish scales. And when the farmers and fields are shifted around, the planners can point to their accomplishments with pride.

Things look different on the ground. Provincial, county, and village officials are rewarded if they plant the number of trees envisioned in the plan, not whether they have chosen tree species suited to local conditions (or listened to scientists who say that trees are not appropriate for grasslands to begin with). Farmers who reap no direct benefit from their work—they are installing trees that do not produce fruit, cannot be cut for firewood, and supposedly stop erosion miles from their homes—have little incentive to take care of the trees they are forced to plant. The entirely predictable result is visible on the back roads of Shaanxi: fields of dead trees, each in its fish-scale pit, lining the roads for miles. “Every year we plant trees,” the farmers say, “but no trees survive.”

During my visit the lines of dead trees dotted the slopes like contour marks, stretching for miles. The harvest was over, and farmers were about to be marched back in for another try. Tree by tree, the government was trying to undo the accidental legacy of the global silver trade.

¹
The reader will have noted that I barely mention Dutch and Portuguese trade in Asia, which centered on spices, and focus on Spain and the galleon trade. This is partly to simplify a complex narrative, but mainly because the Spanish empire, the first truly global enterprise, is more germane to this book. In addition, the Netherlands and Portugal were entangled with that empire: the former not wresting full independence from it until 1648; the latter, long independent, forced by dynastic mishaps to accept a Spanish king from 1580 to 1640.

²
Chen was not the only sweet-potato smuggler. According to a nineteenth-century gazetteer, the Chinese doctor Lin Huailan successfully treated a sick Vietnamese princess in 1581. At a banquet in his honor, he was served sweet potatoes. Vietnam had banned exporting the tuber to China “on penalty of death,” the gazetteer recounted, but Lin decided to take some anyway. “While crossing the border, he was questioned by a [Vietnamese] border official. Lin answered truthfully, and requested that the officer secretly let him through. The officer said: ‘As for what happens today, being a servant of the country, it would be disloyal of me to let you pass; however, being grateful for your virtues, to deny you would be unrighteous.’ He then drowned himself. Lin returned, and the tuber spread across Guangdong.”

³
The ethnic group generally indicated by the word “Chinese” is the Han. The Manchu were pushing Han from the Chinese core into peripheral areas settled by other peoples.

⁴
Agriculture was not the only cause of deforestation. China consumed huge quantities of timber as fuel and building material. To get the wood, platoons of workers went to distant places, where they wiped out entire forests. Alas, so much lumber was lost, damaged, and stolen during shipping, reported Yang Chang, a historian in Hubei Province’s Huazhong Normal University, that less than 2 percent of it was actually used by its intended recipients.

PART THREE
Europe in the World

6
The Agro-Industrial Complex

POTATO WARS

When potato plants bloom, they send up five-lobed flowers that bob in fields like fat purple stars. According to tradition, Marie Antoinette liked the blossoms so much that she put them in her hair. Her husband, Louis XVI, supposedly put one in his buttonhole, inspiring a brief vogue in which the French aristocracy swanned around with potato plants on their clothes. Potatoes belong to the nightshade family, which means they are cousins to tomatoes, eggplant, tobacco, sweet peppers, and deadly nightshade. The tubers are not roots but modified stems that store nutrients underground; the eyes, from which new potatoes sprout, are descended from the leaves that grew on the stem. Potato fruits look like green cherry tomatoes but are full of solanine, a poison that is part of the plant’s defense system—it prevents pests from eating the seeds. As a rule modern farmers ignore the seed, instead cutting up tubers and planting the pieces. In a testament to linguistic confusion, tubers used for this purpose are called “seed potatoes.”

