The Three Gorges Dam
EMPIRES OF FOOD
The Three Gorges Dam
by Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas
How Does the World’s Largest Dam Affect Global Food Supply?
— From Empires of Food
— Topics: Environment, Sociology, Commerce
The Three Gorges dam under construction (October 2004). Photo: Yogho.
Introduction
In their ambitious book Empires of Food, authors Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas take on a huge topic: the cause-and-effect relationship between food systems, societies and governments or, as they phrase it in the book’s subtitle, “feast, famine and the rise and fall of civilizations.” This is historical context as well as advice for college students, who have only a vague idea of where food comes from.
One valuable aspect of their writing is the ease with which they move from science to sociology to history to commerce. In a series of specific episodes, they show how the management of food production has both empowered and doomed empires. A second attribute of this work is its present-mindedness, not so much a warning as an explanation of what is happening today in the taxed-to-the-limits global food network, and what is likely to happen tomorrow.
I find that few class assignments gain traction with my cadets unless I can show that it can contribute to their immediate well-being and future prospects, both career and happiness. The topic of food certainly grabs their attention; this is information that our students need as they make decisions about the food they eat.
For me, food is a rich classroom topic to teach because it is so immediate. What you had for lunch (and where it came from), working in a restaurant (every class has students with vivid experiences of this), articles on health care, obesity studies, students’ eating habits, differences in families and what they cook, films like Fast Food Nation – there are so many solid critical thinking and writing assignments which can connect to this one.
The lucky thing for us is that Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas write so well. They make their scholarship accessible. In this interview and excerpt, they begin their narrative with the gigantic new dam China has built, and use it to introduce readers to their master thesis. Please keep in mind that the book text also includes full footnotes which explain in detail each of the episodes and ideas which the authors bring into their far-reaching exposition.
Interview with Evan D. G. Fraser
07/2011
You begin your remarkable book, Empires of Food, with a look at the Three Gorges Dam (along the Yangtze River in the Hubei Province of eastern China, completed in 2008). Why did you start a book about food with a dam?
The Three Gorges Dam is one of the wonders of the modern world and a metaphor for the potential of technological progress as well as the threat of what happens when our technology might let us down. Also, the Three Gorges Dam is a symbol that reminds us that China is a new superpower. Due to its population, wealth, and political clout, it will shape the way we eat for the next generation.
A little-known Italian trader of the 16th Century, Francesco Carletti, is a central figure of your book. Why did you choose him?
What attracted us about Francesco Carletti is that he was one of the first Europeans to describe many food stuffs that have become commonplace: potatoes, bananas, hot chocolate. So he gives us a glimpse into what the world was like when true globalization was just beginning. Also, his writing is very funny and his journal is extremely entertaining so we felt his story would give our book, which is on a serious topic, a somewhat more human and fun side.
Saint Benedict is another unlikely hero in your history of food production. Can you describe his “successful business model” and its influence?
Benedict's main contribution was to write up the rules by which a monastery in Europe's "Dark Ages" (circa 400-900 AD) should operate. This then became essentially one of the world's first franchise operations with outlets opening across Europe. These monks were then able to control food production, processing, storing and retailing, thereby becoming very wealth. So, we argue that there are some strong parallels between the role that the Benedictine Monasteries played in Medieval Europe and the way that multi-national food
companies play today.
You point to a number of assumptions we make about our food supply today. Which do you feel is the most fragile, or suspect?
There is a pretty strong scientific consensus that the 2050s, 60s and 70s won't have as good weather as the 1950s, 60s or 70s. This worries me because the way farming systems have evolved over the past 100 years depends on good weather. At the same time, we've created a permanent class of poor and economically marginalized people. When the weather turns bad, I think that major parts of the world will become significantly less productive and the economically marginal people will not have the buying power to obtain the food they need to survive.
One of the recent food “revolutions” is the slow food movement. How will this simple-seeming idea bring such widespread change?
Slow Food is emblematic of a cultural shift whereby consumers are willingly becoming much better informed about food and the processes by which food arrives in our kitchens. Since we live in a market oriented democracy, I believe that most change comes from consumers and voters. To make real progress in reforming our food system, therefore, we need more educated consumers who vote both in the ballot box but also with their wallets for change. Slow Food is part of this process.
