1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [103]
The lack of recognition was unmerited; Hong apparently captured the workings of the Malthusian trap better than Malthus. (I use the hedge word “apparently” because he never worked out the details.) The Englishman’s theory made a simple prediction: more food would lead to more mouths would lead to more misery. In fact, though, the world’s farmers have more than kept pace. Between 1961 and 2007 humankind’s numbers doubled, roughly speaking, while global harvests of wheat, rice, and maize tripled. As population has soared, in fact, the percentage of chronically malnourished has fallen—contrary to Malthus’s prediction. Hunger still exists, to be sure, but the chance that any given child will be malnourished has steadily, hearteningly declined. Hong, by contrast, pointed to a related but more complex prospect. The continual need to increase yields, Hong presciently suggested, would lead to an ecological catastrophe, which would cause social dysfunction—and with it massive human suffering.
Exactly this process is what researchers today mean when they talk about the Malthusian trap. Indeed, one way to summarize today’s environmental disputes is to say that almost all boil down to the question of whether humankind will continue to accumulate wealth and knowledge, as has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, or whether the environmental impacts of that accumulation—soil degradation, loss of biodiversity, consumption of groundwater supplies, climate change—will snap shut the jaws of the Malthusian trap, returning the earth to pre-industrial wretchedness. Alarming in this context, China provides an example of the latter, at least in part. In the decades after American crops swept into the highlands, the richest society in the world was convulsed by a struggle with its own environment—a struggle it decisively lost.
“THE MOUNTAINS REVEAL THEIR STONES”
Between the 1680s, when the Qing resumed the silver trade, and the 1780s, the price of rice in Suzhou, a rice-trading center near modern Shanghai, more than quadrupled. Incomes did not keep up—a recipe for social unrest. As if on cue, rebellions exploded across China; the convulsion that dismayed Hong is alone said to have led to several million deaths. Part of the reason for the price hike was the influx of silver to Fujian, according to Quan Hansheng, the economic historian, which drove up Chinese food prices in exactly the same way that the influx of silver to Spain had earlier driven up European prices. The population boom presumably increased demand, putting further pressure on the price. State purchases for granaries sometimes had the same effect. But a big reason for the price rise was that many farmers simply stopped growing rice.
Qing emperors had made a priority of improving transportation networks so that farmers could sell crops profitably. The intent was to facilitate the movement of staple foods; the new roads would help merchants ship rice and wheat from places with abundant harvests to places that needed supplies. Instead smallholders discovered they could make more money by switching from rice and wheat to sugarcane, peanuts, mulberry trees, and, most of all, tobacco.
Initially the Qing court cracked down on this shift, insisting that peasant farmers practice “correct agriculture”—that is, grow rice and wheat. “Tobacco is not healthy for the people,” the Yongzheng emperor proclaimed in 1727. “Because cultivating tobacco requires using rich land, its cultivation is harmful for growing grain.” But as the court grew more insular and debased—seemingly the fate of all Chinese dynasties—it lost interest in enforcing agricultural correctness.
Farmers seized