Farmer Power

We all know that the world in the pre-historic times have been occupied by humans that fed themselves by hunting and gathering. But as Jared Diamond states, that eventually died down and was replaced by food production: the way we currently obtain our food today by farming, cultivating livestock and crops and domesticating plants to produce edible objects. This is, according to Diamond, the essential and decisive factor in how one civilization ended up with guns, writing and diseases while others were devoid of these things.



























As you can see in this chart taken from page 87 of the book, one can see how vital farming production is towards the development of empires and civilizations. Obviously there are 'ultimate' factors; factors that cannot be changed or altered such as the east/west axis that might have contributed to the location of suitable species or species spreading.

So what made hunters and gatherers slowly adopt farming procedures and practices? Diamond states that the origins of food productions evolved from observation and conscience. By observing neighbors who tilled the land and reaped its benefits, other people adopted this procedure while others completely rejected them. I sneered when I read that people actually rejected farming. But maybe its because I live in a first-world country brimming with food and supplies while those in the early 6000 B.C never fully understood the benefits of farming and what tangible benefits it could bring in the future. If they only knew what I knew now...

Five factors pulled many hunter-gatherers towards farming: decline in available wild foods, depletion of wild game, development of food processing technologies, the link between human population density and rise in food production and the decisive geographic boundaries between hunters and farmers. Out of these, the link between population density and food production is important in my opinion. To feed a boom in population, farming is necessary. Hunting cannot support a large population, as reinstated over and over again in the last few chapters in the book. Food production yields a higher 'edible calorie per acre' as Diamond puts it, and due to this growth in population, this catalyzes itself into a positive feedback loop that grows exponentially, like when the industrial age hit the world. Exponential Growth.

Diamond also stresses the importance of the exact locations of food production and its origins. There are only five such areas: "Southwest Asia (Fertile Crescent), China, Mesoamerica, the Andes of South America and possible the Amazon Basin and the eastern U.S".






















Neighboring areas might have been affected by this growth of farming areas and thus the technique of farming proliferated. Those with this head start also gained an extra step in approaching the production of technologies, pathogens and population growth that many non-farming socities did not have.

As a result, those who still tried to keep hunting and gathering techniques as opposed to farming, were met with two outcomes. They were displaced by those who farmed (also noted as farmer power) by their technologies and man power, or soon assimilated into the agricultural mix. Only three notable hunting groups were able to survive until the 20th century: Native Americans in California, Khoisan hunters from the South African Cape and the Bantu farmers in the Australian continent. But it was not because they produced much better weaponry or a large army to resist conquering forces, but instead of the area's inability to support farming.

Reading this book up to now, I think its intriguing but extremely tedious because Jared Diamond loves to tell a story inside another story. Instead of getting to the point, he spends almost six chapters to tell us that farming was one key to the success of civilizations. He also places various side stories about his chapters which are interesting in some cases but confusing and page-fillers in others.
Word count: 628