An Edible History of Humanity (20 page)

Mao was told that the grain harvest for 1958, the first after the launch of the Great Leap Forward, had doubled; in some cases
yields in particular fields were said to have increased over 150-fold. Officials who could see what was really happening dared
not question these claims. Where possible, farmers had ignored Mao’s crackpot list of instructions, and the harvest was not
much worse than that of previous years. But the redeployment of farmers in the misguided effort to make steel meant that not
all the crops were gathered, and a lot of food rotted in the fields. Official figures said the harvest had doubled, however,
so the procurements of grain demanded by the state’s central granaries were much larger than in previous years. As different
provinces vied to outdo each other in apparent productivity, they submitted larger and larger deliveries. Exports of grain
doubled, providing apparent proof of China’s agricultural miracle to the outside world. And in the autumn of 1958 Chinese
farmers were told that there was abundant food, and that they could eat as much as they wanted in the communal kitchens. They
did so, and by winter there was no food left.

People began to starve in large numbers. One Party leader later estimated that twenty-five million people were starving in
early 1959. Mao refused to believe that the vast appropriations of grain being made by the state were causing shortages. If
some regions were unable to meet their quotas, he said, it was because farmers were hiding their food. “We must recognize
that there is a severe problem because production teams are hiding and dividing grain and this is a common problem all over
the country,” he declared. When some officials tried to explain the situation, Mao responded that if there were a few problems
in some areas, those were “tuition fees that must be paid to gain experience.” Peng Dehuai, the defense minister, who came
from a peasant background and had experienced famine in his youth, accused Mao of sacrificing human lives in the pursuit of
impossible production targets. He was stripped of his rank, placed under house arrest, and later exiled. Mao came to regard
any reports of food shortages as personal attacks on his leadership, and he became even more determined to press ahead with
his program. This meant that those officials who knew what was really going on became even less inclined to try to intervene.

Even higher grain-production targets were set for 1959. The harvest was about one-fifth smaller than in 1958, but officials
reported another year of record yields, and to make their claims stand up they set about procuring all the grain they could
find for delivery to the central government. (The state procurement quota was set at 40 percent in many areas, and 40 percent
of the fictitious and vastly inflated harvest figures meant that in practice the entire harvest was seized.) When their quotas
could not be met, even by seizing everything, officials began to search for hidden supplies of food that did not exist, as
had previously happened in the Soviet Union. Perhaps the worst atrocities occurred in the province of Henan, where Party officials
beat, tortured, and murdered thousands of peasants who were supposedly hiding grain. Some were set on fire; others had their
ears cut off, were frozen to death, or were worked to death on construction projects. But there really was no food. People
tried to eat grass and tree bark, and there were many cases of cannibalism.

By the end of 1959 millions of rural Chinese were starving. The communal kitchens served watery soup made of grass and anything
else that could be found. As the crisis deepened, China cut itself off from the outside world. Relations with the Soviet Union
were broken off so that Krushchev would not learn of the disaster. When problems were admitted, they were blamed on natural
causes such as drought, but even then officials continued to insist that food was abundant and the people were happy. Mao
began planning another big increase in production targets for 1960. But in much of the country the people were too weak to
plant anything. Those in the cities suffered less; they were given grain rations from the central granaries, and thus were
the last to be affected by the spread of the famine. In the countryside, Party officials had the first claim on what little
food was available, so that many of them failed to realize the extent of the catastrophe on the land. Most of those who starved
to death were peasants in rural communes.

Famine and starvation were widespread by the end of 1960, but Mao refused to recognize the problem. Senior members of the
Communist leadership realized they had to act, if only to preserve the regime. They began to gather evidence to present to
Mao and convince him of the scale of the disaster. But in some cases they were thwarted by local officials, loyal to Mao,
who went to great lengths to deceive them; in other cases senior officials dared not confront Mao with the evidence, because
they feared being punished for disloyalty. Hu Yaobang, one senior official, spent a sleepless night before an audience with
Mao, wondering what to say. “I did not dare tell the Chairman the truth,” he later admitted. “If I had done so this would
have spelled the end of me. I would have ended up like Peng Dehuai.”