What do emerging nations have to learn from empires of the past, empires which failed to keep their people fed and paid the price?
Maintaining rural incomes and diverse agro-ecosystems are probably the best ways of protecting rural communities that are peripheral in the world's economy. In the short term, developing export crops for sale in rich markets seems like a good idea. However, cases such as famines in England's Colonies in the 1870s suggest that export economies do not have the resilience to withstand environmental problems like drought. So, it's a balancing act: using exports to grow incomes, while maintaining diverse, vibrant, local markets.
Was the Green Revolution a blessing or a curse? What would Norman Borlaug say if he were alive today?
The Green Revolution has helped boost yields, and allowed hundreds of millions of people to live better. However, in using these technologies we have made our food system dependent on cheap oil and good weather, both of which are unlikely to continue into the future. This has happened because we have used green revolution technologies to create farming systems that are extremely productive yet not very thrifty when it comes to energy nor very resilient when it comes to pests of droughts. So, I think Norman Borlaug would probably advocate using our technologies to help create more resilient lower energy agro-ecosystems. Of course this will likely come at the expense of some productivity. But in ecological systems, everything comes at a tradeoff.
A pirate named James Lancaster plays a role in your narrative. What can we take away from his experience?
James Lancaster was a swashbuckling buccaneer during the Elizabethan era who helped found England's overseas trading empire. So, he's an interesting and exciting character to write about. On a more serious note he represents how the spread of food empires tends to be quite rapacious and exploit the people who produce the food that elite members of society enjoy.
Illustration commissioned by JES copyright @ 2011 Margaret Hurst
The Three Gorges Dam
An Excerpt from the book “Empires of Food”
Copyright @ 2010 Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas. Reprinted with the permission of The Free Press.
A brown dusk hangs above the Yangtze River as it drifts, hazy as stale tea, through the concrete warrens of middle China. A few miles upstream, the water still laps against fantastical crags and bamboo forest, but in downtown Yichang, it seeps along a molded channel, as grey and unyielding as the skyscrapers that roost on the paved edge of the stream. A few years ago, Yichang was the Chinese equivalent of a puddle-duck hamlet—a forgotten river city like dozens of others in the valley. Today, it’s one of the new cities of the East, a rusting bunker of 4 million people living under a whorl of ozone and carbon dioxide. You don’t see the sun much in Yichang. But you do see traffic. Lane after lane of chrome and plastic and gusting diesel clang past the fluorescent restaurants and brothels, the silent blue television glow from the windows of the apartments, the sad potted trees.
If Yichang were an American or European city, it would rank, in terms of size, in the second tier. In China, it barely registers on the human landscape. But it does register on the economic one. The city stands six hundred miles west of Shanghai, midpoint along the river
between the industrial coast and China’s vast inland metropolis of Chongqing. That wouldn’t matter much if it weren’t for a particular trick of geography that would make Yichang the site of humanity’s single greatest material act: the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.
The physical reality of the dam squashes the brain’s capacity for hyperbole. Like the numerical value of pi or the distance between stars, it’s a concept that can only be
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The Three Gorges Dam unveils a new world …
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encapsulated by numbers. For instance: The dam contains 986.56 million cubic feet of poured concrete. It flooded 244 square miles of land. It’s propped up by 256,500 tons of metal supports. Building it displaced 1.13 million people. In short, it’s a piece of civilization that can only really be thought of in terms of a spreadsheet.
