6 Sustainable Agriculture and Food
become less valued. New efforts to analyse biocultural diversity on a country-by-
country basis are reviewed, and despite some important progress in the interna-
tional sphere, such as in the Convention on Biodiversity, the most fundamental
changes must come from ground-up actions.
Part 2: Early Agriculture
Some 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers in various parts of the world began to
domesticate some wild plants and animals. These evolved over thousands of sea-
sons under the guidance of people, producing domesticated forms strikingly dif-
ferent from their wild progenitors. Now, wheat, rice, maize, sorghum, barley,
potato, cassava, taro, yam, sweet potato and grain legumes are the main sources of
human nutrition for billions of people. Plant geneticist, Jack Harlan, reflects on
these processes that generated huge reserves of genetic diversity, pointing to the
importance of the intimate knowledge of crops by so-called primitive agricultural
societies. Centres of diversity are found on every continent (except Australia, where
native people did not widely domesticate plants). These centres are characterized
by ancient agriculture, great ecological diversity and great human diversity. Such
centres were first recognized and described by the Russian agronomist N I Vavilov.
This paper goes on to describe contemporary efforts to protect crop genetic diver-
sity in the face of modernizing tendencies to simplify agriculture.
All agricultural systems need water. A few can rely only on rainfall, but most
require some kind of system to manage the collection and delivery of water to
crops and livestock. Karl Wittfogel’s classic Oriental Despotism explored the char-
acteristics of hydraulic economies: they involve a division of labour; they intensify
cultivation; and they necessitate cooperation on a large scale. All three contribute
to the requirement for a particular type of management of both inputs, including
water, and outputs of food to markets and consumers. Water necessitates control,
and some of this has to be very large-scale, both for flood protection (such as in
Egypt or Mesopotamia) and for irrigation management (such as for the rice terrace
cultures of Asia). Cooperation is also essential, as water can be captured by
the more powerful, and tail-enders in irrigation systems can easily go without.
Wittfogel’s contribution is to show how such cooperation easily slips into coer-
cion, with punishment for transgression never really absent. Agrohydraulic socie-
ties also require active timekeeping and calendar-making and close observation of
weather, seasonal patterns and astronomy, as well as the capacity to build canals,
dams, roads and other monuments.
Marcus Porcius Cato lived 234–149 BC, and was known as the Orator, the
Censor or Cato Major. He was born at Tusculum, some 15km from Rome. His
youth was spent on his father’s farm, and a love for the soil remained with him
though life. He entered the military aged 17 and served in the Second Punic War.
Political offices came later, including the consulship in 195 and the censorship in