From this nexus, agriculture moved, each area of the world developing its grain of choice, rice in Asia, corn in America, sorghum on the African continent and wheat in the Mediterranean. The French historian Fernand Braudel defines these as the ‘plants of civilization’. New societies were constructed around the chosen one, agriculture, economy,

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Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking

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Rice: The Other Staple

It didn’t take long for these methods of plant breeding to be applied to the other great stable of human diets: rice. Facing exploding populations in Asia in the early 1960s two American charities, namely the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, formed a partnership called the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the

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Rice and wheat productivity went from one (metric) tonne per hectare to four, five, even six times that. In the case of millet, we’re still talking about going from a tonne to maybe two.

A farmer can’t say, for exam -ple, “I’m getting a better price for onions in the market, so maybe I should switch from rice to onions.” The onion production doesn’t have the support system that rice production does, so onion production tends to be much riskier.