by Alan Weisman
“Because of cost. It’s more profitable for seed companies to market one variety over a large area. The more hectares sown to your variety, the more successful a breeder you are, which is the opposite of promoting diversity. Also, we simply don’t know how to build productive diverse systems. How can you harvest a mixture with a combine? We know we need diversity, but to develop large-scale diverse farming—we’re not there. That’s why we need this gene bank, because diversity is not out in the fields, although that’s where we need it to be.”
So they forge on, trying new tricks to improve on the natural order of things. IRRI’s biggest quest now is to increase the photosynthetic efficiency of rice by 50 percent, to give it enough solar energy to produce more grains and to fix its own nitrogen. The resulting “C4” rice would greatly increase yields and even be able to create its own fertilizer—the potential cited by the Vatican as how to feed a world that keeps adding more people.
But that will require reconfiguring the very cell structure of rice leaves. To find a winning combination of genes and crosses amid all these varieties is, at minimum, a twenty-to twenty-five-year project. Even their funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation can’t force that schedule. By then, world population may nullify the gains, even as a renegade climate shrinks the amount of arable land, fresh water grows scarcer, and soil degrades further.
C4 rice would be one of history’s major transformations of agriculture. But it, or any other improvement, can only do so much, says Sackville Hamilton.
“In this gene bank we can deal with nearly any future challenge the world throws at us, except for one: increasing population. Because we cannot indefinitely increase the amount of food we grow.”
He pulls a ten-gram foil seed packet from a shelf, scans the label, and replaces it. “We can respond to new diseases,” he says. “Even, I think, to climate changes. We can improve technology: Last year I saw a Japanese farm trying to grow commercial rice hydroponically. An ideal variety for hydroponics would have a different root structure from one grown in the field. That presents a new breeding challenge, but we could address that challenge from this collection.”
He hugs himself against the chill. “We can handle anything. Except indefinitely increasing population.”
Up in Manila, the chances for reversing the Philippine fecundity that surrounds IRRI were not looking promising. Despite newly elected President Aquino’s professed interest in a national reproductive health plan, as 2010 dragged into 2011 and then 2012, the Catholic Church maintained a steady frontal assault on congressmen who dared broach such an abomination. For decades, the Church had quashed every proposed bill for universal access to family-planning information, free contraception for the poor, and mandatory sex education for secondary school children. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines wasn’t about to let any president overturn that record.
“Contraception is corruption,” declared one archbishop.
“Sex must never be taught separate from God and isolated from marriage,” decreed another.
“Don’t fool with the Church. Because she will bury you,” warned a third. As debate on the latest bill alternately waxed and wilted in Congress, Filipino bishops bused thousands of Catholic school students into Manila for traffic-stopping prayer rallies and blanketed vehicles with smiley-face “Gospel of Life” bumper stickers. In every sermon, they admonished their flock that contraception is just one more form of abortion, which is outlawed by the Philippine constitution.
In the Manila suburb of Alabang, they muscled through an ordinance making the purchase of condoms without a doctor’s prescription punishable by six months’ imprisonment—a measure “more Catholic than the Pope,” pundits noted, as Benedict XVI acknowledged that condoms help prevent AIDS. In Congress, pro-Church forces piled the reproductive health bill high with amendments—thirty-five proposed by one anticontraceptive congressman in one day alone—and otherwise exploited parliamentary procedure to keep proceedings safe from closure. One night in November 2012, when it seemed like the bill—favored by 70 percent of Filipinos—might actually come to a vote, so many cowed legislators stayed away that the House of Representatives couldn’t muster a quorum. Championing the Church’s intractable position was the most famous Filipino of all, congressman and boxing legend Manny Pacquiao. The fourth of six siblings himself, Pacquiao reminded everyone that he would never have won world titles in eight weight divisions if his parents had used birth control.