Passing through the shipping locks on the upper section of the dam is like sailing through a steel gate into Brobdingnag. The five lock chambers are each big enough to float twenty large cargo vessels; their 130-foot-high doors are tall enough for cruise ships to putter through like tugboats. Once inside the chambers, the water drains away at a rate of a meter every couple of seconds, leaving passengers craning their necks to see the sky. It takes a boat three hours to pass through the dam, but doing so makes travelers feel like they’re crossing a threshold into a changed world, one that’s out of scale with everything downstream. A broken flow, leaving behind everything that’s ever gone before. The travelers are right. The Three Gorges Dam unveils a new world that stretches far beyond the cinder-block maze of Yichang. On the outskirts of the city, the river swells to a width of about a mile and a half. Before the Chinese started to tinker with the river’s flow, the water churned with sediment from as far away as the Himalayas, rolling with it down into the flat, squelching miles of the Yangtze Delta to Shanghai. Now much of the grit settles against the concrete filter of
the Three Gorges. One local hydrologist (who asked to remain anonymous) says that since the river ceased replenishing the delta’s mud, Shanghai has actually begun to sink.
The Yangtze River cuts the nation in half, both physically and gastronomically. On the northern bank is the beginning of wheat country. To the south lie rice paddies. So long as the river remains navigable, merchant fleets keep the western hinterland connected to Shanghai’s markets, and hence to the world. But when the river floods, as it once did with regularity, the catastrophe can be mythic. A Yangtze flood in 1931 killed more than 100,000 people, although this was a mere fraction of the 4 million deaths inflicted by China’s rivers in a grisly season that still holds the world record for murderous natural disasters.2 China’s history is the history of its rivers, and the dam is meant to change that. Official proclamations declare that the Three Gorges is a giant battery of clean, renewable energy, ridding a sorely gassed nation of 100 million tons of carbon dioxide and 2 million tons of sulfur dioxide emissions per year. It’s meant to bestow dependable irrigation on millions of peasant farmers. Most importantly, it promises to lessen flooding from once per decade to once per century, shielding 1.5 million hectares and 15 million people from the deadly wash. On the other hand, critics are worried that the dam’s reservoir will silt up like a
clogged drain, making the whole project not only wasteful but dangerous. Earthquakes, too, are dangled as an apocalyptic possibility, as is terrorism. And then there’s the question of obsolescence. With a brave, new climate burning down on our icecaps and glaciers, the twenty first century is going to be awash in floodwaters. The dam, in short, may prove to be useless or even downright catastrophic, potentially unleashing a gigantic wave of muddy, rolling death on the river valley. Yichang would be its first victim.
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Super-rice needs super-pesticides, and super amounts of water and chemicals.
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In the meantime, the Three Gorges Dam has risen to an unusual pantheon of human achievement: that of Epochal Engineering, stuff that sums up the human condition of the time. Stonehenge, for instance, reflected the relationship between Neolithic people and the
cosmos. The pyramids proclaimed the divine nature of the pharaohs. Now the Three Gorges Dam declares to the world, in the most ostentatious manner possible, that China Is Modern. No longer is it a nation of bent peasants eking out a living among the rice plants. It’s now a
nation of six-lane highways and lab coats, of hydroelectricity powering the laptops, where something as primitive as a bursting riverbank belongs to the muddy past. And it’s especially a nation where no one goes hungry, where even the poor can stalk the refrigerated aisle for
a bag of frozen dumplings. In the twenty-first century, the China of the Three Gorges Dam need never fear starvation. It’s part of the safe, clean, modern world. Part of the global food empire.
Or so it seems on first glance. In the late 1990s, some Western researchers worried themselves into a tizzy about the effect that a global China would have on the world’s food markets. They suggested that a country so populous couldn’t possibly feed itself, particularly since its land area under cultivation was shrinking. They thought that China’s appetite for imported rice, in particular, would drain the international markets by the year 2030, driving up prices and making trouble for everyone from commodities brokers in Chicago to slum dwellers in Rio. This hasn’t happened. China remains almost entirely self-sufficient,
consuming only homegrown rice and mostly homegrown wheat. This would be good news for everyone if it had any chance of lasting. It doesn’t. The Chinese Academy of Sciences recently stated that, due to climate and population change, “cereal production . . . [will] fall
significantly as the century progresses.” This is bad news for everyone, because the Chinese food empire, with its tangle of farms, warehouses, refrigeration cars, corn exchanges, cash registers, and frying pans, is hopelessly intertwined with the rest of the world. Recall the cliché of the butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon and causing a hurricane: today, we have a shrimp boat hauling up an empty net in the Mekong Delta and sparking a riot in Haiti.
