Amber waves of grain

The weekly quiz is provided by the Globalist, a daily online feature service that covers issues and trends in globalization. The nonpartisan organization provides commercial services and nonprofit educational features.

Question

Humans have grown domesticated wheat for about 11,000 years. It was a cornerstone of the transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary, agricultural societies. Today, about 554 million acres are growing it worldwide. We wonder: Which country devotes the most land area to wheat cultivation today?

Answer

A. Russia B. China C. United States D. India

A Russia is not

correct: Russia has the world’s largest land area overall, but it does not have the largest area under cultivation for wheat production.

Russia ranked third for wheat cultivation land area, in 2014(the latest year for which data are available) according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, at 59.1million acres.

This is a land area larger than the total land area of Romania and nearly the size of the United Kingdom. Russia also ranks third for the volume of wheat it produces at 59.1million metric tons.

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were often viewed as the world’s two most strategically important breadbaskets, due in part to their wheat production.

Russia’s neighbors and fellow former Soviet Republics, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, remain major wheat producers as well, ranking sixth and 11th, respectively, for land area cultivated for wheat.

If the three countries were still part of one union, their land area devoted to wheat would easily be the largest in the world. Their combined tonnage of wheat production would also be the second-largest in the world.

This production continues to have a strategic impact on global affairs. Crop failures in Russia and Ukraine during a 2010drought are believed to have contributed significantly to bread shortages in Egypt. This eventually sparked the overthrow of the government in early 2011.

B China is not correct:

China is the world’s largest wheat producer by volume (126.2million metric tons), but it only devotes the second-largest national land area in the world to growing wheat.

In 2014, 59.5million acres of Chinese land were growing wheat slightly more than Russia. This is a land area equivalent to the total land area of the United Kingdom (which is the world’s 12th-largest wheat producer by volume). While China has significantly less land area overall than Russia, ranking second worldwide, most of China has a more favorable climate than Russia for crop production. Wheat is a difficult crop to produce, but its cultivation led to many of the key developments of human civilization, from dedicated and fenced croplands (with permanent buildings) to extensive irrigation networks. Wheat also generates much more food from a given area of land than hunter-gathering, which enabled the human population to grow.

On the other hand, wheat dependence degraded the ancient human diet and put populations at more vulnerability to famines if the crop failed. Organized warfare and by extension governments also emerged out of a need to defend farms and grain storage, which could not be abandoned easily, unlike a foraging or hunting territory.

C United States is

not correct: The United States is the world’s fourth-largest producer of wheat, both in land area and by volume.

In 2014, 46.4million acres of U.S. land was devoted to growing wheat. That is a land area larger than North Dakota or more than twice the land area of the Netherlands. The United States produced 55.1 million metric tons of wheat on that land.

The fifth through 10th rankings for land area under cultivation for wheat belong to Australia, Kazakhstan, Canada, Pakistan, Turkey and Iran.

The latter two, Turkey and Iran, are at the edges of the Fertile Crescent where wheat was first domesticated in 9000BC. Wild wheat, a species of grass, originally grew in a very small range around that area.

One of the oldest sites of wheat domestication is in southeastern Turkey near the prehistoric, pre-agricultural temple at Göbekli Tepe. Once domesticated in the Middle East, wheat was brought to the rest of the world over time. It is not native to the Americas. In terms of total volume of wheat produced, the fifth- through 10th-ranked countries are France, Canada, Germany, Pakistan, Australia and Ukraine.

D India is correct: India devotes the most land area to wheat production, as of 2014, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

That year, 75.3million acres of land in India were growing wheat. This is a land area equivalent to the total land area of the nation of Norway.

However, India is only second in wheat production volume, trailing China by more than 30 million metric tons for a total output of 95.9million metric tons despite a substantially larger land area under cultivation. India’s wheat cultivation area is larger than China’s by about the size of Ukraine’s area under wheat cultivation, but its production volume is smaller than China’s by more than the total volume produced in Ukraine.