False Economy - Alan Beattie [39]
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.
Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.
Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.
Small, light, durable, expensive: silks and spices formed some of the world's first global supply chains. The cinnamon mentioned by Masefield was being brought home to Spain, which extended its trading empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries across Asia and to South America. But the same spice—particularly valued as a food preservative—was traded overland between South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East at least as early as the second millennium b.c. The trade, controlled for many centuries by Arab and Persian traders, was significant enough to have been mentioned in the Old Testament.
Water comes a long way down the list of obvious goods to trade.
True, there is a lot more of it in some parts of the world than others, and the potential gains in efficiency in moving it from wet to dry would be considerable. But it is exceedingly heavy and bulky. And despite the rising cost of water in the dry nations of the world, water is rarely worth the cost of shipping direct.
There was, it is true, at one point a thriving water trade between North America and India in frozen form. In Walden, Henry David Tho-reau described the cutting of thousands of tons of ice from the lake near which he lived in Massachusetts. The blocks were shipped to Bengal to find their way into underground icehouses to furnish sweating British colonial officials with cool water and ice cream. In the 1870s, New England was exporting 12,000 tons of ice a year to India, Latin America, and East Asia. Even on a six-month sea voyage, the chunks were big enough that much arrived unmelted.
But it was in truth not the water but the cold that was being exported. When steam-powered ice-making machinery was invented and installed in India at the end of the nineteenth century, the ice trade with North America evaporated. Still, there are intriguing parallels between the ice trade of the nineteenth century and the virtual water trade of the ancient Mediterranean and today. India was in effect importing the bitter New England winter embedded in the blocks of ice. Rome and other urban centers in ancient times, and Egypt and other dry countries in the twenty-first century, implicitly buy water from wetter nations embedded in the crops they import.
A simple look at a trade map for a water-intensive product like wheat betrays a clear geographical pattern. The water, in general, goes from wet countries to dry. It is cheaper, other things being equal, to grow crops in countries where water is abundant, so they will tend to displace crops grown in dry nations.
Governments across the world are drawing up plans to manage their water stocks, working out how to allocate them between farmers and urban dwellers, how much they can take out of the river systems without causing serious environmental damage, and so forth. Their task is eased by the market, which has dealt with vast discrepancies between countries by sucking water around the world trading system. Yet the growth of Egypt as the granary of the ancient world owed a great deal to forcible government transfers, as well as to the silent operation of the invisible hand of market forces.
The potential for growing grain in the Nile valley and delta was obvious from very early on. Along with the similar but smaller basin of the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, it was one of the original wellsprings of irrigated agriculture. It was in the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile valleys that humans moved on from living as roaming bands of hunter-gatherers and coalesced into communities of settled