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… the Chinese food empire, with its tangle of farms, warehouses, refrigeration cars, corn exchanges, cash registers, and frying pans, is hopelessly intertwined with the rest of the world.
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To feed itself, China is resorting to the deus ex machina of genetically modified grain—“super-rice” varieties that are twice as productive as natural ones. What biotechnology giveth, it also taketh away in the form of weird, genetically mutating pests. Super-rice needs
super-pesticides, and super amounts of water and chemicals. When the Chinese planted their first strains of these laboratorial wonders, they bathed them in a wash of fertilizers. And these products cost oil. Lots of oil. So they yoked their agriculture, as Westerners did long ago, to the energy market. It’s a devil’s bargain at best. At worst, perhaps in some future, fateful year when the price of oil floats to record highs along with the annual temperatures, it’s going to be hell.
Genetically modified crops may not even promise technological salvation anymore. One of China’s current experiments is with a strain of rice that produces its own insecticide, a poison tagged for a prowling plant killer called the stem borer. But the stem borer is already yesterday’s villain. Even as this new rice is unleashed on the stem borer, a fresh pest, the brown leafhopper, is replacing the ailing vandal, proving again that ecology is impossible to squash into an engineer’s blueprint. Something unexpected always happens to mess up the prophets.
The Rise and Fall of Food Empires, Past, Present, and Future
The Three Gorges Dam exists because of the way China gets its food. And China, like all developed countries, is part of the global food empire. Food empires are the subject of this book. They are what urban societies create to feed themselves. In their simplest formation, they’re webs of farms and trails, rivers and vegetation, all of which function to deliver food from a piece of tilled land to a cluster of interested eaters. To do this well, more food must be created than the producers themselves wish to eat. The food must also be preserved and shipped on the winding journey from farmer to diner. And the food empire needs a
mechanism for exchanging the food between these parties. These three functions—surplus, storage/shipping, and exchange— are the pillars of every food empire from ancient Egypt to Victorian England. Just as there is no life without food, so there is no civilization without a food empire.
Driving a wagon of grain into a legionnaire camp; measuring hops into a beer keg destined for sale to a village on the other side of a forest; packing tea leaves in the hold of an Indiaman for the voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. Such is the daily bustle of food empires. The engineers who poured the concrete for China’s cyclopean water projects
were likewise working on behalf of our staggeringly complex modern food empire, one that feeds everyone who buys groceries from a store. Which, unless you’re a subsistence farmer or some recluse with a fishing spear and a headful of Thoreau, means all of us.
Despite its seeming triumph over the technological strictures that hobbled its predecessors, today’s food empire is cracked with very old fissures. We’re making the same mistake our ancestors did, and the result is a system as delicate as a ripe sheaf of emmer wheat. One
brusque stroke and the grains will fall away. The mistake of the modern food empire is to accept three apparently self-evident assumptions. The first is that the Earth is fertile. For the
last eighty years, human beings have been plowing, sowing, and reaping with a fury that the planet’s soil has never before experienced. Past food empires farmed as frantically as they could, but modern advances put them to shame. Today’s bumper crops, even more so than historical harvests, deplete the earth, drawing down what ecologists call “natural capital.” By spending our geological endowment, we’ve been able to feed billions of human beings. But we haven’t replaced the fund. When older food empires depleted their soil, they either expanded onto fresh ground or concocted new technologies to resuscitate the land. Then, when these strategies inevitably faltered, the food empires had to retreat, leaving abandoned cities and memories of wealth.
Our own food empire has yet to stall. For a hundred years, we’ve beefed up our soil with clever fertilizers and planted it with breeds of engineered crops. The question that bubbles under the Bunsen burners of the world’s agricultural laboratories, though, is whether we can
indefinitely cook up new biochemical fixes. Farming does violence to nature. Will we always have enough Band-Aids on hand?
