Wheat or Rice?

Wheat or rice? Here’s how the world production looks on that question, writes Tomas Pueyo (Red = rice; Green = wheat):

A key point here: rice and wheat are not harvested in the same places. It is an either/or option. The reason for the distribution?

“Rice grows in hot, wet, flat, floodable areas, whereas wheat prefers cooler, drier, better drained areas.”

 

Another consequential point here:

“Rice generates twice as many calories per unit of area. This means that rice nourishes families on half the land that wheat requires. Which means population density in rice areas can be twice as high as in wheat areas.”

This explains why (see map above) coastal China, a huge part of the Indian subcontinent and South East Asia are so densely populated.

 

Rice cultivation requires a lot more work than wheat:

“Preparing paddies, raising seedlings in nurseries, transplanting every single seedling by hand into flooded fields, managing water, pumping it, weeding, harvesting, and threshing.”

Also of importance, any delay in most of those steps ruins the crops.

“The timeliness pressure meant rice villages became tightly cooperative communities to ensure everyone’s fields were tended before it was too late.”

Wheat cultivation is a lot easier (by comparison).

“These differences made these regions diverge across politics, culture, and economy.”

 

Political divergence: Rice needed controlled irrigation and flooding, so it benefited from centralized administration (Asia, India onwards). Wheat, which grew with rain, could be done by groups of individuals or families, leading to the decentralized states and an individualistic Europe.

 

Cultural divergence: With rice, as we saw:

“When your life depends on your relationship with your neighbors, you better develop a culture of group harmony, family loyalty, and consensus decision-making.”

Eastern philosophies and religions may have been collective/group oriented for that reason. While Western ones may have been individualistic since they did not need those attributes for wheat.

 

Economic divergence: Since wheat is far less labour intensive, it gave more free time in Europe. Which was used for other activities, including greater trade among European neighbors initially. Eventually, those seeds of trade triggered more production, then the need for increased efficiencies, setting off the Industrial Revolution. That then triggered the need for more resources and more markets, both of which resulted in the evils of imperialism and “discovery” (new routes, new lands) and the exploitation became the cause of Western richness and Asian poverty.

 

To summarize, climate determined crops, which heavily influenced our societies.

“Does this mean these crops fully determined the history of the world? No. But they nudged it in a particular direction, like dozens of other factors… The world is made of systems that mold us in certain ways, unbeknown to us.”