Sunday, February 2, 2020

Climate Politics: "The Invention of the Two-Degree Target"

Some background for folks who are new to this stuff.
This piece is part of an eight-part series that Der Spiegel did a decade ago. Links to the entire series below.

Climate models involve some of the most demanding computations of any simulations, and only a handful of institutes worldwide have the necessary supercomputers. The computers must run at full capacity for months to work their way through the jungle of data produced by coupled differential equations.

All of this is much too complicated for politicians, who aren't terribly interested in the details. They have little use for radiation budgets and ocean-atmosphere circulation models. Instead, they prefer simple targets.
For this reason a group of German scientists, yielding to political pressure, invented an easily digestible message in the mid-1990s: the two-degree target. To avoid even greater damage to human beings and nature, the scientists warned, the temperature on Earth could not be more than two degrees Celsius higher than it was before the beginning of industrialization.
It was a pretty audacious estimate. Nevertheless, the powers-that-be finally had a tangible number to work with. An amazing success story was about to begin.

'Clearly a Political Goal'
Rarely has a scientific idea had such a strong impact on world politics. Most countries have now recognized the two-degree target. If the two-degree limit were exceeded, German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen announced ahead of the failed Copenhagen summit, "life on our planet, as we know it today, would no longer be possible."

But this is scientific nonsense. "Two degrees is not a magical limit -- it's clearly a political goal," says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). "The world will not come to an end right away in the event of stronger warming, nor are we definitely saved if warming is not as significant. The reality, of course, is much more complicated."
Schellnhuber ought to know. He is the father of the two-degree target.

"Yes, I plead guilty," he says, smiling. The idea didn't hurt his career. In fact, it made him Germany's most influential climatologist. Schellnhuber, a theoretical physicist, became Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief scientific adviser -- a position any researcher would envy.

Rule of Thumb
The story of the two-degree target began in the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). Administration politicians had asked the council for climate protection guidelines, and the scientists under Schellnhuber's leadership came up with a strikingly simple idea. "We looked at the history of the climate since the rise of homo sapiens," Schellnhuber recalls. "This showed us that average global temperatures in the last 130,000 years were no more than two degrees higher than before the beginning of the industrial revolution. To be on the safe side, we came up with a rule of thumb stating that it would be better not to depart from this field of experience in human evolution. Otherwise we would be treading on terra incognita."

As tempting as it sounds, on closer inspection this approach proves to be nothing but a sleight of hand. That's because humans are children of an ice age. For many thousands of years, they struggled to survive in a climate that was as least four degrees colder than it is today, and at times even more than eight degrees colder.

This means that, on balance, mankind has already survived far more severe temperature fluctuations than two degrees. And the cold periods were always the worst periods. Besides, modern civilizations have far more technical means of adapting to climate change than earlier societies had.
Since the first rough estimate was made, many other good reasons have emerged to support the two-degree target, says Schellnhuber. At the same time, however, the constant appearance of new studies has also made the picture significantly more complex.

Coral reefs, for example, could already be doomed if the oceans heat up by 1.5 degrees Celsius. On the other hand, crop yields in agriculture are likely to rise at temperature increases of up to 2.5 degrees Celsius -- good news for the world's growing population.

Completely Speculative
But what good are all the predictions? It's difficult enough to calculate exactly how far temperatures will rise in the coming decades. It becomes completely speculative to predict in detail how warming temperatures will benefit tourism or harm biodiversity.

"Of course, the conclusions of climate impact research are not as reliable as we'd like them to be," Schellnhuber admits. "But we can't exactly drop 10,000 studies from Science and Nature on our political leaders' desks. That would obviously be too much for them. Instead we, as experts, must attempt to condense the large number of analyses into plausible scenarios."

Critics say that the climate impact researchers have gone too far with their brand of political advice. "The two-degree target has little to do with serious science," says Hans von Storch. Many of his fellow scientists, he adds, now see themselves too much as political activists who want to get something done. This, in turn, harms the credibility of science as a whole, he adds, and it is also a more deep-seated cause of the Climategate affair and the sloppy work on the IPCC report.
"Unfortunately, some of my colleagues behave like pastors, who present their results in precisely such a way that they'll fit to their sermons," says Storch. "It's certainly no coincidence that all the mistakes that became public always tended in the direction of exaggeration and alarmism."

'Completely Absurd'
Such suspicions irritate PIK Director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, particularly when they are directed against him or his institute. Schellnhuber, a native of Bavaria, normally speaks quietly and diplomatically, but he raises his voice when discussing the accusations. He says that he is far from being an environmental activist or someone who acts purely for political reasons.
"That's completely absurd!" he says heatedly. "I don't participate in protest marches, I'm not a member of the Green Party, I like to eat meat and I drive a BMW. And I didn't study physics to become a climatologist, either."

But no, he adds, he happens to be someone who has acquired inside knowledge about a looming disaster, knowledge that he cannot keep to himself. "If I'm a passenger on a ship and I see, through my binoculars, that we're headed for an iceberg," says Schellnhuber, "I have to warn the captain immediately."

But exactly how far away is that iceberg? How much time is left to steer the ship onto an alternate course? And how great is the risk of collision? These are key questions. In reality, it isn't about stopping a luxury ocean liner, but about the massive effort that is required to end the age of oil and coal as quickly as possible.

Time to React
"We climatologists can only describe possible futures," Storch points out. "It's also possible that things will be completely different."

Storch, a native of northern Germany and one of the pioneers of climate modeling, recommends a more dispassionate approach. He grew up on the North Sea island of Föhr, where he experienced storm tides at first hand. He learned that humans are tough and adaptable beings.
"Fearmongering is the wrong way to go about it," says Storch. "Climate change isn't going to happen overnight. We still have enough time to react."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned Not Just to Repeat It, But to Exist As Ignorant Children

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child."

That's childish, with its selfishness and uncaring impulsivity, not childlike with its connotations of wonder and exploration.
There is some comedy value in beginning this post with a quote from a guy no one reads anymore on the virtues of having an historical grounding but I promise that is the last bit of lightheartedness you'll find in this piece.

Last year we saw headlines such as this from NPR, "The Startling Statistics About People's Holocaust Knowledge"
NPR's Scott Simon reflects on a new study which shows that many millennials don't know about the Auschwitz death camp and the true number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Two-thirds of Millennials between the ages of 18 and 34, could not identify what Auschwitz was.

If folks haven't been taught about the murder factory the Germans established at Oświęcim, Poland, they sure as hell never learned about the Ordnungspolizei and the Einsatzgruppen. Here's an attempt to rectify the omission.

From the New York Times, April 12, 1992, a review of the earlier stages of the mass murders:

The Men Who Pulled the Triggers

ORDINARY MEN Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. By Christopher R. Browning. Illustrated. 231 pp. New York: Aaron Asher Books/HarperCollins Publishers. $22.
We know a lot about how the Germans carried out the Holocaust. We know much less about how they felt and what they thought as they did it, how they were affected by what they did, and what made it possible for them to do it. In fact, we know remarkably little about the ordinary Germans who made the Holocaust happen -- not the desk murderers in Berlin, not the Eichmanns and Heydrichs, and not Hitler and Himmler, but the tens of thousands of conscripted soldiers and policemen from all walks of life, many of them middle-aged, who rounded up millions of Jews and methodically shot them, one by one, in forests, ravines and ditches, or stuffed them, one by one, into cattle cars and guarded those cars on their way to the gas chambers.
In his finely focused and stunningly powerful book, "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland," Christopher R. Browning tells us about such Germans and helps us understand, better than we did before, not only what they did to make the Holocaust happen but also how they were transformed psychologically from the ordinary men of his title into active participants in the most monstrous crime in human history. In doing so he aims a penetrating searchlight on the human capacity for utmost evil and leaves us staring at his subject matter with the shock of knowledge and the lurking fear of self-recognition.
Mr. Browning, a professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., and the author of two other books on the Holocaust, focuses his study on one killing unit that operated in Poland during the German occupation, Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police. This group of 500 policemen, most of them from Hamburg, was made up of truly ordinary men. Most were in their 30's and 40's -- too old for conscription into the army -- and of middle- or lower-class origins.

