geography matters
thank goodness we have ours
One of the rewarding points of visiting Kansas City is viewing the adjacent farmland. My son and I laugh that we both love ‘horizon’ views, or being able to look out across the broad, open plains as far as the eye can see. At this time of the year, the lush, dark green trees with leaves freshly out surround the newly planted fields. This also reminds one that five months from now an unparalleled bounty will emerge from the grounds into our kitchens and into providing us food security as a nation.
One of the reasons it’s so rewarding is the reality that we are pretty self-sufficient in producing our food in this country. I took that for granted in the 1960s because we could get that classically American delicacy, peanut butter, in the commissary about once a year. My dad always loved to retell the story of hearing Kerry gush to her parents that ‘the Watsons actually have peanut butter’ as if we had the manna of the Old Testament.
But we produce so many varieties of basic food needed for humans to survive and thrive. Most countries cannot compare with our dozens of food crops.
What we rarely faced as a society is the food insufficiency terrifying many people around the world, not the least Xi Jinping and China. We all know Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other regions periodically afflicted by terrible droughts. We certainly have drought conditions, though not this particular year, in a wide swath of the Southwestern United States. Serious sustained droughts, as we might want to remember, can undermine food productivity much as it did in the Great Dustbowl but has historically been a transitory problem. As Merrill Lynch used to remind us, however, past performance is no guarantee of future events so this could definitely last if we confronted it.
China’s problems, however, are somewhat different. As I noted last Friday in ‘Heat heat Heat Heat’, prolonged heat waves have plagued the vast country two years running. Those heat waves killed crops but also affected power generation. For China, however, those crops were important in the ever-increasing desire to protect the Middle Kingdom’s autarky, in case of any potential adverse actions by Washington to cut off food or anything else.
The issues of food production, however, are broader than merely water supply. For its vast size, roughly the same as the continental United States, China uses 54.7% of its space for agriculture;its arable land—that where a farmer can plough to grow crops—constituting a puny 11.3% according to the CIA in 2018. When I first began raising this point with students fewer than twenty years earlier, the number was closer to 14%. For 1.2+ billion folks, that is a scary prospect to see a decrease coupled with folks incentivised to forego farming altogether for the big city life.
By comparison, the CIA lists our agricultural land use as 44.5% of the continent, a 16.8% subset as arable land. That small difference of 5% gives the United States an immeasurably important cushion on growing food.
So much of China is mountains rather than the rich alluvial soil so abundantly located in the central farm band of the United States. There is a reason the phrase ‘the mountains are high and the Emperor is far away’ applies to many challenges in that nation: it’s a political and social critique which also happens to be true physically.
Famine is a common Chinese experience, sadly, even in recent history. The late 1950s and a portion of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution between 1966-76 were known for massive failing to produce sufficient food. As a result, even in this era of ostentatious wealth in so much of the People’s Republic, the fear of famine drives many wealthy to consume massive amounts.
As China became more prosperous, weight increased in conjunction with greater consumption of a western, meat-intensive and processed food-intensive diet. It is no longer true that all Chinese are slim as a result of food consumption and massive physical exertion. I long noted with black humour that McDonald’s (and Kentucky Fried Chicken) with profound influences in the diet are the greatest soft weapons against China’s future as the nation wrestles with weight, heart disease, diabetes, and the other ‘rich people’s diseases’ of the twenty-first century, all utterly unknown in a nationwrought by violence through much of the past two hundred years.
So much of China’s farming has been in small farms with inherent inefficiency. As the population grew, food production did not keep pace with needs. It followed, then, that moving people off inefficient farms in the late 1970s to put them into foreign-financed factories during the Four Modernisations seemed a better use of the nation’s resources. But food was still needed.
China’s leaders are correct to fear food can be a weapon of statecraft. The 1980 grain embargo President Jimmy Carter instigated following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan failed because an embargo only works with sole sources of products. Argentina alone had plenty of wheat to meet Soviet needs and they were decidedly angry about Carter’s tendency to criticise the military regime in Buenos Aires for its human rights abuses. The Soviets benefitted from the Argentine frustration with Carter.
Today, China has the vast Belt & Road Initiative Xi began not long after assuming the General Secretary position in November 2012. One of the most notable successes China has during this Initiative is agreements to assure food imports from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile for a start; Australia has also appealed as a trading partner based on food and natural resources China needs. Those countries offer wheat to make noodles, beef soyabeans, and fish for protein are the basic components of the Chinese diet in conjunction with rice. Importing food allows the nation to focus its arable efforts on rice to preclude the need to import much of it.
Insufficient water makes that production so much harder in the Middle Kingdom itself. after a wet winter and spring, flying into the brand new Kansas City airport this afternoon illustrated why the U.S. farmers grwo so much. Whether the few small family farms left or the massive agicultural conglamerates of spread across so much of the country, farms are lush areas in a good spring, able to produce an incredible amount of food for this world, because the argircultural techniques so effectively leverage the geographic advantages this country happens to have.
This is not to forget that millions of Americans go to bed hungry at night, an inexplicable fact in a country with such bounty. And many people eat highly processed food which is barely food but the primary issue in America today is overabundance followed by overconsumption rather than shortages.
Next time you go to a farmers’ market or a grocery store, note how many of the products are American-grown. Certainly globalisation opened the door to importing crops year around from some places. But the U.S. geographic bounty is almost remarkable in world history. Arguably only Canada with its vast prairies compares.
This advantage is one that China’s leadership fears. China has many legs up in the growing competition with the United States but, mercifully, food is not generally one. Thank you, geography. FIN
The CIA Factbook (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2022), retrieved at https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/china/#geography