Yet again, the reproductive health bill seemed stillborn. But then, on December 8, 2012, in the sixth round of a welterweight bout in Las Vegas, the seemingly invincible Pacquiao collided with an unexpected right to the head by his arch-rival, Mexican Juan Manuel Márquez, knocking him out so thoroughly that for minutes fans thought he was dead. Although after just three days Pacquiao was back, fighting the reproductive health bill in Congress by claiming that his survival only deepened his belief in the sanctity of life, his ignoble defeat proved a portent of surprise outcomes.
Ten days later, President Aquino orchestrated his own creative ploy with Robert’s Rules of Order, forcing a vote on the bill before anyone could abscond by declaring it a presidential priority. His country, despite headquartering the International Rice Research Institute, had grown so far beyond its carrying capacity that it was now the world’s biggest importer of that grain. Worse still, the world was also now on track to warm more than 2°C—at which point coral reefs, home to the main protein source in the Philippines, aren’t expected to survive. President Aquino’s even more popular than his sainted mother, Cory, and his refusal to let the population double again and risk starvation finally carried the day in the Philippine House and Senate.
In a conciliatory move, he waited until Christmas to quietly sign the Reproductive Health Bill into law, with no fanfare. Nevertheless, Philippine bishops vowed to defeat every apostate legislator in the next election, to fire all faculty at Catholic universities believed to favor the bill, and to appeal to the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional.
Should they fail, there will be only country left on Earth where political decisions on reproductive health are still controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike the Philippines, which adds 2 million more people each year, that tiny country suffers no population crisis, because its citizens include virtually no women, and are mainly—at least theoretically—celibate men.
What they do within Vatican walls is their own business; the fact that they can no longer sway any other country may prove timely on an Earth that, in every sense including biblical, humans have now filled.
CHAPTER 10
The Bottom
i. Sahel
Libya is that rarity, a sparsely populated country. The reason is simple: Although it has valuable natural resources, they’re inedible. The world’s seventeenth largest nation by area but 103rd by population, it has just 6 million people, 90 percent living in a tight band hugging its northern coast, where its Mediterranean ports were once its greatest assets. Today, oil is number one; another commodity, however, may irrevocably limit Libya’s population to its present size, or possibly fewer. That is water.
Because Libya’s northern wells are depleted or fouled by seawater, drinking water for that 90 percent now comes via Muammar Gaddafi’s magnum opus, the “Great Man-Made River”—the world’s biggest network of pipes, connected to more than a thousand wells drilled half a kilometer into a sandstone aquifer in the south. The water they tap accumulated when the Sahara abounded with plant and animal life, a wet period that ended about six thousand years ago when the Earth’s axis wobbled slightly—just as growing populations and their flocks and crops were demanding more water than ever. The unfortunate collision of those events altered northern Africa profoundly. Estimates for when the Libyan aquifer will be pumped dry range from sixty to a thousand years, the high figure possibly more attributable to Gaddafi than hydrology. Whenever it happens, one thing is almost certain: nothing will replenish it anytime s
oon—neither in human nor geologic time.
The Sahara is as monochromatic and vast as the Arctic—except that the Arctic is shrinking and the Sahara is growing, southward into the semiarid transitional belt known as the Sahel that separates the desert from central Africa’s tropical savannas. Cinched around the upper body of the African continent, the Sahel is six hundred miles thick at its widest point—at least, for now.
In the West African nation of Niger, due south of Libya, Al-Haji Rabo Mamane knows a lot about the Sahel, but he isn’t sure how many children he has, so he reaches for his prayer beads and starts counting.
“Seventeen,” he presently says. Mamane is the chief of Bargaja, a Sahel village of two thousand, twenty kilometers north of the border with Nigeria. He sits on a blue and green woven cotton mat under a thatched awning in front of his mud-plastered home, surrounded by the men of his village. A white-goateed man of seventy, he adjusts his sky-blue djalabiya around his bare ankles, straightens his round embroidered blue prayer cap, and then adds: “Seventeen who are still alive. I’ve lost at least that many.”
