History Repeats Itself with Rising Food Prices20100909g

Today Evan Fraser teaches sustainable development at the University of Leeds in England. But if
he had his way, he would have liked to have been born in the Middle Ages.
"Being born somewhere around 1240, 1250 in Western Europe - relative to the centuries before or
after that - was actually a really nice time," he says.
Medieval bounty
It was a time of high culture, when great cathedrals were built and renowned universities were
founded. The society fed itself through a sophisticated continent-wide trading system, where each
region specialized in a few crops and transported them to far-flung markets.
Fraser gives much of the credit to networks of monasteries across Europe, whose monks had spent
the preceding few centuries cutting down Europe's forests with evangelistic zeal. He says that
newly deforested land was tremendously fertile and productive.
"They created this huge amount of food that allowed people to move to the cities and created
enough wealth in society that people could invest in universities and build cathedrals," he says.
"So that was great."
But it wouldn't last. The soils wore out. Productivity declined. And then, Fraser says, "1315 comes
along. The weather started to cool a bit. A bunch of rains destroy the crop. Fifteen percent of
Europe dies suddenly over a four-year period in a series of catastrophic famines."
Where they went wrong
Europe had over-extended itself, he says. And it wasn't the first society to do so. In "Empires of
Food," Fraser says this arc repeats itself over and over throughout history, from Mesopotamia to
Rome to Han dynasty China and beyond: Civilizations grow when the weather is good and soil is
fertile. Their farmers specialize in a few crops and trade for the rest of their needs with faraway
suppliers.
But farmers eventually exhaust the soil. Climate changes. And when crops fail, specialized
agriculture and faraway suppliers become a liability.
And Fraser says we're doing it all over again today.
"The reason we wrote the book," he says, "is that we haven't learned these lessons. The modern
world is committing the same series of mistakes that the Sumerians, or the ancient Chinese, or the
ancient Romans, or the medieval monks all made."

Fraser is among those who say modern agriculture's reliance on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and
vast fields of single crops is not sustainable. With the predictions for climate change, he says, it's
time to make some changes. Those include a shift away from globalized, industrialized agriculture
toward more organic and local production methods.
Food crises past and present
He says the sharp rise in food prices in 2008 and the food riots that followed remind him of the
decades preceding the bloody French Revolution in the 18th century.
"Historically speaking, when these things are allowed to progress unchecked, one of the first
symptoms is inflation and one of the last and most extreme symptoms is civil war," he says.
It doesn't always end that way, he adds, but 2008 should serve as a warning.
Scientific solution
"Some of the points he makes are very valid," says Fran Pierce, professor of crop science at
Washington State University and president of the American Society of Agronomy.
"We're not going to have more water than we have right now," he says. "We're not going to have
more land than we have right now. Our fertilizers are not infinite. And our fuel and energy sources
are not going to be there the way they are right now. Those are all true. He's correct there."
But, Pierce says, Fraser left out an important factor. "He doesn't talk about what we've been able to
do when we've applied scientific principles to the production of food and fiber and feed."
Pierce notes that scientists made major advances in food production in the last half-century that
averted famine in large parts of the world. And we're more technologically advanced than ever
before, he says. So he's hopeful that science can help avert the next major famine and keep our
modern societies from suffering the fate of food empires of the past.
From:
http://www.hxen.com/englishlistening/voaenglish/voastandardenglish/20100909/120877.html