They included men who, before the war, had been professional policemen as well as businessmen, dockworkers, truck drivers, construction workers, machine operators, waiters, druggists and teachers. Only a minority were members of the Nazi Party, and only a few belonged to the SS. During their stay in Poland they participated in the shootings, or the transport to the Treblinka gas chambers, of at least 83,000 Jews.
IN the 1960's Battalion 101 was investigated for its activities by West German prosecutors. In the process, 210 former members were interrogated, and 125 of the testimonies were detailed enough to enable Mr. Browning, examining the records, to piece together not only how the unit operated but also how its members felt about their participation in the unit's work. It is on the basis of these testimonies -- some of them self-serving and mendacious, Mr. Browning recognizes, but many of them, he believes, remarkably open and revealing -- that "Ordinary Men" was written.
Battalion 101 was sent into Poland to participate in a "special action." Just what that action was to be its members weren't told. In fact, they were fated to play a crucial role in the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe.
Three months before the Battalion's arrival in Poland during the early summer of 1942, only about a quarter of the Holocaust's eventual victims had been killed, most of them in the Soviet Union. Six months after its arrival, only about a quarter were still alive. Most of the killing during this intense period of mass murder took place in Poland. Battalion 101 of the Order Police -- together with other Order Police battalions -- contributed to the manpower needed to carry out this immense task.

In fact, the Order Police was part of the answer to Heinrich Himmler's Holocaust dream. In the summer of 1941, while the Order Police and special units operating behind the German Army were busy killing the Jews of the Soviet Union, Himmler told Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader in Lublin, Poland, of Hitler's intention to kill the Jews of the rest of Europe as well. Globocnik's task, he was informed, was the murder of the Jews in the central part of Poland called, by the Germans, the General Government. It was in this area that two million Jews lived, and it was into this area that Jews would be dumped from other parts of Europe, such as Germany, Austria and Slovakia. It was Globocnik's job to kill them all.
But he was not to do it in the way the Germans were doing it in the Soviet Union. There, the Jews were being killed by mobile firing squads. That method was too public, too inefficient and too hard on the killers psychologically. The solution would be killing centers using gas chambers, which would require much less in the way of manpower and relieve Germans of the psychological burden of killing individual people with individual bullets.
But two manpower problems remained. The first resulted from the need to round up the Jews so that they could be consolidated in centralized ghettos and then transported by rail to the killing centers. The other resulted from the need -- when the gas chamber or rail lines were out of order, when there weren't enough trains to transport the Jews, or when the Jews were located in inconvenient places -- to shoot the Jews in the villages in which they lived.

WHERE to obtain this manpower at a time when the war against the Soviet Union was straining German resources to the limit? Globocnik hit upon the solution of using the three manpower pools available in his area: local ethnic Germans; the "Trawnikis" (Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians recruited among Soviet prisoners of war who were willing to work for the Germans and who were trained for killing operations at the camp at Trawniki, near Lublin -- the same camp at which John Demjanjuk, who is currently appealing his conviction in Israel for war crimes, was trained); and three Order Police battalions, one of them Reserve Battalion 101.
A shortage of rolling stock was holding up transports to the killing centers when Reserve Battalion 101 arrived in Globocnik's Lublin region. At first, Globocnik had the battalion consolidate Jews in "transit" ghettos and camps so that they would be available for future transports. But within a few weeks Globocnik apparently decided that the killing itself had to resume, with or without rolling stock, and had the battalion sent to the village of Jozefow for its first "action."
Jozefow provided the men of Battalion 101 with their introduction to mass murder. The village contained 1,800 Jews. The orders were that the male Jews of working age -- those who would serve as "work Jews" before being killed -- were to be sent to camps in Lublin, while the women, children and elderly men were to be shot in Jozefow. The battalion commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, a 53-year-old career policeman, clearly found these orders distasteful. Already one of his officers, the owner of a lumber business in civilian life, had learned about the impending massacre and asked to be given another assignment; he was. Upon arrival in Jozefow, Trapp informed the battalion's men what their task would be, and invited the older ones to excuse themselves if they felt they were not up to it; a dozen did. Battalion members were then ordered to surround the village, round up its Jews and shoot those trying to escape as well as infants and those too sick or frail to walk to the marketplace.
Trapp then absented himself, spending the rest of the day indoors, away from the action. One policeman remembered seeing Trapp at his headquarters muttering, "Man. . . . such jobs don't suit me. But orders are orders." Another remembered him crying. He later told his driver, "If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans."
Trapp's officers and men, however, went to work. After those Jews who weren't shot in the roundup were assembled, often with the ready help of local Poles who rousted Jews from hiding places, the battalion doctor showed the officers how to aim their rifles at the back of the neck so as to kill a Jew with one shot. In the marketplace, the Polish mayor of Jozefow provided the Germans with flasks of schnapps. The Jews, mostly women and children, were then brought to the nearby forest in trucks. Each truckload was met by an equal number of policemen, who marched the Jews down a forest path. The Jews were ordered to lie face down in a row; each policeman then placed his bayonet at the back of his Jew's neck and fired. This procedure was repeated throughout the day.
As the shooting went on, and as the battalion members found themselves covered with blood, brain tissue and bone splinters from the Jews they had shot at point-blank range, a few felt ill. One policeman was paired with an old man who, upon seeing the corpses of other Jews, threw himself on the ground. The policeman shot too high. "The entire back of the skull . . . was torn off and the brain exposed. Parts of the skull flew into Sergeant Steinmetz's face." The policeman asked to be excused, and was.
Other policemen recalled other reasons for asking to be excused. One, a tailor, discovered that the mother and daughter he had been assigned were German Jews from Kassel, apparently deported to Poland some time before; others encountered Jews from their hometown of Hamburg. Several battalion members slipped away and were cursed as weaklings. In all, as many as 20 percent quit shooting at some point; at least 80 percent kept on shooting until all 1,500 assembled Jews were dead.

Twenty years later, during their interrogations, those battalion veterans who claimed to have stopped shooting at Jozefow cited physical revulsion, in the main, as the reason. Very few -- even two decades later, when it might have helped them legally -- claimed to have had ethical qualms. A few observed that they felt they were freer than others to withdraw from the killing process because they had no intention of remaining policemen after the war; their colleagues, though, had to think about their careers. For many, the pressure to conform to the group, and to not seem like cowards, played a role in their continuing to shoot. One metalworker from Bremerhaven contented himself with the rationale that he would shoot only children, since if his partner shot the mother then the child would be unable to survive alone and killing it would be an act of mercy. For nearly all, the Jews were not in the same human family as they. Their commander, Major Trapp, had told them, in his initial speech, that all Jews were enemies who deserved to be killed, even their women and their children, because Germany's enemies were killing German women and children with bombs.
Though Trapp and many of his men found their participation in the murder of Jozefow Jews difficult, that difficulty diminished as the battalion continued its work. First of all, they got help from the Trawnikis -- the Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians -- who were called in to do much of the shooting. In addition, the gas chambers came back on line, and it was less stressful to stuff cattle cars, no matter how brutally this had to be done, than to do "neck shots." And even when they had to shoot, the shootings themselves somehow got easier. In fact, after Jozefow the shootings became, for many, routine -- even, for some, fun. And for a few, the initial horror was replaced by a gory sadism, in which Jews, totally naked, preferably old and with beards, were forced to crawl in front of their intended graves and to sustain beatings with clubs before being shot. One officer even brought his new and pregnant wife from Germany to show off his mastery over the fate of the Jews....MUCH MORE 
More tomorrow on another aspect of the Einsatzgruppen. 
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Freud's Nephew, Bananas and a Coup In Central America

We've mentioned Bernays a few times and should probably do a deep dive. Here's a start.