In some areas senior Party officials managed to install local leaders who were prepared to reverse Mao’s collectivization
and get agriculture going again, by granting small plots to peasant households for their own use, as had previously been done
in the Soviet Union. Collective kitchens were also dismantled, officials who had been dismissed for their opposition to collectivization
were given their jobs back, and in some cases punishment was meted out to those who had brutally enforced Mao’s policies.
Deng Xiaoping, one of the reformers who had recognized that things had to change, famously declared at a meeting in March
1961 (at which Mao was not present) that “it does not matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.”
In short, ideological considerations were less important than providing food.

But how could the reformers get Mao to agree to a retreat from collectivization, while enabling him to save face? Eventually,
in mid-1961, Mao quietly agreed to allow the “lending” of some land to peasants so that they could grow their own food. But
officially he refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong, or that anything had changed. Collective farming on communal
fields continued, but in many parts of China people were also allowed to raise livestock and grow food on their own small
plots on waste ground, and to trade in everything except grain (a fixed proportion of which still had to be handed over to
the state). In Hunan this new policy came to be known as “save yourself production.” Grain was shipped in from Australia and
Canada, though it was sometimes repackaged in Chinese sacks to conceal its origin, since officially China was still reporting
huge increases in grain yields.

The Great Leap Forward was a disaster that resulted in the worst famine in history. In all, some thirty to forty million died,
though the full extent of the disaster only became apparent to the outside world in the 1980s, when American demographers
analyzed population statistics released by China in 1979. Mao’s agricultural policies, modeled on those of Stalin, caused
overall grain yields to fall by 25 percent, and wheat yields by 41 percent. But the main cause of the famine was not inadequate
food production so much as the farmers’ lack of entitlement to it. The food they produced went to feed people in the cities,
Party officials, and foreigners. During the crisis years China exported more than twelve million tons of grain and record
amounts of pork, poultry, and fruit. Granaries in many parts of the country were well stocked, even as people starved. The
famine was not caused by drought or flood, disease or pestilence. It was an entirely man-made disaster, the root cause of
which was Mao’s desire to use food to display the ideological superiority of Chinese socialism. Instead, he demonstrated precisely
the opposite.

What caused the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991? According to Yegor Gaidar, a senior Russian politician who served in
Boris Yeltsin’s government in the era after the fall of the Soviet Union, the regime disintegrated in large part because it
could not feed its people. The food crisis crept up on the Soviet Union over the course of several decades, but it had its
roots in Stalin’s industrialization program, back in the late 1920s. The leadership’s obession with industrial transformation
meant that farm workers were less highly valued than industrial workers, and received much lower wages. As a result, those
in the countryside took any opportunity they could to move to the cities and take a job in industry. As the urban population
expanded, agricultural productivity stagnated.

When Nikita Khrushchev came to power after Stalin’s death in 1953, he observed that grain yields had fallen by one fifth since
1940. As more of the shrinking food supply went to feed the growing urban population, there was less grain left over for export,
so threatening the industrialization program. The Soviet Union found itself between the closing jaws of a trap: The food demands
of its urban population were growing, and supply could not keep up. What could be done? One solution was to pay farmers more
for their produce and give them incentives to increase output. But that would have been tantamount to reversing the collectivization
program—a huge political U-turn. So instead Khrushchev decided to boost agriculture by bringing virgin land under cultivation,
and by paying the farmers who worked on it the higher wages granted to industrial workers. Existing farmers’ wages were left
unchanged.

