There are times when unintended consequences spring from bottom-up group behavior and times when these effects spring from enforced, top-down policy. This post deals with a few examples of top-down decisions that changed food supplies (and more) in unexpected ways.
Results include mass starvation, possibly the plague, and warehouses of moldy cheese.
Deep Plowing, Deep Hunger
During the Great Leap Forward, starting in 1958, farmers in China radically changed their farming techniques. One unusual change was that of “deep plowing,” a set of often complicated techniques for mixing fertilizer and soil levels, along with the deep planting of seeds. This farming technique, applied at scale along with other mismanagement, was responsible for tens of millions of starvation deaths in China in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This is the risk of having political leaders influence farming techniques.
The deep plow concept came from Soviet scientist (or pseudoscientist) Terentiy Maltsev (and colleague of Stalin’s friend Trofim Lysenko) and was forced top-down on farmers throughout China. Slogan: “turn up thousand-year old soil and strive for output of 1,500 jin per mu.” (1 jin = 1.1 pound / 0.5 kg. 1 mu = 734.8 square yards / 614.4 square m.) As best as I can tell, Lysenko survived as an influence on Soviet agriculture (and Maltsev had a chance to impact Chinese agriculture because of close ties to Stalin). If there had been a few more years before the start of the Great Leap Forward, or if the Sino-Soviet Split had started earlier, perhaps there wouldn’t have been the loss of life in China from deep plowing.
Deep plowing of the modest sort (to depths of one foot / 0.3 m) did improve crop yields. But then things got out of hand. What followed was a wide collection of deep plowing implements, including vibrating and rotating plows that were difficult to produce, required more effort, and which tended to break down. Deep plowing then got deeper and deeper. “In the ‘satellite’ fields of Shouzhang County, Shandong Province, leadership demanded that deep plowing go 1.2 zhang [a unit of measure equal to three and one third meters] deep… “The soil dug up by the bottom person was lifted to the middle person, who then hauled it to the top person, who then hauled it to fill a ditch.” — From Agricultural Reform and Rural Transformation in China since 1949.
This misuse of labor and land productivity was of course a problem, as was the problem of losing fertile top soil by covering it with infertile soil from far below the surface. But as a top-down theory from a central government, the deep plow movement demanded support. What to do if deep plowing did not actually lead to higher crop yields?
People produced the supporting research and theory. From a report on the dozens of types of deep plowing (p92-93 in the book above) “deep plowing was a great revolution of the soil and that we would no longer be able to make judgements [sic] of soil distribution and changes from solely the perspective of the natural environment. It was more important… to study soil changes caused by the power of the great laboring masses… Therefore… we must use not only natural dialectics but also historical materialist dialectics to study the soil.” “[S]cientists and researchers at the time had been affected by the prevailing political and social atmosphere of the time. Their arguments were not based on strict experimentation, and this led them to slant their views.”
Whenever you find the word “dialectics” added to soil science, run.
Unfortunately, the new yield targets were so far above normal yields (often hundreds of times higher) that meeting quota, regardless of farming technique, was impossible. Even when scientists and farmers gave great attention to the fields, planted much more seed than typical, used much more fertilizer than normal, and even fanned the seedlings to promote air circulation and shined electric lights on the crops at night, actual production was only 0.5% of the exaggerated targets, set both from theory and from hearing about other exaggerated accounts of output. Here’s a (fake) propaganda photo of young people standing on top of wheat so densely grown that it supports their weight.
During this time, the reported exaggerated theoretical yields started to influence China’s leadership. Grain exports rose even in a time when domestic production shrank below subsistence levels. Land and labor became less productive and yet more of production shifted away from where it could be used best.
Setting Prices, Creating Scarcity, Spreading the Plague?
Across the centuries in ancient Rome, the government intervened during grain shortages. What happens when this sets an expectation of action?
“As the city populace complained of the cruel dearness of corn, he [emperor Tiberius] fixed a price for grain to be paid by the purchaser, promising himself to add two sesterces on every peck for the traders.” — from The Annals, by Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Book 2 (A.D. 16 – 19). (Attempts to put a current value on the Roman sesterce make it roughly equal to $1.)