From Cabinet Magazine:

Watch Out for the Top Banana
It was a war in which few shots would be fired, but upon which the very safety of the Free World was said to hang. It was a war where words and symbols were the primary weapons and Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward L. Bernays, supplied the ammunition. And in 1954 Bernays’s arsenal was as well-stocked as it would ever be.

He had a plan for spying, one that involved putting in place a network of moles. He had a plan for waging psychological warfare, and another plan for wooing the press. He even had a plan for contrasting his Godless enemy’s outlook on twenty-two vital issues with those of Christianity. All this for an undeclared war waged on behalf of United Fruit, one of America’s richest companies. A war fought in quiet alliance with the US government, on foreign soil, against the elected government of Guatemala. A war that, in the mid-1950s when the Cold War seemed ready to boil over, was seen by those waging it as a crusade to keep Moscow from gaining a beachhead a thousand miles south of New Orleans.

Bernays helped mastermind that war for his fruit company client, drawing on every public relations tactic and strategy he had refined since giving birth to the profession forty years before. Historians have written extensively about that propaganda campaign, but always relied on the sketchy account Bernays provided in his autobiography and the limited materials available from the American and Guatemalan governments. Upon Bernays’s death in 1995, however, Library of Congress made public fifty-three boxes of his papers on United Fruit that paint in vivid detail his behind-the-scenes maneuvering and show how, in 1954, he helped topple Guatemala’s left-leaning regime. Those papers offer insights into how the United States viewed its Latin neighbors as ripe for economic exploitation and political manipulation—and how the propaganda war Bernays waged in Guatemala set the pattern for future US-led campaigns in Cuba and, much later, Vietnam.

“This whole matter of effective counter-Communist propaganda is not one of improvising,” Bernays noted in a 1952 memo to United Fruit’s publicity chief. “What is needed,” he added, is “the same type of scientific approach that is applied, let us say, to a problem of fighting a certain plant disease.”
• • •
The United Fruit Company was born over a bottle of rum. In 1870, Lorenzo Dow Baker, skipper of the Boston schooner Telegraph, pulled into Jamaica for a taste of the island’s famous distilled alcohol and a load of bamboo. While he was drinking, a local tradesman came by offering green bananas; Baker bought 160 bunches at twenty-five cents each. He resold them in New York for up to $3.25 a bunch, a deal so sweet he couldn’t resist doing it again. By 1885, eleven ships were flying under the banner of the new Boston Fruit Company, bringing to the United States ten million bunches of bananas a year. United Fruit was formed in 1899, with assets that included more than 210,000 acres of land across the Caribbean and Central America and enough political clout that Honduras, Costa Rica, and other countries in the region became known as “banana republics.”

The company also soon had a kingpin worthy of its swashbuckling history: Samuel Zemurray, better known as Sam the Banana Man. Big and blunt, the Jewish immigrant from Russia used a blend of cleverness and cunning to buy up a bankrupt steamship company and plot the overthrow of the Honduran government, to acquire millions of dollars of United Fruit stock, and, convinced it was being mismanaged, to insert himself as head of the Boston-based firm. By 1949, Zemurray had built United into one of America’s biggest and best-run companies, with fifty-four million dollars in earnings and control of more than half the US market in imported bananas.

But he always was looking to sell more, especially during the winter, when frosts made shipment and storage more difficult. Which is why, in the early 1940s, he brought on as his public relations counsel Edward Bernays, a diminutive man who had proven his ability to act big by convincing a generation of American women to smoke the cigarettes made by his client American Tobacco Co., luring a generation of children into carving sculptures from Ivory Soap bars made by client Proctor and Gamble, and generally tapping the ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, on why people behave the way they do, only to reshape those behaviors for the benefit of his paying customers.

One way to boost sales for United Fruit, Bernays reasoned, was to link bananas to good health. Bernays also connected the fruit to national defense, a link less obtuse than it seems since United’s “Great White Fleet” was used in both world wars to ferry supplies and troops. On top of that were campaigns to get bananas into hotels, railroad dining cars, airplanes, and steamers; to feed them to professional and college football teams, summer campers, YMCA and YWCA members, Boy and Girl scouts, and students of all ages; to push them with companies making cake, cookies, ice cream, and candy; and to secure a place for them in movie studio cafeterias and at top-of-the-line resorts in places like Palm Beach and Sun Valley.

But Bernays was farsighted enough to realize that if United Fruit wanted to cement its position in the North American economy, it had to teach North Americans about their neighbors to the south. The mission wasn’t just to sell bananas, he told Zemurray, but to sell an entire region of the hemisphere. So he set up one of his trademark front groups, the Middle America Information Bureau, which churned out brochures and press releases with titles like “How about Tomato Lamburgers?” The Bureau was in part an honest attempt to educate, providing scholars, journalists, and others with the latest information about a nearby place most Americans knew nothing about, but where did the Bureau get its material? From United Fruit, of course. “I wrote articles, one after another, I ground them out and they were sent to newspapers throughout the country,” recalled Samuel Rovner, who went to work for Bernays right after graduating from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1943. “I didn’t know much about Latin America. I did some research now and then but for the most part it was based on material that came from the United Fruit Company.”
• • •
By the mid-1950s, questions of public education, and even of selling bananas, were being subsumed by questions of politics for Bernays and his employers at United Fruit....MUCH MORE
Previously on the propaganda spawn of Freud's nephew:
Early Facebook investor compares the social network to Nazi propaganda, likens its workers to Goebbels and claims it is creating a climate of 'fear and anger'  

News You Can Use: "Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion"
Still working to take your "nudge" game to the next level?
Wish there had been more 'how-to' and hands-on info in "The Psychopathy of  Everyday Life"?
Think Edward Bernays was a piker and Goebbels was a punk?

Well friend, look no further for your manipulation needs. Here's the latest research in easily digested pieces.

From the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:...
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Big Money: "Millionaire Farmers: Top 10 Families That Made Millions from Agriculture"

Not your typical list of High Net Worth folks and not your typical list of farmers-who-are-millionaires-because-they-own-a-hundred-acres somewhere in Iowa.

From Millionaire Mob:
Farming and agriculture has a poor image in popular culture, but it remains a solid investment for families and people around the world. With a growing population and a shrinking land base, I anticipate farming will only need to get more efficient. Here are several millionaire farmers that have built wealth by following their plan and growing their agriculture business. 

Millionaire Farmers: Top 10 Families That Made Millions from Agriculture
Modern agriculture and new technologies have helped foster the development of successful farms around the world. Many millionaire farmers around the world have made a fortune through the use of new technology.

Farming is undoubtedly one of the most proven ventures in history. I can’t remember the last time we didn’t have food on earth… That’s a joke. We need food now more than ever before. At the same time, we will always need food. A strong agriculture system is core to our well-being.
An ideal tip on how to become a successful farmer is to treat agriculture like any other business. Farming also requires the formulation of proper strategies and keeping of accounts of the business cash flows. In order to accumulate wealth, you need to own something. One thing I admire about farmers is that they love taking ownership of their work.

Farmers simply don’t get enough credit for what they do. I’m bullish on farming for years to come. Not just traditional farming, but city farming and greenhouses. Let’s get into some background about farming and money.

How Farmers Make Money
Farming is one of the most straightforward business ventures in the world. It is not without cycles, however. Farmers can be somewhat reliant on weather conditions and external factors that will truly influence how much money you can make. However, these millionaire farmers have isolated their businesses away from weather reliant products.

Then, most of these farmers scaled their land from ordinary farmer to millionaire farmer. Farmers make money by selling consumer products to distributors that bring these products to grocery and retail stores.

Farmers have large upfront costs, but if you own the land and assets, you can live off of the income forever. If you reinvest the income from farming, you can really take your business from ordinary farm to an everlasting enterprise.

