A lesson from Tolkien in common sense
W‘China is now holding nearly half the world’s cereal’
E’RE initially going on a slight diversion today. The Tolkien scholars among you might’ve rued the absence of one of the Lord of the Rings characters from the movie trilogy. Inexplicably, headman of the primitive Pukel men, ‘Ghân-buri-Ghân’, is left out. As I recall-from the written word, Théoden and his army of horsemen take a shortcut through Ghan’s woods, in their race to rescue their besieged friends. Capturing Ghan, scouts brought him – somewhat grumpily – before Théoden, who quizzed him about what he knew. Feeling belittled by the questioning, Ghan points out that just because he and his people look primitive to civilised outsiders, he is still a great headman, not a child. He can, he reminds Théoden, count many things. ‘Stars in sky, leaves on trees. Men on horses in the dark’, going on to reveal he’s already not only tallied how many men Theoden commands, but also how many nasty orcs await them in battle. Unsettlingly, he’s already calculated the odds, and found the horsemen are badly outnumbered. Theoden has to acknowledge that Ghan is clearly not the simple wretch they’d imagined.
Through this exchange, Tolkien shows us the folly of presuming someone you regard as an uncivilised primitive is also a fool. Sometimes, for all your culture and finery, you mightn’t know as much as someone in a grass skirt.
And just now, I’m feeling more than my usual affinity for old Ghan. Because while I might look like tramp whose had a run of bad luck, that doesn’t mean I can’t count.
And one of the things I’ve been counting – notionally you understand – is grains of wheat. This is quite a trick just now, as a lot of them have vanished. Where have they gone? China, that’s where. In a few years, the Chinese have ramped up their overseas grain buying to levels unheard of. As I pointed out at the time, you could sum up what was happening in China back along, as that everyone had left the family smallholding and gone to work in the bicycle factory. This turned them from being self-sufficient into being consumers. Suddenly they had some money in their pockets… and the first thing they bought was food.
Meanwhile, the State have taken rational steps. While we might be reviled by their attitudes to human rights and the like, they’re beavering away with a determination to improve their being.
And one of the conservative values they’ve evidently been favouring is making sure there’s bread on the table or possibly rice in the bowl.
Recalling the unfortunate famine during the Cultural Revolution, President Xi Jinping has openly been concerned for food security
And boy is he doing something about it! In two decades, their overseas grain buying spend has increased 20-fold. They’re now holding over half of the world’s traded cereal crops in the vast banks of silos. Maize is something they’re particularly targeting, holding nearly 70% of what is available worldwide. They’re storing a year and a half’s worth of their required staple food stuffs.
Some of this is reckoned to be in preparation for any kind of trade war or sanctions that might interrupt the flow, as well as simple prudence. Meanwhile, in the idle profligate West, we think we’re the masters of the Universe, beyond the cold reach of such matters. In the UK, government simply dispels any such thoughts, presuming the nation’s food supply can be cheaply imported. They’re far more concerned with salving our delicate consciences, feeling upset because David Attenborough tells us off for destroying the natural world. And despite the evident truth that a growing population of 68 million, on a footprint of 93,000 damp square miles, already can’t feed itself, government are more concerned that we should protect nature, and rewild farmland... and this will make all of our environmental guilt vanish. Pop stars and wealthy heirs buy farmland to rewild, and gush about their righteousness. Curiously, I notice selfmade first generation billionaires tend to buy productive farmland … and farm it.
A cross-party group of MPs has just warned Defra that post Brexit agricultural policies are a total mess. Plans focus on redirecting funds to taking farmland out of food production. Farmers have been warning constantly against this folly, but our voices are lost amid the clamour. Meanwhile Boris who allegedly can’t even count his own children, wouldn’t even begin to consider counting grains of wheat. He’s a poster boy for what is wrong with society, driven by the basest of immediate selfish desire. He’s no Ghan, that’s for sure.