Here’s a related statement from emperor Diocletan, who ruled from 244 to 311. “For who has so dull a breast, or is so alien to the feeling of humanity, that he can be ignorant, nay rather has not actually observed that in commodities which are bought and sold in markets or handled in the daily trade of cities, the wantonness in prices had progressed to such a point that the unbridled greed for plundering might be moderated neither by abundant supplies nor by fruitful seasons?… Who therefore can be ignorant that an audacity that plots against the good of society is presenting itself with a spirit of profiteering, wherever the general welfare requires our armies to be directed, not only in villages and towns, but along every highway? That it forces up the prices of commodities not fourfold or eightfold, but to such a degree that human language cannot find words to set a proper evaluation upon their action?” — The Edict Of Diocletian Fixing Maximum Prices
And another example during emperor Honorius. “In AD 384, the populace demanded specifically the imposition of a fixed price, which may have been due to the fact that within their lifetime prices had been fixed twice already.” “Once the urban consumers became used to imperial intervention, it became impossible for the authorities not to intervene.” — from The Grain Market in the Roman Empire: A Social, Political and Economic Study, by Paul Erdkamp
But how could a top-down governmental body manage the grain supply to alleviate times of shortage? Maintaining grain storage is different than stockpiling other more durable commodities. Grain spoils, and at faster rates based on temperature, moisture, and pests. Granaries in ancient Rome could not store grain for years, meaning that they couldn’t always deploy their stores when prices rose. Similarly, government granaries couldn’t sell old grain to replenish their stores when there was no shortage and fresh grain was available. In seeking a price maximum or stability, they actually created greater instability.
When the Roman emperors set price maximums and prohibited personal hoarding — creating wilder shortages in the process — Romans found other ways to make sure that they had enough grain to last through the intervention. Since they couldn’t store grain publicly, Roman families started to store grain in their homes to guard against a potential shortage. They would periodically draw down on their stores and replenish with fresh grain. The problem with home storage was that grain attracts rats. Rats carry fleas. That meant that the Roman population had a greater risk of rat and flea borne health conditions.
A theory from Morris Silver: these rats and fleas carried plagues (possibly Bubonic) into Roman homes. The Antonine Plague during emperor Commodus’ grain interventions is recorded as killing 2,000 people a day and a total of five million.
Cheese Stands Alone
The story of “government cheese” started with Jimmy Carter’s campaign promise to support the price of milk (specifically, to support a $0.06/gallon price increase). Consider it a rare campaign promise that happened to be kept, though it wasn’t completely thought through.
Enforcing a higher price for something commonly either means restricting supply or increasing demand. In this case, supporting the price increase meant that the government had to buy milk en masse. What happens when you buy lots of milk? You discover that it does not keep well. That in turn led to the milk being converted into other forms that last longer: cheese, primarily. The other benefit of cheese being its greater density — producing one pound of cheese requires roughly 10 pounds of milk.
But then what to do with the cheese? At first, the government just stored the cheese, where it apparently filled most of the large-scale cold storage in the US. (Rough cost for one year of the milk price support program (1981): $2 billion paid to dairy farmers in price support and $120 million in storage.)
But starting in 1981, space was running out and something needed to be done, even if it meant just throwing the cheese out. Options were limited. Since cheese requires refrigeration, long-range transport was not possible. That meant that the cheese couldn’t be exported, but had to be distributed domestically. The distribution of hundreds of millions of pounds of cheese also couldn’t impact existing cheese producers in the US, or risk creating another unintended consequence. Instead, what followed was a cheese giveaway for poorer populations. As reported by Planet Money, “[t]he theory was that if you give cheese away to people who can’t afford it, then you’re not stealing business from real cheese sellers.”
The cheese giveaway was intended to be a short-term solution to rid the warehouses of cheese, which was still being produced and stored. Eventually, in 1985, the government offered dairy farmers the option to take a whole herd buyout — to be paid to not produce milk. That is, rather than prop up prices with increased demand, they would prop up prices with reduced supply. Naturally, after a delay, daily cow herds increased again.
What’s not well understood is how much this program changed the American diet and the health impacts of that change. Per capital consumption of dairy products spiked suddenly from 540 pounds/year in 1981 to 600 pounds per year by 1987. I’m not sure how much of that change came from the government cheese program, but as with anything at scale, there is a risk of an unintended outcome. The irony could be that the health impact of this giveaway might be larger than the economic benefit to the dairy farmers.
Government cheese is still around, even if it’s less of a cultural item now. In fact, the volume of cheese stored was recently 1.39 billion pounds, an all-time high.
Conclusion
What could be done to prevent the above? In other posts the antidotes to second-order effects were connected to the causes of the outcomes. But in these examples, the top-down political situations themselves are the root cause of the unintended consequences.
In the case of the deep plow movement, the problem was that the theory was politically sought after and enforced. Even when farmers knew that deep plowing did not produce the yields it claimed, they were forced to do it or punished. That sounds like an unavoidable mess. If that weren’t the situation, we’d expect that deep plowing would have stopped immediately, as soon as farmers realized that it didn’t produce better results. At a minimum, small test fields and actual results would be measured before widespread commitment.
Regarding food subsidies, in both grain and milk, there is a long memory of previous interventions. That memory impacts the results people expect. If intervention seems predictable, then everyone is at risk of unintended (and bad) behavior change. Instead, add randomness to whether there will be intervention.
There is a long list of unintended consequences from top-down interventions. Those consequences are also difficult to predict and guard against. Easier to limit the interventions themselves. Easier said than done.