How to Become a Successful Farmer
If you are trying to become a rich farmer or a successful farmer, there are a few guidelines for success.
Successful farmers don’t always have to be rich farmers. Based on my review successful farmers that have eventually become rich from farming possess the following:
  • Successful farmers always have the highest yielding equipment and continue to reinvest into their business.
  • They focus on mergers and acquisitions to expand the business into new verticals or lines of distribution.
  • Isolate or diversify their business from weather patterns.
  • Successful farmers possess the true entrepreneurial spirit. They certainly learned from these accumulated wealth tips. I don’t think they spent much time monitoring their Personal Capital net worth. They focused on investing in their business.
There are many other traits of successful farmers, but these are some of the top traits of successful farmers that come to mind. A few of these farmers on our list are not just millionaires, they are billionaires. Let’s get into our list of the top millionaire farmers in the world.

List of the Top 10 Millionaire Farmers in the World
Our list of millionaire farmers features families from across the world in all different continents. These farmers made the list due to their devotion to growth in business and entrepreneurial savvy. They started as farmers, but grew into much more than that. Some of the richest farmers in the world no longer focus on the grass roots of farming. However, that’s okay.
Without further ado, let’s look at the top ten wealthiest farmers in the world (not in any particular order).

  1. Liu Yonghao and Family

Liu Yonghao is among the most prosperous farmers in the world. He is among the most successful millionaire farmers in China from a humble beginning as a chicken farmer. In addition, he has a net worth of $6.6 billion. He is the man behind New Hope Group. New Hope Group is a conglomerate that controls New Hope Liuhe where Liu’s daughter is a chairperson.

Mr. Liu was once a technical school tutor until 1982 when he quit and began a bicycles business together with his three brothers. He managed to raise $120 start-up capital which he invested in breeding quails and chickens to sell to other farmers near their home in rural Sichuan province.
Soon he branched out into the animal-feeds business. He formed East Hope Group Company in the early 1990s after an amicable business split from his brothers. The Hope Group company was one of the largest animal-feed groups in China and one of the largest non-government conglomerates in the country in 1992.

Taking Farming to the Next Level
Being a founder of China Minsheng Bank, the only bank in the country since 1949 to be established without direct state ownership, Liu holds about 7% of China Minsheng Bank’s shares. His New Hope Group maintains extensive interests in animal feed, property, logistics and dairy products.
Liu and his brothers are millionaire farmers and made it to the top wealthiest farmers list by focusing mostly on the agriculture and animal husbandry sector. By the end of 2013, China Minsheng Bank had more than 500 subsidiaries and branches.

East Hope Group specializes in producing animal feed for pigs, ducks, chickens, and fish among others.  It is present mostly in the Chinese market, but also in a few countries abroad, such as Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, or Cambodia.

The company has developed support services and products, such as fodder, plant cultivation and food processing around animal husbandry. Their family is one (if not the) richest farming families in the world.

  1. Howard Buffet

Howard Buffet is a son of US billionaire investor, Warren Buffet and is not only a businessman but also among the wealthiest American farmers. He has spent most of his life as a farmer.
With little financial support from his father, Howard managed to rank among the topmost agriculture millionaires. However, he recently got appointed the CEO and Chairman of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

Buffett has traveled to over 130 different countries around the world. He documents the challenges of preserving biodiversity and providing sufficient resources to support the ever-growing human demands.

The Howard G. Buffett Foundation supports projects in the areas of agriculture, water, conservation, nutrition, humanitarian, and conflict/unaccompanied persons. His wealth is approximately $200 million. Howard Buffett is thus among the once of many millionaire farmers in the world today. I admire Howard Buffett for his devotion to impact investing and leaving a lasting legacy. Not only that, but from what I’ve heard, he’s one of the most down to earth businessmen out there.

  1. Colin and Dale Armer

Colin and Dale Armer is a couple from New Zealand. They are one of the most celebrated dairy millionaire farmers in the world. They own Armer Farms, a company in New Zealand’s North Island.
The Armers have 13,000 cows for milking on 14 farms. They are significant shareholders in corporate business Dairy Holdings which own 59 dairy farms, 48,010 cows and produce 17.3 million kilograms of milk solids per year.

The two brothers began developing their dairy operation around 40 years ago. Having started with zero capital, Colin and Dale bought 140 cows to share the farm with a focus on making profits. Colin and Dale’s wealth is around $240 million, and they also own the Dairy Holding whose value is approximately $535 million.

  1. Harry Stine

Another gentleman among the top millionaire farmers is Harry Stine. Harry is not only an entrepreneur and innovator but also one of the wealthiest farmers in the world. He grew up on the family property in Dallas County, Iowa. Harry graduated from Central Dallas High School and McPherson College in Kansas. He joined his father’s soybean cleaning business in Adel, Iowa in 1964.

Harry’s found some unusual soybean plants in one of the company fields which piqued his interest in research and seed breeding. He recognized the value and potential opportunities of reproduction, developing and growing newer higher-yielding soybean varieties for his company and farmers.
While yield-checking the soybean lines, he gained an understanding of what a conventional breeding program could bring to the soybean industry and growers.  His net worth is around $3.4 billion.

Harry Stine made his fortune by licensing corn and soybean genetics to large multinationals, such as Syngenta or Monsanto. He is mildly autistic and dyslexic, but he never allows these challenges overcome his drive and ambitious. Harrys’ company, Stine Seeds, is the largest private seed company in the world. Stine Seeds has created some of the most genetically robust soybean seeds.

  1. Stewart and Lynda Resnick

Stewart and Lynda Resnick are millionaire farmers and among the wealthiest American farmers. They now own a company called the Wonderful Company. It all began in 1978 when the Resnicks moved into the agricultural business after the purchase of some orange groves in Kern County.
They got their fortune first from the Teleflora flower delivery service. They later expanded their assets and bought cheap farms during the drought years of the late 1980s. The company which was then known as Paramount Farm soon became the largest pistachios and almonds producers in the world.

Their many brands include Wonderful Pistachios, Fiji Water, Halo clementines, and POM Wonderful. Nearly half of all Americans today purchase one of their products, including Halos mandarin oranges, POM Wonderful, and Fiji Water.

The two millionaire farmers have a net worth of $4 billion. It made lots of it from their almonds, oranges, and grapefruits they grow on their land. The family owns property in the Central Valley of California and South Texas....
....MUCH MORE
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"Eloquence in an Interview Is Better Than Accuracy, Says Study"

Although a decade old I see no reason this advice doesn't apply just as well in 2020.
From FINSfinance:
If you're stumped by a question in an interview, fake it. That's the advice coming out of a new study from Harvard.

You'll have a better chance of making a good impression if you respond eloquently and slightly irrelevantly than if you answer truthfully but with a dozen "uhs" and "ums" thrown in, according to the study.
Two Harvard researchers found that a person's likeability increases the more articulate they are. In the study, they showed subjects videos from a political debate. In the first video, a candidate answers the posed question directly and well. In the second, he answers a similar question, and in the third, he answers it directly but inarticulately.

Subjects didn't notice when the candidate answered a similar question -- his likeability only went down a tenth of a point. But when he answered directly and inarticulately, subjects liked him less. The audience also didn't remember if the candidate fudged a similar question....MORE
Hence Grandfather's dictum: If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.

Students of rhetoric would do well to study the March 23, 1955 press conference of President Eisenhower.
Relations with China were very, very tense, the State Department and some of the President's staff were convinced he would say something that started a nuclear war.

Press Secretary Hagerty says, ''The State Department people are really worried about what you're going to say about the offshore islands. They say, if you get a question on that, please refuse to answer.'' And Eisenhower says to Hagerty, ''Don't worry, Jim. If that comes up, I'll just confuse them.''
The question did come up:

Q. Joseph C. Harsch, Christian Science Monitor: Sir, I wonder if you can clarify something I am not quite clear on.

In your last press conference, referring to the use of atomic weapons, you said that when it was a question of strictly military targets for strictly military purposes, you saw no reason why they shouldn't be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.