Today the potato is the fifth most important crop worldwide, surpassed in harvest volume only by sugarcane, wheat, maize, and rice. Originally it came from the Andes—not only
Solanum tuberosum,
the potato found in supermarkets, but many other types of potato that are eaten only in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. There are also scores of wild potato species that can be found everywhere from Argentina to the southwestern United States. Despite similarities of name and appearance, not one of these potatoes is related to the sweet potato, which belongs to a different botanical family. The two have long been confused; the word “potato” is derived erroneously from
batata,
the Taino name for sweet potato (and the source of its scientific name,
Ipomoea batatas
). The mix-up rankled the early English botanist John Gerard, who complained in 1597 that “those [who] vulgarly impose names upon plants have little either judgement or knowledge of them.” Intending to clear up the matter definitively in his “generall historie of plantes,” Gerard used the term “Virginia potato” for the ordinary potato, which is not from Virginia. He called sweet potatoes “common potatoes.”
¹

Potatoes are about three-quarters water and one-quarter starch but have vitamins enough to prevent scurvy if consumed in quantity. For 167 days in 1925 two Polish researchers ate almost nothing but potatoes (mashed with butter, steamed with salt, cut with oil into potato salad). At the end they reported no weight gain, no health problems, and, improbably, “no craving for change” in their diet. Historically speaking, the scientists’ regimen was not extreme; two British inquiries in 1839 intimated that the average Irish laborer’s per capita daily consumption of potatoes was twelve and a half pounds. Ireland was notorious for its potato habit, but the tubers had become so essential to all of northern Europe that Prussia and Austria fought a “potato war” in 1778–79 in which the two armies spent most of their time scrambling to get food for themselves and deny it to the enemy. Only when every potato in Bohemia had been consumed did hostilities end.

Compared to grains, tubers are inherently more productive. If the head of a wheat or rice plant grows too big, the plant will fall over, with fatal results. Modern plant breeders have developed wheat and rice varieties with shorter, stronger stalks that can bear heavier loads of grain. But even they could not support something as heavy as an Idaho potato. Growing underground, a tuber is not limited by the rest of the plant—there are no worries about its architecture. In 2008 a Lebanese farmer dug up a potato that weighed nearly twenty-five pounds. Photographs showed a man holding a tuber bigger than his head.

Many scholars believe that the introduction of
S. tuberosum
to Europe was a key moment in history. This is because their widespread consumption largely coincided with the end of famine in northern Europe. (Maize, another American crop, played a similar but smaller role in southern Europe.) More than that, the celebrated historian William H. McNeill has argued,
S. tuberosum
led to empire: “[P]otatoes, by feeding rapidly growing populations, permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950.” Hunger’s end helped create the political stability that allowed European nations to take advantage of American silver. The potato fueled the rise of the West.

As important in the long run, the European and North American adoption of the potato set the template for modern agriculture—the agro-industrial complex, as it is sometimes called. Celebrated by agronomists for its bounteous harvests and denounced by environmentalists for its toxicity, the agro-industrial complex rests on three pillars: improved crops, high-intensity fertilizers, and factory-made pesticides. All three are entwined with the Columbian Exchange, and with the potato.

Not only did the Columbian Exchange carry the ultra-productive potato to Europe and North America, it also brought ultra-productive Andean potato-cultivation techniques, including the world’s first intensive fertilizer: Peruvian guano. Andean peoples had mined it for centuries from great excremental deposits seabirds left on coastal islands. Fertilizer ships crossed the Atlantic by the hundreds, brimming with guano—and, many researchers believe, a fungus-like organism that blighted potatoes, causing a famine in Ireland that by some measures was the worst in the historical record.

Not long after, potatoes fell to the attack of another imported species, the Colorado potato beetle. Panicked farmers turned to the first inorganic pesticide: a widely available form of arsenic, sprayed with enthusiasm over the field. Competition to produce ever-more-effective arsenic compounds launched the modern pesticide industry—the third component of modern agribusiness. Brought together systematically in the 1950s and 1960s, improved crops, high-intensity fertilizers, and artificial pesticides created the Green Revolution, the explosion of agricultural productivity that transformed farms from Illinois to Indonesia—and set off a political argument about the food supply that grows more intense by the day.

SEA OF GENES

In 1853 an Alsatian sculptor named Andreas Friedrich erected a statue of Sir Francis Drake on a marble plinth in the center of Offenburg, a small city in southwest Germany. Friedrich portrayed Drake staring into the horizon in orthodox visionary fashion. His left hand rested on the hilt of his sword. His right gripped a potato. “Sir Francis Drake,” the base proclaimed,

disseminator of the potato in Europe
in the Year of Our Lord 1586.
Millions of people
who cultivate the earth
bless his immortal memory.