The past years have been hard. In 2010, few crops in Niger made it to maturity. Millet, the staple cereal, dried and died on the stalk, as the great heat came early. Same with the groundnuts. Sorghum, usually drought-tolerant, grew but produced no seed. The cattle lacked grass.
“So our children began to die.” The World Food Programme tried to airlift in emergency food for 5 million desperate people, but Mamane still lost three—even though, as chief, he was able to send a wife to the health center run by French doctors in Maradi, the region’s capital. There she watched them die of malnutrition, one after another.
She is his youngest wife. “I married her when she was twelve, when she was fresh. All her babies have died; one was three years, one was two. One died after just a week.”
In 2011, he lost two more. Two of his other wives had been nursing; malnourished, they grew anemic and their breast milk faltered. The babies died of anemia and opportunistic malaria. “My youngest wife was still so upset that I considered divorcing her to give her another chance with another man. But fortunately, she is pregnant again.”
A murmur of approval from the men seated around him.
He doesn’t have a sure count of wives, either. Although the Qur’an allows him up to four as long as he can responsibly care for them, over the years some wives have stayed, some have left. “Some of them died, too.” One, he knows, has three children still living. Three out of nine births.
His oldest son, Inoussa, squatting at the edge of his father’s mat in a dark blue flowing djalabiya and purple prayer cap, adds some figures in the dirt with his finger. “Last year, this village lost a hundred eighty children.” Inoussa, forty-two, has three wives who have borne him eleven children, six still alive. He is considered rich because he farms an entire hectare himself. Fifty years ago, everyone had two hectares, but the land has been so partitioned among multiple sons that the two hectares that once supported a family of twenty now must support sixty or seventy.
“We have these problems we don’t know how to solve,” says his father.
“We have too many people,” Inoussa replies. Frowning eyes turn to him. “Yes,” he says. “We are weeping because we are being crushed by our own children.”
All his life, he’s heard that every birth is a blessing. God provides, although God also takes away. Two years before, after he and his wives stopped working for three days to pray for the soul of the latest child to die, they made a decision. They went to the clinic in Maradi. With his consent, all three wives began to take family-planning pills. Inoussa didn’t try to hide it in the village, and the other men didn’t hide their discomfort over what he’d done. He hasn’t tried to convince them: “Their eyes can see the results. My wives were so thin, but now they’ve gained weight. No one has gotten pregnant for two years. It’s good, because having eleven is a big test of their strength.”
As he explains this, the other men look baffled. In Niger, every woman averages between seven and eight—the highest human fertility rate on Earth. His wives should have borne at least twenty-one among them, but they stopped at barely half that.
In a room a few feet from where the men are talking, two of the chief’s wives sit on the dirt floor near the doorway, listening. Neither weighs more than ninety pounds. In rural Niger, the best food, like eggs, goes to the men. Next the children are fed. In lean times, women barely eat at all. Hassana, the taller, older wife, is nursing a son named Chafiou, four months old. She has two others, a boy and a girl. But a mother keeps score of her losses, too, and she’s behind, four to three.
“The first, a boy, died at four years. The second, a girl, at a year and seven months.” Three and four lived. “The fifth died at age three. The sixth at one year. Those two were also girls.” She sets Chafiou in her lap and wipes an eye with the hem of her flowered hijab. The baby’s own eyes widen as he looks up at her.
She pulls him back to her breast. “It is such darkness to have and lose a child. God gives life, then takes it back. But I can’t go against God’s wishes. Because I know that God can also take my life anytime He wants.” She’s heard about family planning before. It doesn’t interest her. “When a food crisis hits and sweet children die, you have to keep having them while you can. If I stopped, what if the ones I already have don’t survive? I’ll have nothing.”
But wouldn’t only three have a better chance, because there would be more for them to eat?