On January 12, we were talking about atomic weapons in connection with police action as distinct from a major war, and within that context you said you did not think that normally we would use the atomic weapons, because, you thought, you could not conceive of atomic weapons as a police weapon, and there was some further remark there that it was so destructive.

THE PRESIDENT. Well, Mr. Harsch, the difference here, I think, is perfectly simple. A police action is not war; a police action is restoring order. 

Now, you don't send in bombs to restore order when a riot occurs. You get police people to restore order. Occasionally there may be a life lost if someone is too tough about it. 

But when you get into actual war, you have resorted to force for reaching a decision in a particular area; that is what I call War. 

And whether the war is big or not, if you have the kind of a weapon that can be limited to military use, then I know of no reason why a large explosion shouldn't be used as freely as a small explosion. That is all I was saying last week. 

But that is different from trying to restore order. Incidentally, if you want to follow some of these things off into the realm of great philosophical conjecture, suppose you won a war by the indiscriminate use of atomic weapons; what would you have left? Now, what would you do for your police action, for your occupation and restoration of order, and all of the things needed to be done in a great area of the earth?
I repeat, the concept of atomic war is too horrible for man to endure and to practice, and he must find some way out of it. That is all I think about this thing.

Q. Mr. Harsch: Sir, I am a little stupid about this thing.

THE PRESIDENT. Well, I am glad you didn't say I was! [Laughter]

Q. Mr. Harsch: It would seem to me there is big war at one end, just a local police action in which one person might be killed at the other; and, in between, what the military people would say was limited war. The Korean War, in a sense, was a limited war.

THE PRESIDENT. It became one, anyway.

Q. Mr. Harsch: It became one.
If we got into an issue with the Chinese, say, over Matsu and Quemoy, that we wanted to keep limited, do you conceive of using this specific kind of atomic weapon in that situation or not?

THE PRESIDENT. Well, Mr. Harsch, I must confess I cannot answer that question in advance.
The only thing I know about war are two things: the most changeable factor in war is human nature in its day-by-day manifestation; but the only unchanging factor in war is human nature. 

And the next thing is that every war is going to astonish you in the way it occurred, and in the way it is carried out. 

So that for a man to predict, particularly if he has the responsibility for making the decision, to predict what he is going to use, how he is going to do it, would I think exhibit his ignorance of war; that is what I believe.

So I think you just have to wait, and that is the kind of prayerful decision that may some day face a President.
We are trying to establish conditions where he doesn't. 

-Transcript from The American Presidency Project at UCSB

Brilliant!
CIA types later discovered the confusion this caused among Chinese intelligence and the hierarchy. 
Within a month they backed off from their threat to invade the islands and the threat that the Chinese, along with their nuclear-armed Soviet allies, would do something that led to a worldwide nuclear war passed.
(okay, I know it's not exactly Churchill enlisting the English language in the service of freedom but hey, it worked)

PBS' "American Experience" has video of the press conference.
Click here to listen to President Eisenhower discuss nuclear weapons at the press conference.

(Courtesy Eisenhower Library)
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Saturday, February 1, 2020

The Scientist On Coronavirus

Folks who have been following this story are probably familiar with these various aspects but I want them in one place for possible future reference.
Regarding what seems to be an effort on the part of some members of the media to drum up a bit of hysteria, yeah right.

I've mentioned that one of my doctors has a tropical medicine sub-specialty. His verdict:
Coronavirus is virulent, but not that virulent. It's deadly but not that deadly.
His advice? Stay away from areas with active Ebola and Marburg, in fact all the hemorrhagic fevers; don't smoke, lose five or ten pounds.
He tells everyone to lose 5 or 10 pounds.
He doesn't seem all that impressed with Wuhan coronavirus.

From The Scientist:
January 31, 2020
Scientists Zero in on the Novel Coronavirus’s Incubation Period
January 30, 2020
Going Viral for the Wrong Reasons
January 29, 2020
Australian Lab Cultures New Coronavirus as Infections Climb
January 24, 2020
Where Coronaviruses Come From
January 23, 2020
Scientists Scrutinize New Coronavirus Genome for Answers
August 9, 2019
Questions Surround Canadian Shipment of Deadly Viruses to China
November 2015
Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate

Back to the good doctor: Any time I see him I ask if he's been out of the country in the last 21 days, turnabout is fair play.
And you can't be too careful.
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Demand For Consumer DNA Testing Seems To Be Drying Up

Good.
Being married to Sergey Brin for eight years I always wondered if she had picked up some of Google's bad—read exploitive—habits. Ms Wojcicki's sister was employee #16 at the GOOG and runs YouTube.

FromCNBC:
23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline, CEO says she was ‘surprised’ to see market turn
  • 23andMe is laying off 100 people, as consumer DNA tests are down.
  • CEO Anne Wojcicki didn’t have a clear explanation for that, but cited a variety of factors, including both recession fears and privacy concerns.
  • Wojcicki said she anticipated that DNA testing would explode when she co-founded the business in 2007, but is now looking ahead to a retracting market.
Home DNA-testing company 23andMe is laying off about 100 people, or 14% of its staff, on Thursday, in the wake of declining sales.
The layoffs include the operations teams, which were focused on the company’s growth and scaling efforts, as well as other teams. In the coming months, the company plans to tighten its focus on the direct-to-consumer business and its therapeutics arm while scaling back its clinical studies arm.

CEO Anne Wojcicki told CNBC she’s been “surprised” to see the market starting to turn.
Wojcicki has theories, but she doesn’t have clear proof for why consumers are shying away from getting tests that reveal their percentage of Irish heritage, propensity for a favorite ice cream flavor, or whether they have a limited set of variants that are associated with breast cancer. Either way, she notes, she’s downsizing because it’s “what the market is ready for.”
“This has been slow and painful for us,” she said.

Wojcicki notes that privacy could be a factor. Fears about people’s DNA ending up in the wrong hands might have been heightened in the aftermath of the Golden State Killer case. Criminal investigations honed in on a suspect involved in a decades-old rapes and murders by running DNA found at the scene through a free online database where anyone who got their DNA tested through a company like 23andMe could upload it. A suspect was found because a distant relative had shared their genetic information -- showing how DNA data, unlike other kinds of data, is unique because it’s linked to and potentially exposes information about family members....
....MORE

Related at CNBC: "Veritas Genetics, the start-up that can sequence a human genome for less than $600, ceases US operations and is in talks with potential buyers"

HT on both stories: The Hustle
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"Walking sharks discovered in the tropics"

From the University of Queensland's UQ News, January 21:
Four new species of tropical sharks that use their fins to walk are causing a stir in waters off northern Australia and New Guinea.

While that might strike fear into the hearts of some people, University of Queensland researchers say the only creatures with cause to worry are small fish and invertebrates.

The walking sharks were discovered during a 12-year study with Conservation International, the CSIRO, Florida Museum of Natural History, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences and Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries.

UQ’s Dr Christine Dudgeon said the ornately patterned sharks were the top predator on reefs during low tides when they used their fins to walk in very shallow water.

“At less than a metre long on average, walking sharks present no threat to people"...
Said the one-legged man.

....MORE
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The French Fishermen Who Could Sink Britain’s Post-Brexit Ambitions

From Reuters via gCaptain:
BOULOGNE-SUR-MER, France, Jan 30 (Reuters) – For the British government, a successful Brexit means re-asserting economic sovereignty and landing a trade deal with Europe. Trawler captain Stephane Fait and his fellow French fisherman could sink that plan.

Based in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France’s busiest fishing port and a major European processing centre, Fait and his crew earn the bulk of their income from fish caught in British waters.

In negotiations on a post-Brexit trade deal that get underway after Britain’s Jan. 31 exit from the European Union, Britain will say EU vessels like Fait’s Notre Dame de Boulogne trawler no longer have automatic access to British waters.