The statue was pulled down by the Nazis on November 9, 1938, a small portion of the violent frenzy known as Kristallnacht. Destroying the statue was a crime against art, not history: Drake almost certainly did not introduce the potato to Europe. Even if he
had
introduced it, though, the statue would be misguided. Credit for
Solanum tuberosum
surely belongs most to the Andean peoples who domesticated it.

Geographically, the Andes were an unlikely place for the creation of a major staple food. The second-biggest mountain range on the planet, the chain of peaks forms an icy barrier on the Pacific Coast of South America that is 5,500 miles long and in many places more than 22,000 feet high. Active volcanoes are scattered along its length like molten jewels on a belt. Ecuador alone had seven eruptions in the last century; San José, on Chile’s western border, has gone off seven times since 1822. The volcanoes are linked by geologic faults, which push against each other isometrically, triggering earthquakes, floods, and landslides. Even when the land is seismically quiet the climate is active. Temperatures in the highlands can fluctuate from 75°F to below freezing in the space of a few hours—the air is too thin to hold the heat. Sudden hailstorms splinter windows and drive vehicles off the road. Famously, El Niño—the name itself is an Andean coinage—brings floods to the coast and drought to the high plains. El Niño episodes can last for years.

The Offenburg memorial to Sir Francis Drake’s introduction of the potato was destroyed by the Nazis. (
Photo credit 6.1
)

The main part of the range consists of three roughly parallel mountain chains separated by high tablelands known as the altiplano. The altiplano (average altitude: about twelve thousand feet) holds most of the region’s arable land; it’s as if Europe had to support itself by farming the Alps. The sheer eastern face of the Andes catches the warm, humid winds from the Amazon, and consequently is beset by rain; the western, ocean-facing side, shrouded by the “rain shadow” of the peaks, contains some of the earth’s driest lands. The altiplano between has a dry season and a wet season, with most of the rain coming between November and March. Left to its own devices, it would be covered by grasses in the classic plains pattern.

From this unpromising terrain sprang, remarkably, one of the world’s great cultural traditions—one that by 1492 had reached, according to the University of Vermont geographer Daniel W. Gade, “a higher level of sophistication” than any of the world’s other mountain cultures. Even as Egyptian kingdoms built the pyramids, Andean societies were erecting their own monumental temples and ceremonial plazas. Contentious imperia jostled for power from Ecuador to northern Chile. Nasca, with its famous stone lines and depictions of animals; Chavín, with its grand temples at Chavín de Huántar; Wari, landscape engineers par excellence; Moche, renowned for ceramics depicting every aspect of life from war and work to sleeping and sex; Tiwanaku, the highest urban complex ever built (it was centered on Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake on the planet); Chimor, successor to Moche, with its sprawling capital of Chan Chan—the tally is enormous. Most famous today are the Inka, who seized much of the Andes in a violent flash, built great highways and cities splendid with gold, then fell to Spanish disease and Spanish soldiers.

The history of the civilizations of the Middle East and Egypt is entwined with the development of wheat and barley; similarly, indigenous societies in Mexico and Central America were founded on maize. In Asia, China’s story is written on paper made from rice. The Andes were different. Cultures there were nourished not by cereal crops like these but by tuber and root crops, the potato most important.

Archaeologists have turned up evidence of people eating potatoes thirteen thousand years ago in southern Chile—not the modern
Solanum tuberosum,
but a wild species,
S. maglia,
which still grows on the coast. Geneticists remain uncertain, though, of the exact pathway by which Andean cultures created the domestic potato. Because early Andean natives mainly grew their tubers from seed and apparently planted multiple species of
Solanum
in the same garden, they would have produced countless natural hybrids, some of which presumably gave rise to the modern potato. One often-cited analysis tried to nail down the process; after much study, its author declared that today’s potato was bred from four other species, two of which bore the label “unknown.” Timing, too, is unclear: archaeologists have established only that Andean peoples were eating wholly domesticated potatoes by 2000
B.C.