Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Initially the clans would flourish, but as population continued to grow there would be
no mechanism to stop them exceeding the carrying capacity of their lands: they would run
out of new sites for gardens, their existing sites would become overused and degraded, and
there would be increasing pressure to expand into the territory of another clan who were
experiencing the same problem. Eventually they would go to war. In this 'sustainable meat'
scenario, there would be three main differences from the
kaiko
cycle: firstly it would take
longer, perhaps 50 or 60 years rather than ten, because humans breed more slowly than
pigs; secondly, perhaps five or six times as many people would have to be killed in the hos-
tilities in order to give the land a similar rest, because there would be no surplus pigs to
kill; thirdly, the carrying capacity of the land would have been breached, possibly result-
ing in permanent damage; and fourthly, there wouldn't be any big feast to invite friendly
neighbours to.
Now, imagine that there were voices in the tribe saying: 'Pigs eat garden produce that we
could more efficiently eat ourselves, we should get rid of all of them, and just grow enough
surplus tubers to see us through a bad year.' If each clan opted for a vegan diet, it would get
rid of its pigs, but it would still multiply and eventually run out of space for gardens, and
then go to war. In this case there wouldn't be any pigs to kill; and the cycle would again
take a long time, though, curiously, slightly less than the 'sustainable meat-eaters' cycle.
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In fact, in both the above scenarios the cycle might well not happen at all, because when
pressure on land became severe, raids on gardens would be committed by hungry people
rather than by mischievous pigs. Reprisals would be likely lead to fatal skirmishes which
temporarily reduced population and garden pressure, to the point where a full-scale battle
might not be necessary. This state of affairs is potentially self-perpetuating: if no solution
were found, neighbouring clans would find themselves permanently on the brink of their
carrying capacity, in a condition of chronic petty warfare.
It also seems likely that the alternative 'sustainable meat' and 'vegan' cycles, even if
they could be made to work in every other respect, would fail because they take too long.
A cycle of ten years is repeated several times over a normal person's lifetime. A fifty year
cycle is lived through once, or very rarely twice, in a lifetime: a Maring tribesman who
witnessed the planting of the
rumbim
trees at the age of ten would be 60 by the time they
were uprooted. It is much harder for a culture to maintain its continuity or its collective
memory over such a slow cycle. Like the proverbial frog in a saucepan which doesn't no-
tice that the water is edging imperceptibly towards boiling point, a vegan tribe would be
more likely to fail to recognize the slowly advancing symptoms of overpopulation. Besides
acting as a buffer, the pigs also accelerate the process of population growth and ecological
degradation, so that human individuals can see what is happening several times during a
lifetime and respond sensibly - which in this case involves throwing a party ending in a not
particularly vicious battle every ten years.