But French fishermen won’t accept that and they have leverage: pressuring Brussels via French President Emmanuel Macron to withhold the trade deal unless Britain lets EU trawlers fish its waters.
“Macron mustn’t give an inch to Britain,” the captain said as his crew unloaded 2 tonnes of squid, red mullet and whiting this week.

Fait, 50, said his livelihood was at risk and wants Macron to retaliate against any restrictions imposed by London with a ban on British-caught fish entering the EU.
The fishing row shows how just one small industry – which plays a tiny economic role but has outsize political influence – can undo Britain’s ambitions of landing a wider deal that preserves its access to European markets.

British fishing grounds are among the richest in the North East Atlantic zone where most of the EU catch is hauled in. Current rules allow EU boats to fish as close as six nautical miles to Britain’s coast, but once it leaves the bloc its exclusive economic zone will reach as far as 200 miles offshore.
If no new accord is reached, Fait will not be allowed to fish beyond a line down the middle of the English Channel separating French and British territorial waters.

It would be “very, very grave” if French boats were banned from British waters, French Farm Minister Didier Guillaume told Reuters. “There could be reprisal measures.”

COMPETING INTERESTS
Regaining control of Britain’s waters was a totem for Brexit campaigners. British fishermen say too many concessions were made when Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973....
....MORE

Previously:
December 25, 2019 
UK Sets Collision Course With France by Equipping Itself to Fend off Illegal EU Fishers – Report
August 2019
Former Maritime Power, Great Britain, Won't Have Enough Ships To Monitor Post-Brexit EU Fishing Fleets

Possibly relevant:
"How Iceland Beat the British in the Four Cod Wars" 
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"Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village"

From CrimeReads, January 23:

You stay away from the village fete, do you understand?
It’s happened. You’ve finally taken that dream trip to England. You have seen Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, and Hyde Park. You rode in a London cab and walked all over the Tower of London. Now you’ve decided to leave the hustle and bustle of the city and stretch your legs in the verdant countryside of these green and pleasant lands. You’ve seen all the shows. You know what to expect. You’ll drink a pint in the sunny courtyard of a local pub. You’ll wander down charming alleyways between stone cottages. Residents will tip their flat caps at you as they bicycle along cobblestone streets. It will be idyllic.
Unless you end up in an English Murder Village. It’s easy enough to do. You may not know you are in a Murder Village, as they look like all other villages. So when you visit Womble Hollow or Shrimpling or Pickles-in-the-Woods or Nasty Bottom or Wombat-on-Sea or wherever you are going, you must have a plan. Below is a list of sensible precautions you can take on any trip to an English village. Follow them and you may just live.
___________________________________
PLACES TO AVOID
___________________________________
The village fête
The village fête is a fair, a celebration on the village green. They toss coconuts, judge cakes, drink tea, and whack toy rats with mallets. It’s a nice way to spend a summer’s day and thin out the local population, because where there is a fête, there is murder. If you enter a town while the fête is happening, you are already dead. The tea urn is filled with poison. The sponge cakes are full of glass. There’s an axe in the fortune telling tent. The coconuts are bombs. It’s like the Hunger Games, but dangerous.

Anywhere with a vat
In English villages, vats only exist for drowning people—in beer, in pickling brine, in whiskey, in jam. This is doubly true if the vat was built by 14th century monks. If anyone offers to show you a vat, say you need to get something from your car, then start the engine and run them over. The police understand this sort of thing. Tell them about the vat.
Places with gargoyles or statuary
Ghosts and monsters of stone. They are there to kill you.
The village church
The vicar will find your body if you venture here.
The village shop
They sell cheese, stamps, tea, and death.
The stables
How do you prefer to go: pitchforked, or stomped to death by a two-thousand-pound animal? Spoiler: it will be both.
Canopy beds
They have snakes in them.
Kitchens
No.
Attics
Join the ghosts up there, why don’t you.
Higher floors
Stay low. They can’t throw you off the balcony if you never go up the stairs.
The stairs
They are the xylophones of death.
Lower floors
Marble busts fall down, not up.
Basements
They don’t even have to dig a hole to put you in.
Bathtubs
You’re better than this.
Wells
Full of the skeletons of Victorian children and, if you are unwise, you.
The pond
Just remove water as a category.
The village green
Also land.

___________________________________
PEOPLE TO AVOID
___________________________________
The vicar
See previous note about the village church. When you see the vicar, run. If you are not dead yet, the vicar is obliged to kill you....

....MUCH MORE
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"China reports outbreak of deadly bird flu among chickens in Hunan province, close to coronavirus epicentre of Wuhan"

As Grandmother used to say, "If it's not one tham ding it's another"
(we knew what she was really thinking)

From the South China Morning Post, updated 5:01 am February 2:
  • Bird flu outbreak in Hunan province, which lies on the southern border of Hubei province, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak
  • Bird flu is much deadlier than either Sars or the coronavirus, but as of yet no human cases have been reported in this outbreak
China has reported an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 bird flu in Hunan province, which lies on the southern border of Hubei province, the epicentre of the rapidly spreading coronavirus.

“The outbreak occurred in a farm in the Shuangqing district of Shaoyang city. The farm has 7,850 chickens, and 4,500 of the chickens have died from the contagion. Local authorities have culled 17,828 poultry after the outbreak,” according to a statement by China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs on Saturday.

No human cases of the Hunan H5N1 virus has been reported.
The Hunan H5N1 outbreak comes even as the Chinese authorities continue to scramble to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, further stretching the nation’s already heavily strained resources needed to combat the health threats.

The deadly coronavirus infection had claimed 259 lives in China as of Saturday. So far, no deaths have been reported outside the country. The virus has sickened more than 11,900 in China and about 140 overseas so far.

The H5N1 avian flu virus, often called bird flu, causes severe respiratory disease in birds and is contagious to humans. The virus was first detected in 1996 in geese in China and is especially deadly for poultry....MORE

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From Those Wonderful Folks Who Bring You Davos: The World Economic Forum Is REALLY Pushing Surveillance Cities

Apologies to Jerry Della Femina.*

From Visual Capitalist via the World Economic Forum, January 9:

This is what the cities of the future could look like

*Mr. Della Femina was a New York advertising guy and the inspiration for Mad Men.
In the 1960's he was brainstorming with some colleagues on how to sell Panasonic televisions and he came up with the tagline "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor".
In 1970 he used the tagline as the title of his book on advertising. Here's the 1971 paperback cover:


The key takeaway from the book is Be Bold (borderline crazy).
Good advice for running a business, not so good for running a portfolio.
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"Are we in for a repeat of the ‘Long Depression’?"

Nah.
Probably something more Churchillian:
"then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."
—in the House of Commons, June 18, 1940

From MarketWatch, December 4, 2019:
There are a lot of parallels between the present moment and the late 1800s, including a backlash against globalization: economist

A financial crisis that left in its wake deflationary price pressures, low productivity, stagnant incomes, a spike in populism, a backlash against globalization: if that all sounds familiar, you may not like the following insight.

It comes from Dario Perkins, global macro economist for TS Lombard, who, in a Wednesday note, described the historical period he thinks most resembles the current moment. That era is called, a bit bleakly, the Long Depression, and stretched from 1873 to about 1896, depending on the country. 

The U.S., for example, was in recession from October 1873 to March 1879, a stretch that remains the longest downturn on record, and which was followed by four more recessionary periods, for a total of 161 months, or over 13 years, in contraction during that time frame.

“The panic of 1873 was arguably the first truly international crisis,” Perkins explained. “It began in central Europe with the collapse of the Vienna stock market, then spread to the United States after the failure of the banking house of Cooke and Co. over its investment in the Northern Pacific Railroad.”
A financial crisis kick-starting a long period of economic malaise may also sound familiar, but Perkins is more interested in other features of the depression. He notes the slump in productivity that hit Great Britain especially hard: “this is the only period in the last three hundred years with a downturn comparable to what we see today.”

