Published by EH.NET (June 2001)
Peter H. Lindert, Shifting Ground: The Changing Agricultural Soils of China
and Indonesia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. xii + 351 pp. $45 (cloth),
ISBN: 0-262-12227-8.
Reviewed for EH.NET by D. Gale Johnson, Department of Economics, University of
Chicago, Emeritus.
The generally accepted opinion is that a large percentage of the world’s
agricultural land is degraded and is being further degraded year by year. The
World Map of the Status of Human-Induced Soil Degradation produced by
the United Nations Environment Program in the late 1980s is a major source of
such an opinion. Peter Lindert argues, persuasively in my opinion, that the
basis for the conclusion that a large percentage of the world’s agricultural
land is degraded as a result of human action is wholly inadequate. The
evidence used to reach this conclusion is not derived from historical
comparisons of the status of agricultural lands but on a description of lands
at a particular moment in time. As Lindert writes, “It tries to measure
changes over time in the absence of data over time” (p. 21).
Lindert (Professor of Economics and Director of the Agricultural History
Center at the University of California, Davis) utilizes data from soil surveys
in China and Indonesia. This data — from the world’s largest and fourth
largest countries (in terms of population) — has been available for decades.
These surveys cover a period of approximately half a century, from the 1930s
to the 1980s. The soil surveys provide measures of soil characteristics for a
given location at a given time. While the surveys are not identical in all
respects over time, there are many common elements — measures of the major
nutrients, of organic matter, alkalinity, acidity and the depth of the top
soil.
Such surveys exist in other countries, including the United States, but
apparently only Lindert has used them to provide a realistic picture of the
changes in the soils over time. Given the availability of such data, it is
surprising that it has not been used before to understand what has happened to
the quality of the world’s soils. The reason may be that it is an enormous
amount of work to effectively utilize the hundreds — thousands, probably —
of these surveys that exist and so far Lindert has been the only one willing
to make the required investment of time.
That erosion exists cannot be questioned. After all, the Yellow River didn’t
get its name by accident. But in much of the discussion of erosion, as well as
other aspects of soil degradation, it is seldom asked whether the erosion is
human induced — it tends to be merely assumed that it is. In addition, when
and where there is erosion, little or no evidence is provided as to whether or
not it occurs on farmland. Farmland, after all, constitutes a minority of the
world’s land. There can be many sources of the silt in rivers other than
farmland. Lindert directly addresses the issue of whether erosion has taken a
serious toll on the farmlands of two countries. As noted later, he finds no
evidence that the depth of the topsoil has declined over a period of half a
century in these two countries. One can hope that future estimates of soil
degradation, including the extent of soil erosion, will utilize the real
evidence that is available rather than speculating on the basis of models not
based on historical data.
Based on the comparisons of the soil surveys in China, Lindert concludes that
there have been positive and negative changes affecting the quality and
quantity of farmland. The negative factors have been declines in the nitrogen
and organic matter in the soils while the potassium and potash contents have
increased. The decline in nitrogen content of the soil seems to have little or
no negative effects on yield, however, since nitrogen can be and is added as
fertilizer.
Perhaps the most striking conclusion is that the depth of the topsoil has not
diminished — erosion has not taken a toll on China’s soils. And the quantity
of farmland has apparently increased over the past half century, as recently
confirmed by the Chinese government, rather than decreasing significantly as
has been often claimed by Lester Brown, Vaclav Smil and others. Lindert
summarizes what has happened to soil quality in China: “The most reliable . .
. basic inference is that the overall soil quality did not decline between the
1950s and the 1980s” (p. 145). In fact, some of his estimates indicate a
modest increase in soil quality. Thus in a period of rapid change — the
creation of the communes, the period of the Great Famine, the Cultural
Revolution and the reforms of the late 1970s and early 1980s when the communes
were abolished and the household responsibility system emerged — the evidence
is very strong that the quality of the soil was not diminished.
In addition, Lindert finds no evidence that erosion of agricultural land in
Indonesia was a problem. This conclusion is based on two types of evidence —
the absence of a decline in the content of major nutrients in the soil and the
adjustment of the depth of topsoil data to account for certain problems in the
data for the early years. His overall estimate is that the average soil
chemical quality declined by 4 to nearly 6 percent. This decline was due
primarily to bringing new lands into cultivation in the outlying islands —
the soil quality index for the established agricultural areas in Java and
Madura may have increased by 10 percent. The area under cultivation more than
doubled between 1940 and 1990. If land is adjusted to the Javanese quality
level and adjustment is made for the small decline in average quality, the
increase in quality-adjusted land under cultivation during this period was
more than 75 percent.
To summarize the results presented in this very important book, Lindert shows
that for two of the most populous countries in the world farm people have
taken very good care of their land. Yes, erosion exists but careful analysis
is required to determine whether it is human induced and whether it affects
agricultural land. Lindert’s careful analysis supports two important
conclusions, though these conclusions are not stated explicitly by him. His
work confirms that “Farmers are as smart as the rest of us” and that “Farm
people of China and Indonesia have been good stewards of their land.” Studies
similar to this one should be made for other countries or areas for which soil
surveys exist over extended periods of time to determine whether farmers
elsewhere have been good stewards of their land. My expectation is that they
have been. I do not believe that the experiences in China and Indonesia were
unique.
D. Gale Johnson is the Eliakim Hastings Moore Distinguished Service Professor
of Economics Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of
World Agriculture in Disarray, revised edition 1991 and “Agricultural
Adjustment in China: Problems and Prospects,” Population and Development
Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, June 2000.