“If we could guarantee enough food so I wouldn’t have to always have one in my womb and another one on my back, then yes. But this guarantee doesn’t exist.” She glances at her cowife, Jaimila, huddled in the opposite corner, a blue khimar over a batik skirt hiding her pregnancy. “Besides, if there are fewer children and more food, husbands will just race to get more wives, and wives will compete with each other to have more children. Then there won’t be enough food again.”
Chief’s wives, Bargaja, Niger
She married late, at sixteen. Not so Jaimila, who was twelve when she married the chief, and whose three babies have all died. Does she regret not taking the opportunity to find a younger husband, rather than bearing the child of a seventy-year-old man?
“But he is the chief,” she replies, puzzled by the question.
There is a saying in Niger: An old man with money is a young man. Other men’s wives lose even more babies, and faster, because the chief has the most land and animals. Though these days, no one has much. “If I still had my three, or if God gives me three more after this one, maybe I could stop someday. But I would have to go all the way to Maradi for the pills. And he will be old soon, and won’t want to. So I abandon the idea.”
Landlocked Niger is slightly larger than France, Germany, and Poland combined. Directly below Libya and Algeria, the northern four-fifths of the country is mostly uninhabitable desert. Most Nigeriens live farther down in the Sahel, which many still remember as covered with acacia forests, grasslands, and baobab trees. Today, as vegetation shrivels and temperatures average 1.5 to 2°C higher than during the 1990s, they fear it will increasingly resemble the Sahara.
In far southwest Niger, the Niger River, Africa’s third longest after the Nile and the Congo, enters the country for the middle of its 2,600-mile journey. One hundred sixty miles after passing through the capital, Niamey, it reaches Nigeria, whose fertility, averaging slightly under five children per female, isn’t quite as alarming as its neighbor’s. But with ten times the number of people—166 million to Niger’s 16.6 million—Nigeria has the highest population in Africa, more than twice that of second-place Ethiopia. By 2040, Nigeria is expected to double to 333 million, a number that will so far transcend its agricultural capacity—and the continent’s—that no one has any idea what will happen.
In his palace in Maradi, Sultan Al-Haji Ali Zaki is not worrying about Nigeria or 2040, because he has enough trouble here and now. Despite its tragic infant mortality rate, his region also ha
s the highest population growth rate in Niger, which has the highest in the world.
The reason is a Niger River tributary, the Goulbi de Maradi, one of Niger’s most important seasonal wadis—“hands of the river” in the Hausa language. The greenest part of its country, Maradi is considered a breadbasket, but its villages, such as Bargaja, are full of dying children. It is Friday; religious leaders gathered here earlier to discuss the crisis, and now village leaders have assembled.
Ignoring his carved throne, the sultan sits in a comfortable stuffed chair, in a gold-embroidered white robe and caftan, white silk turban, and a white lace scarf around his neck. He is elderly but thickset, with large, red-rimmed glasses perched on a broad triangular nose. He is the only man in the room wearing shoes: white leather with golden buckles. Everyone else sits on the thin red carpet, except the four orange-turbaned guards standing nearby in green, white, and ochre robes, with daggers and cudgels ready. The sultan’s right wrist is wrapped in prayer beads. On his left is a stainless-steel Rolex.
“Last year we suffered much hardship,” he says. “Drought killed our cattle. Thousands simply dropped. People starved. Luckily, we were helped by the government and international donors and NGOs. They did their best, but their statisticians can’t predict our needs, because they can’t keep up with our numbers. Nobody can anymore. But we thank them for trying.”
One of the guards shouts his praise of the government.
“And now we are again facing poor rains,” the sultan continues. “The government and the NGOs will again miscalculate the provisions we will need.”
Recently he traveled to northern Maradi, where the Sahel is fast fading to desert. A few areas received a bit more rain this year, but most villages were like one he visited, Mailafia, a silent town with soil baked yellow-white, its women gaunt and leathery, its children sullen, its goats stunted. The big trees were gone, as were the cattle. Their sole concrete-lined well, dug by a French NGO after the 2005 famine, wasn’t enough to water livestock and the people, too.