Perkins also calls attention to deflation. While most analysts agree that the effects of globalization, technological innovation, and a shift to a services-oriented economy away from manufacturing have all combined to keep inflation tepid, “these deflationary pressures were even stronger in the late 1800s, producing a sustained period of failing prices,” he writes. “U.K. inflation averaged -1.4% between 1873 and 1888.”....
....MORE

And here with contrary opinions:
"Why Vanguard's Chief Economist Is Long-Term Bullish" (hint: Productivity)

"Carlota Perez et al. 'Are We on the Verge of a New Golden Age?'"
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"Chocolate, bioterrorism and the birth of Brazilian funk"

“…For, after all, I had been into cocoa a bit myself. That was back when The Great Winfield had discovered cocoa trading. Occasionally in those more leisured days I would sit with him lazily watching stocks move, like two sheriffs in a rowboat watching catfish in the Tennessee River….”
-'Adam Smith', Supermoney
From engadget:
Is a plot to topple the aristocracy to blame for the collapse of cacao in Brazil? 
In the 1990s, the cacao farmers of Brazil fell into a collective depression. Some hanged themselves, others dosed themselves with rat poison, still others walked around crying and saying they didn't have anything to eat. The cacao pods on orchards throughout Bahia sat stagnant on their branches, rotting from the inside out. A coven of foreign, tightly gnarled stalks covered the trees themselves. The country had been the world's third-largest producer of cocoa beans, but it had fallen from grace and even had to import beans from West Africa to satisfy its residents' sweet tooth. 
Juliana Pinheiro Aquino remembers it well. "My father was depressed. He was very sad," she said.
About a century earlier, her great-grandmother's brother, Firmino Alves, had founded the city of Itabuna and started the tradition of farming cacao in Bahia. "He called all his friends to help him," Aquino said, describing the land rush of the late 1800s. Alves and his friends grew fabulously wealthy thanks to cacao and the mass of workers who helped them farm it. "Cacao was like the golden fruit," Aquino said, "so everyone was raised with a lot of money."

Aquino spent the first few years of her life on the Pinheiro family's large-scale farm, living near her celebrity uncle who used his wealth to buy several Ford dealerships. Then, after a falling out, her father bought his own farm, Fazenda Santa Rita. When witches' broom hit, Aquino said that within a couple of years, they had lost their entire fortune.

Her family wasn't alone. More than 200,000 people lost their jobs. Bahia experienced a mass exodus as people flocked from the farms to nearby cities, creating overpopulation and, with it, poverty and crime: Brazil now boasts 17 of the world's 50 most dangerous cities, which historian Claudio Zumaeta linked directly to the collapse of cacao. Meanwhile, parts of the rainforest were wrecked and Bahia's biodiversity irreparably affected as farmers razed their trees to control the disease.

How could devastation happen on such a definitive level, especially in an area that had been farming cacao for more than 100 years? Two words: Moniliophthora perniciosa. The fungus causes a disease called witches' broom that spells disaster for cacao farming, systematically transforming healthy trees into possessed messes with rotting pods and nasty-tasting beans.

Witches' broom isn't native to Bahia. Rather, it grows more than 1,200 miles away, in the Amazonian rainforest. The first farmers to discover the disease in their trees encountered it in an unconventional way: "I found two cocoa trees with dry witches' broom tied onto them in the middle of their trunks," José Roberto Benjamin, a farm owner in Camacan, tells the camera in the documentary The Knot. Others discovered it the same way, as if, in an act of bioterrorism, the disease was introduced intentionally.
It turns out, it was.

The government investigated by evaluating the disease's entry points (the middle of farms rather than natural boundaries like rivers), and in a 1989 report called "The Report of the First Occurrence," it concluded that the outbreak of witches' broom "cannot be attributed to natural agents of dissemination. ... It makes it possible to believe that the pathogen was introduced by human hands." The trouble was, it didn't know whose.

Then, in 2006, Luiz Henrique Franco Timoteo, a supporter of the leftist Workers' Party (PT), confessed in a startling article in Veja magazine. The idea, he said, had come from Geraldo Simoes, a leading member of the PT who worked at the Comissao Executiva do Plano da Lavoura Cacaueira (CEPLAC), the governmental agricultural agency responsible for Brazil's cocoa-growing regions. Timoteo said that as part of a group of five PT militants (all of whom, besides for him, worked at CEPLAC), he helped introduce the disease to farms to wrest power from the wealthy landowners, destabilizing the area and allowing the oppressed lower classes to have their day.

After all, there was a lot of resentment about the wealth of the so-called cacao colonels -- the owners of large plantations -- compared to the lives of the farm workers. "Cacao elites used to say that the best doctor in the area was Varig and Vasp, which were the two airlines that would take you out of town," said Mary Ann Mahony, a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University. "In the '80s there was no running water, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, nothing."

"Anytime we had health problems, we would go to Salvador or Sao Paulo," Aquino remembered about living in Itabuna, near the farm. When she was three years old, the family moved away from the area: It was the norm for farm owners to live in a bigger city while a manager and hired hands took care of the farm. Aquino moved into a "big apartment" with her grandmother in Salvador and attended private school there. Both she and her brother had cars, and her brother went to "the best university in Brazil for agronomic engineering" and then to California for an exchange program. "We didn't live in luxury, but we had everything we wanted," Aquino said.

Yet compared to most of the workers on her father's farm, she lived like a queen. "They were very poor," Aquino recalled. "They wouldn't know how to read and write." Mahony recalled seeing payroll sheets from the 1970s where workers "were signing with their fingerprint because they were illiterate."

Novelist Jorge Amado describes the scene aptly in his book The Golden Harvest. Ilheus is "a city of money and cabarets, of dauntless courage and dirty deals."...
...MUCH MORE
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"The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World"

A masterful review from Monica Green at Inference Magazine:
Bruce Campbell’s The Great Transition chronicles an important and gloomy historical moment. The two centuries between the 1260s and 1470s witnessed the collapse of international networks of exchange, multiple wars, economic contraction, repeated famines, and demographic decline. The single most profound event was what is still considered the most devastating pandemic of human history: the Black Death of the middle of the fourteenth century. In Europe and around the Mediterranean basin, mortality levels have been estimated at between forty and sixty percent. The 1470s were only a period of stabilization. The new world that the Great Transition ushered in was colder, wetter, and more disease ridden than any humans had ever known before. Historians of the early modern period have recognized the climatic period known as the Little Ice Age (LIA) for some time.1 For the history of medicine, no agreed-upon term has arisen for this regime of intense infectious diseases, which were in full global circulation after 1492. For plague in particular, it is now recognized that instead of seeing the Black Death as a singular event, we should instead recognize the 500-year period of plague infestation that it initiated in Eurasia and Africa as the Second Plague Pandemic.