For a while, everything seemed to be going well. Grain production increased for the first few years. But then it leveled off.
Even with the new land, the amount of food being produced per head of population was still lower than it had been in 1913,
and the state grain reserves actually declined between 1953 and 1960. The new initiative had not solved the problem. So the
Soviet leadership tried another tack: boosting agricultural output by investing in tractors, combine harvesters, and other
equipment. Agricultural output did grow slowly in the 1960s and 1970s, but consumption grew faster still. A turning point
came in 1963, when the Soviet Union stopped exporting food and grain to its satellite states in Eastern Europe—payments that
had helped to maintain stability and political support in these satellites. Instead it bought foreign grain, using 372 tons
of gold—more than a third of the country’s gold reserves—to pay for it. This was humiliating. Khrushchev told his comrades
it was vital to build up grain reserves again. “We must have a year’s supply of grain in seven years,” he said. “The Soviet
regime cannot bear such shame again.”

At the time, the need to resort to grain imports was blamed on a one-off poor harvest in 1963. But there was a deeper problem.
Much of the newly cultivated land turned out to be in regions where the size of the harvest was heavily dependent on the weather.
During the early 1970s imports and exports were roughly in balance, but by the early 1980s the Soviet Union had become dependent
on food imports, and by the mid-1980s it had become the world’s largest grain importer by a considerable margin—despite having
been the world’s largest exporter at the beginning of the twentieth century. It had to agree to long-term contracts to buy
grain, guaranteeing annual purchases of nine million tons a year from the United States, five million from Canada, and four
million from Argentina. The Soviet Union resorted to foreign loans, hard-currency reserves, and gold reserves (in particularly
bad years) to pay for these imports. But this was not sustainable. Nor was exporting manufactured goods an option; most Soviet-made
goods could not compete with those made in other countries. The Soviet Union had tried to industrialize using the proceeds
from huge grain exports, but in the process it had undermined its agricultural productivity, a vital source of wealth.

Food prices continued to rise, and shortages became more widespread. Employees of government agencies and the military were
allowed to buy food at reduced prices in special shops that were not open to the public. By 1981, according to Gaidar, “the
USSR’s po lit-i cal leadership was trapped, with no way out. It was impossible to speed up agricultural production sufficiently
to meet the growing demand.” The exploitation of oil reserves helped for a while. But the Soviets overexploited their oil
fields for short-term gain, reducing their long-term prospects. High oil prices from the mid-1970s helped to pay for food
imports, and for military spending to keep up with the United States. But the Soviet leaders assumed that oil prices would
remain high indefinitely, and therefore they did not build up their foreign-currency reserves before the oil price fell sharply
in 1985–86. Indeed, the Soviet Union’s borrowing increased.

The Soviet leaders were all too aware of the danger of relying on their Cold War adversaries for food. But they had little
choice. Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power as the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, began to introduce economic reforms,
but to little avail as infighting paralyzed the regime. Soon all of the Soviet Union’s oil revenue was being consumed by interest
payments; and poor global grain harvests in 1989–90 drove up prices, in particular of wheat. The Soviet Union began to miss
payments to foreign suppliers for food imports, causing some shipments to be halted. Many foodstuffs and consumer items became
hard to find in shops; lengthy lines for sugar, butter, rice, salt, and other basic foods became commonplace.

On March 31, 1991, one of Gorbachev’s aides wrote in his diary: “Yesterday the Security Council met on the food issue . .
. more concretely, bread . . . In Moscow and other cities there are lines like the ones two years ago for sausage. If we don’t
get it somewhere, there may be famine by June. Of the republics, only Kazakhstan and Ukraine can (barely) feed themselves.
That there is bread in the country turns out to be a myth. We scraped the bottom of the barrel to find hard currency and credit
to buy it abroad. But we are no longer credit worthy . . . I drove around Moscow . . . the bakeries are padlocked or terrifyingly
empty. I don’t think Moscow has seen anything like this in all its history—even in the hungriest years.” By this time many
of the individual republics of the Soviet Union, starting with the Baltic states, and followed by Moldova, Ukraine, Belorussia,
and Russia, had declared themselves sovereign states. Food shortages were a major cause of social unrest and of a collapse
of the Soviet government’s authority. “It remains difficult to ensure the presence of bread and other foodstuffs in a number
of regions,” noted the deputy minister of the interior. “Long lines form outside stores, the citizens criticize the local
and central authorities in strong language, and some of them call for protest actions.”