The second undermining assumption for the stability of food empires is that the forecast calls for sunny, mild weather, with possible showers. That’s the sort of weather we’ve enjoyed for generations, but it’s a historical blip. Human-induced changes aside, our planet’s climate is hardly static. During the Roman Warm Period, a string of pleasant centuries boosted Europe’s wheat harvests and swelled her vineyard grapes. The seventeenth century, on the other hand, was entirely less comfortable, with a Little Ice Age stunting diets across the world and driving the irritable masses to war.
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The Three Gorges Dam exists because of the way China gets its food.
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Food empires, on the whole, grow bigger when the sun and rain cooperate. This was the case with our modern system, which didn’t undergo any significant climatic shocks between the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the droughts in the 1990s. All the truly horrific famines
of the twentieth century (China, Bengal, Russia, Ethiopia, etc.) were political or economic evils. They had less to do with weather than with policy.12 If past examples are any guide, though, when the storm clouds come, we ought to look not only to our umbrellas, but to our larders.
Cities have a tendency to shrink with the grain yields. Our third mistake is to assume that it’s good business to do one thing well. The modern food empire is a patchwork of specialized regions producing large amounts of a very few commodities. This is sound economics but terrible ecology. A specialized agricultural region is fragile in the face of a particular insect or spore or an untimely spell of dry skies. Nature is most resilient when it’s diverse. And since all our specialty patches depend on one another to constitute our food empire, none of them can exist alone. None are self-reliant. Remove one and the whole system unravels. There’s a fourth assumption that affects the first three, but since it’s unique to our modern food empire, we have no historical lesson to glean. Just logical ones. Our food supply, like everything else in our civilization, takes cheap fossil fuels for granted. We use oil to power
everything from water pumps to meat freezers; the factories that synthesize fertilizer in chemical vats use natural gas. Without a predictable, affordable flow, we can’t grow and refrigerate the dizzying quantities of food eaten by our metropolises. Bargain-priced energy is the reason we’ve been free to breed and feed our population past the 6 billion tally.
Remove the energy, and those billions, too, will be taken away.
Of course, these are a lot of assumptions on which to base something as important as the feeding of our species. They assume no pendulum swings in the price of energy. No global warming. They place existential faith in the scientists trying to mask chronic soil degradation
by inventing new seeds and fertilizers. And they assume no political reneging on trade agreements—like, for instance, when India banned the export of non-basmati rice in 2008 in a panicked attempt to smother its domestic prices (Places that had long depended on
having this rice to eat themselves, like Bangladesh and parts of Africa, quickly brokered exceptions and side deals that secured their imports).
But what if India had really run out of food? To be mistaken in one colossal assumption about our food empire may be a misfortune. To be mistaken in all four seems like something worse than carelessness. It seems like willful disregard for the truth. When we finally shed these assumptions, we’ll realize the genuine price of the way we produce, distribute, and consume food.
Our food empire began to totter alarmingly in the spring of 2008. Initial stories quietly noted a drought in Australia and a swing in the value of the yuan. Then the headlines grew excited. Violence in Burkina Faso. Rice quotas at U.S. Walmarts.15 Biofuel stealing the corn from our mouths. Violence in India. The World Bank declaring an international crisis. Violence in Mexico.16 Panic wasn’t really an unreasonable reaction. Worldwide food prices, which were already up by 25 percent compared with the first half of the decade, spiraled out of daily
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Despite its seeming triumph over the technological strictures that hobbled its predecessors, today’s food empire is cracked with very old fissures.
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affordability and into the realm of luxury. Robert B. Zoellick, president of the World Bank, proclaimed in April 2008, “Since 2005, the prices of staples have jumped 80 percent. Last
month, the real price of rice hit a 19-year high; the real price of wheat rose to a 28-year high and almost twice the average price of the last 25 years.”17 That spring, another 75 million people slipped off the statistical precipice into the wretched classification of “hungry.”18
In the hysteria, not many people noticed that 2008 was the single most bountiful year in the history of agriculture. Never before had farmers coaxed such plenty from the earth, never had harvests been so lush. The weight of the global breadbasket was 2.24 billion tons, a
robust 5 percent increase over the previous year. Yet food prices utterly detached themselves from the fact that we had reaped the best harvest in the entirety of human existence. That’s because our assumptions had finally started to wear thin.