The Great Transition
Campbell’s book has twelve tables, seventy-eight figures, most of them graphs, and a bibliography running forty-six pages. Campbell has always favored data-heavy analyses; his many decades of study on English agriculture were based on massive compilations of data on crop yields, and he has recently coauthored a comprehensive survey of the British economy from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries.2 Agriculture is always dependent on weather, which in turn depends on climate cycles; this explains Campbell’s movement into climate history about ten years ago. The devastating effects of the Black Death on England, where population loss was accompanied by a massive decline in wealth, explain his interest in the pandemic. Campbell’s efforts in attempting to master the emerging fields of paleoscience that deal with climate and infectious disease will repay the dedicated reader.
The Black Death was not the only catastrophe Europe suffered in the fourteenth century. A whole generation of readers has the title and imagery of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century seared into their conceptions of life in the late Middle Ages.3 Famines, the Hundred Years’ War, economic disruptions, and all manner of hardship made life in Europe, at least, distinctly unpleasant. Campbell looks at this same long fourteenth century, arguing that this 200-year period should be carved out from the previous periodization in climate history, which saw the warm period of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) leading straight into the LIA. For Campbell, a variety of climate-forcing factors and economic shifts argue for designating the Great Transition as its own separate period, with four distinct phases.
  • 1260s to 1330s: This period saw the end of the MCA, a prolonged, mostly warm period that began around 900 CE which, with one exception in the first half of the eleventh century, was likely due to a high solar irradiance. In the MCA, not only Europe but much of Eurasia flourished. Rising populations, increasing urbanization, an economy growing by leaps and bounds: never had the world seen so much sustained growth and cultural flourishing. The onset of the Wolf solar minimum signaled the end of this prolonged period.4 Combined with changing weather, many years in this period experienced pronounced rainfall at levels that had not occurred since the 1250s and would not occur again until the 1980s. The late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries saw repeated catastrophes, including a sheep-scab epizootic in the 1270s and 1280s, the Great Northern European Famine of 1315–17, and a cattle panzootic of 1319–20. This period also saw a marked reduction of international trade, with severe shortages of bullion. 
  • 1340s to 1370s: The 1340s and early 1350s were, as Campbell remarks, “an almost uniquely disturbed and climatically unstable period when long-established atmospheric circulation patterns were on the cusp of lasting change.”5 The period was distinctly cold, and tree rings show a collective growth minimum. Extreme weather events stand out, such as the devastating Saint Mary Magdalene’s flood in central Germany in July 1342, which raised the Main to levels higher than have ever been documented since, and washed away the better part of topsoil in the region. Warfare, harvest failures, and famine all struck, virtually at once, followed by the great Black Death pandemic, 1346–1353. Despite a few years of climatic and economic alleviation in the 1350s, the plague’s return in the early 1360s ensured that population levels remained depressed. Campbell ventures an estimate of plague mortality of twenty-five million people in Europe, with figures in England indicating that at least one-third of the population perished, and, in certain regions, almost forty percent.6 The plague returned again around 1360, this time having a particularly pronounced effect on children born since the Black Death. It would return at least three more times before the century ended, and would, in fact, haunt most of Europe and the Mediterranean for the next three centuries. By the 1380s, Europe’s population had been reduced by half. 
  • 1370s to 1470s: During this period, climate conditions continued to deteriorate. The LIA followed a brief period of solar irradiance in the late fourteenth century, the so-called Chaucerian maximum. The Spörer minimum, ca. 1416–1534, had effects on the Indian Ocean monsoon, the Nile flood, and the North Atlantic oscillation, resulting in global temperature drops of 0.4–0.8°. The aerosols produced by the eruption of Mount Kuwae off the coast of Vanuatu around 1458 reinforced these trends. Europe remained in a demographic spiral, burdened by infectious disease, a depressed economy, and war. 
  • 1470s on: The Spörer solar minimum finally eased, and there was a slight alleviation of the intense cold. Campbell notes a demographic shift in Europe around 1500, when, even without any apparent cessation of the disease regime, population recovery, at least in northern Europe, led to levels approaching those before the Black Death. By this point, Portugal, allied with Genoa, had circumvented the trans-Saharan trade in gold and ivory and established its own direct ties with West Africa. It also began its expansion into the Atlantic, as did the Spanish and then the English. The Dutch, however, came out most successfully as Europe’s new economic power. This newly configured Europe, one where northern countries took over the economic power formerly wielded by Italy, had now adjusted to the new world the previous two centuries had made. In other words, the Great Transition was completed and the Old World had adjusted to the new climatic and economic balance.
The late medieval period is well-worn territory for Europeanist historians, and many of the political, economic, and cultural ruptures of the period are well-known. Yet the commonly cited signposts that medievalists and early modernists usually use to stake out their respective terrain now stand as just items in long lists of interconnected shifts, declines, and catastrophes in Campbell’s account. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, for example, signaling the end of Roman Byzantium, the last vestige of the Empire, is here nothing more than another falling domino. The majority of the book keeps its focus on England and the economic evidence Campbell knows best; when it ventures beyond, Europe still serves as its point of view. This narrow focus has its costs. Overall, Campbell presents a tight chronological narrative, moving between global forces that shift monsoon patterns and tree growth, and changes in the silver supply and the spice market, down to the level of microbes. Campbell often uses dramatic language: “the Rubicon had been crossed,” and, the “climatic regime had already passed the point of no return.”7 The transition Campbell is chronicling is, “big, complex, multi-faceted.”8 It was a transition, not a cycle.9 The buildup is long, and the identification of the consequences must be extended, too, because societies had to establish new socio-ecological equilibria to deal with a world that had been transformed.

The story, then, is complex and justifies the 200-year span that Campbell stakes out. But there is a climax, a tipping point, and it falls in the 1340s. Save for the eruption of the Samalas volcano in 1257, whose effects turn out to be less dramatic than initial assessments had predicted, all the changes leading up to the 1340s were gradual or iterative. Only one change seemed to be unique, and horrifically sudden, in that crucial fifth decade of the fourteenth century, and that was the arrival of plague.

The Plague
It seems a strange coincidence that the Middle Ages are bookended by two plague pandemics: the Justinianic plague, from ca. 541 to ca. 750, and the Black Death, which we usually date from 1347 to 1353 but which should now be seen as the beginning of the much longer Second Plague Pandemic. Historical periods are conventions we create, and the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, on the one hand, and then the Middle Ages to the early modern period, on the other, were fixed in historiography long before questions about the environment or history of disease loomed large. Yet both pandemics share more similarities than could have been imagined even a decade ago, which suggest why they should have been implicated in two of the greatest turning points in Afro-Eurasian history. Not simply were both caused by the same organism, Yersinia pestis, but climate science confirms that both emerged in periods of pronounced, and quite sudden, global cooling. Molecular genetics suggests that both issued out small pockets of long-term animal infestation in the central Eurasian steppe, or perhaps a region at the edge of the deserts of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, areas now part of western China and eastern Kyrgyzstan. The assumption that plague emerged out of arid central Asia is at the core of Campbell’s analysis, since he ties its emergence to a sudden period of drought in the 1250s, which followed several decades of exceptionally high moisture. Alternatively, he suggests that plague erupted during a subsequent drought in the 1290s, which in turn was reinforced by a subsequent pluvial period in the 1310s.10 The important point to note here is Campbell’s willingness to ascribe the initiation of the most devastating pandemic in history to two different points in time.

The issue is not that Campbell hasn’t been able to settle on a specific date; that would be difficult in the extreme, since we are talking about events transpiring between fleas and rodents in the wild. The issue is that, since he wishes to place these events in central Asia, it matters considerably whether they had a hundred, fifty, or only as little as thirty years to generate effects 4,500 kilometers away in the region of the Black Sea. And whether the interval was long or short, there is also the question of why the path of spread would have been unidirectional, when we would expect a radiating pattern out of a central focus. Since he believes that the spreading outbreak covered the longest part of its journey, the 3,300 miles from Kyrgyzstan to the Black Sea, in between eight and twelve years,11 both the speed and the unidirectionality become problematic. How does plague move across a landscape? How much time does it take? And how much genetic change should we expect to have occurred in relation to time elapsed? The first questions have been asked repeatedly in historiography about the Black Death; the third is one we have only been able to pose in the past few years. Clearly, the wet environment of much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which Campbell has documented persuasively for Asia and Europe and which was reinforced by the sudden cold of the 1340s, is well suited for sustaining continued plague outbreaks, and for allowing plague to focalize in adjacent areas, finding new pockets of burrowing rodents to afflict in slow-burning enzootics. But sustaining plague as a local enzootic, and accounting for locally radiating epizootics, is different from igniting a pandemic 4,500 kilometers away. The genetics is what Campbell is using to place the Black Death’s origin in central Asia.12 But the genetics is also what complicates his scenario....MUCH MORE
And some of the correspondence regarding the review:
         by Daniel Curtis and Joris Roosen, reply by Monica Green
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