I've been reading The Death of Grass by John Christopher,
which a friend lent/gave me recently. But this is not a book review: just some
thoughts about the book.
The Death of Grass, a short, apocalyptic novel from the
1950s, posits a dystopian future in which nation states have pressed their
farmers to change to an almost worldwide growth crop of 'grass'. The 'grass' in
the UK is mainly wheat. The 'grass' in China is, of course, rice. Other
countries grow their own national 'grass'.
Monoculture is always a risky
undertaking, and so it proves in this novel. When a deadly virus attacks the rice crops in China, and
the scientists who had been expected to be able to overcome the problem, gradually find it
beyond them, widespread famine/starvation/death results, and once-fertile ground
becomes barren. Nearby countries find, courtesy of the wind and other dispersal
agents, that their grassy crops become infected too. Eventually the wheat in
Britain, where the story is set, becomes contaminated. There is too little other
food to feed a nation and everyone has to try to survive as best they can,
and by whatever means, abandoning as they must, moralities they previously
followed.
This book was remarkably prescient. The threat of
agrarian monoculture in this century is here already in parts of the world. I
read only today in The Ecologist, of the threat to Paraguay's small farmers, "suffering social
and environmental ills from the country's meteoric rise in soya farming." I urge
you too to read the article and learn how today, in reality and not in
fiction, the ruthless agrochemical GM/biotech industry is wreaking
havoc on real farmers and on the environment. And I hope that if you do not already oppose the genetic
engineering of crops, that you will consider doing so. Everyone's fate may
depend on curbing the malign power of Monsanto and the rest of the biotech
industry.