History has a talent for ruining comfortable ideas. In the nineteenth century, at the height of Victorian industry and the flowering of mechanization, 45 million people died when well-reasoned, generally well-intentioned British colonial policies blended, murderously, with the weather of El Niño.19 If a true environmental catastrophe had struck the world in 2008—a drought in the American Midwest or a bad case of European corn borer in the Ukraine—it would have been an awful lesson in history. That’s the negative side of the food empire. The bonds that link our pantry shelves to the wages of tractor drivers on the North
China Plain are real, for both good and bad.
So even though malnutrition and hunger are inconceivable to many of the world’s inhabitants, the only difference between a bond and a shackle is perspective. The U.S. Congress passes a law on biofuel subsidies, and Bangladeshis can’t buy rice. A dry summer sends an Australian cattleman into bankruptcy, and Senegalese storefronts are smashed. It’s no different from the way that toxic mortgages in the United States caused economies to topple in Europe.
But while a financial crisis ruins lives, a food crisis ends them. No parents ever watched their child’s teeth fall out from scurvy on account of a vanishing 401(k) plan. A collapsing food empire, on the other hand, is an existential matter.
For a hundred years, our industrial food empire has been astoundingly successful, but all empires stumble and fall, with or without a few buffering centuries of decay. The Three Gorges Dam—an edifice that’s almost godlike in the liberties it takes with geography—is either a symbol of our salvation or a symptom of our coming collapse. It’s the high water mark of a food system in which billions of farmers, workers, and consumers (all of them eaters) are connected, and it’s a reminder that, while technological leaps and commodity profits have a global effect, so do blades of grass.
End of excerpt.
Evan D.G. Fraser is an adjunct professor of geography at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and a Senior Lecturer at the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds in the UK. His research is on farming, climate change, and the environment. Andrew Rimas is a journalist and editor at the Improper Bostonian magazine. Previously he was an associate editor and staff writer at Boston magazine. His work has frequently appeared in those publications and in the Boston Globe Magazine and the Boston Globe.
Rice harvester, representative of the industrial food production. Photo Felipe Stahlhoefer.
POSTSECONDARY LEVEL
L E S S O N P L A N T O A C C O M P A N Y
“The Three Gorges Dam
and Empires of Food”
JOURNAL OF EMPIRE STUDIES SUMMER 2011
1. What is the authors’ thesis?
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2. How do they prove it?
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3. What does the size of the Three Gorges Dam have to do with food? Does it apply to people who do not live in China?
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4. Please look up a man named Norman Borlaug, who has been called the father of the green revolution. Who is he? When did he live? What is the “green revolution?” Would Norman Borlaug be happy today? Why or why not?
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5. According to the authors, genetically modified foods – they mention the “super rices,” varieties which are twice as productive, or which produce their own insecticide – are an important part of the global food system.
But new and unexpected problems are developing with GM foods. Please read the following article about two legal cases:
a) http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/breaking/9936660/neighbours-gm-stoush-a-test-case/
Neighbours’ GM stoush a test case
What are these cases about? Who is right? Should the government regulate all of these new GM plants? Are these “the tip of the iceberg”?
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6. What did you have for breakfast? How far did each ingredient travel to get to your plate (if it is locally grown = 1 unit of measure). See if you can find out where the meat and fruit and vegetables at your grocery store were grown.
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7. What are the four assumptions which we make about food empires – and how do the authors say these assumptions are flawed?
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Cotton harvester. Photo U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Wow. This was an eye-opener. Everything seems very well researched and contains promising ideas for betterment. The author offers examples of what is done in the past, present, and what needs to be done in the future. Excellent Article!
Fraser does an excellent job of portraying these advances in the food market as both a blessing and a curse. It is easy to assume that an invention to increase efficiency is a good thing, but when you look deeper you realize the effects that invention will have on future generations. For instance the development of new, more effective farming methods. Fraser does an excellent job of bringing to light the issue with depending on good weather for crop growth when poor weather is on the horizon.