Читать книгу Nature's Evil - Alexander Etkind - Страница 26

On the eve of modernity, the European economy depended on hundreds of towns with surrounding green belts. The main route for trade was by water. On the canals built in the Low Countries, one horse could pull as big a barge-load of grain as fifty horses could carry on a good road. Thanks to its rivers and sea coast, Poland was the main supplier of grain to the Netherlands. Productivity was low, but Poland contributed to the Netherlands a huge number of ‘ghost acres’ – according to the historian Jan de Vries, almost 2.5 million hectares of arable land, half the area of modern Holland. Still, only 5 per cent of the wheat and 12 per cent of the rye grown in Poland was exported. All the rest was consumed locally or kept back as seed. To increase his revenue, the landowner needed to reduce his peasants’ consumption even further, but they were barely able to subsist. Grain exports fed the thriving Dutch culture but led to serfdom in Poland.¹⁸

While big cities were increasingly dependent on foreign trade, the countryside relied on the nearest town. In 1826, the Mecklenburg landowner Johann Heinrich von Thünen demonstrated that agricultural revenue depends not on the soil or the farmer’s skill but on the farm’s distance from the nearest town. In his book The Isolated State, von Thünen constructed a formal model for the relation between town and country. In this model, each town is surrounded by concentric rings of agricultural activity. The inner ring consists of nearby farms, which produce vegetables, milk and meat for the town’s markets. These fetch high prices in the town, but only the nearest farms make a profit on these perishable goods. They do not practise crop rotation because they fertilise the land with night soil which they get from the town. The next ring out is made up of arable farms, which supply wheat and rye to the town. The closer the farm is to the town, the cheaper the cost of transport; von Thünen’s estate was situated 5 miles from Rostock, so he knew what he was talking about. If a farm is 10 German miles (75 kilometres) away from the town market, the horses and carts will be on the road there and back for four days. The horses have to be fed. According to von Thünen’s calculations, on such a journey they would eat one-eighth of the grain delivered. Delivering grain from farms further than 50 German miles from a town, the horses would eat the entire load on the journey. The forest zone is situated in the third ring, on the periphery. The prices in the town shift the borders of the agricultural belts: the higher the price of grain, the greater the area of arable land, but then firewood will be too distant.¹⁹ Therefore von Thünen re-examined the theory of land rent: it is defined not by the productivity of the land, as Ricardo thought, but by the land’s distance from the market.

Grain is the most widespread of all main resources after air and water. However, it became the subject of protectionist laws, which limited free trade for the sake of security. The interests of the grain producers, who wanted to raise prices, clashed with the interests of the consumers, who faced starvation. When the Napoleonic wars ended and troops were demobilised all over Europe, there was an immediate fall in the demand for grain. In England, a parliament of landowners chose to protect the market and voted for the Corn Laws, which limited the import of cereals. The price of industrial products fell but the price of grain and flour stabilised. The cotton mill workers couldn’t earn enough to buy food, and bread riots broke out in London. In 1815 the volcano Tambor erupted on the remote island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies. The result was ‘the year without a summer’, when harvests failed on a catastrophic scale. Defending the ‘cotton interest’ against the ‘grain interest’, a group of journalists and intellectuals from the cotton-processing town of Manchester demanded a free market. The leader of the movement was Richard Cobden, the owner of a profitable calico factory. Free trade, wrote Cobden, is the secret of permanent peace, because all nations will have as great an interest in the prosperity of other nations as in their own. For the generation that had lived through the Napoleonic wars and the continental blockade, this opinion was convincing. In 1841, Robert Peel, a reader of Adam Smith and supporter of free trade, became prime minister. He was the son of a textile magnate – the first leader of the government whose wealth came from cotton, not grain or sugar. In 1846 the Great Famine began in Ireland after blight devastated the potato crop. The same variety – a monoculture – was planted throughout the island, and the blight spread like wildfire. A proportion of British grain went to Ireland, and this helped Peel to repeal the Corn Laws. The debate about the advantages of free trade over mercantilism resulted in a victory for the free trade lobby.

Karl Marx moved to London in 1849, and the debates about the Corn Laws helped him to formulate his idea of class warfare. The fall in grain prices resulted in the ruin of the tenant farmers. The effect was similar to that of the earlier land enclosures – landless peasants went to the industrial towns or emigrated. In the countryside, economy of scale helped the largest farms to survive. In order to facilitate land sales and mergers, the government had to create a free market in land, abolishing inheritance rights and entailments. The radical followers of Bentham and Cobden had long been calling for this. This was a victory of industrial over agricultural interests, of metals and textiles over grain and sugar.

The abolition of corn tariffs in England led to soaring prices on the continent. Because of railways and steamships, American and Russian exports of grain dramatically increased, and the price of grain fell. At the end of the nineteenth century practically the whole of Europe was practising food protectionism, which largely meant grain import tariffs. Only the most industrialised countries, Great Britain and Belgium, refrained from this. In the 1880s Great Britain imported 65 per cent of its wheat, paying for it with its industrial goods. On the eve of the First World War, Russian peasants harvested three times less wheat per acre than English farmers, but the area of arable land kept pace with the growth in population and the expansion of railways.²⁰ The Russian prime minister, Sergey Witte, a former railway official, took British mercantilism from the sea onto dry land. His plan worked: thanks to the railways and low tariffs, the growth in the grain trade made up more than half the growth of the whole economy. But after the war, global wheat prices collapsed again. The economic historian David Allen characterises the late period of the Russian Empire as a one-off boom in raw materials.

The agricultural experiments of the Soviet authorities led to mass starvation. Collectivisation of agriculture brought crop failures, ecological devastation and mass famines. Things got so bad that in 1982 the Communist Party voted for the Food Programme, which entailed annual purchases of huge amounts of grain in exchange for oil. The USSR collapsed, and its successor, the Russian Federation, has become a major exporter of grain. However, petrofarming is just another method of converting oil into food (see chapter 13). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the double action of farm subsidies and energy-intensive technologies has reproduced the Soviet Food Programme all over the developed world.