Recently, China developed genetically engineered rice that will increase production by over 24 percent. This makes it nearly certain that China will be a military superpower in a generation or less. Pretty strong stuff, right? No, it's simply historical fact. Read on and learn a little something about your own past.

We tend to lose sight of the fact that food is power. Has been for thousands of years. The more food you have, the more people you have, and some of those folks will be carrying weapons. Sure, there are plenty of industrialized nations that buy most of their food overseas, but they are able to do that because, at one point, they were very efficient producers of food.

A hundred and fifty years ago, most Americans worked on farms, and they were the most productive farmers in the world. So productive that fewer and fewer farmers were needed. Today, about three percent of Americans work on farms. American farms were always more mechanized than any others, and were complex operations that created management savvy men and women who went on to provide the most productive workforce on the planet. As more farmers worked themselves out of a job, they went on to provide dynamic workers and managers for non-farm enterprises. This pattern repeated itself in all large industrial nations. And once you were an industrialized nation you had lots of money, technology and very efficient soldiers.

European nations got started doing this some four centuries ago. Over the space of a few generations (for reasons we won't go into here) crop yields began to increase enormously. For many centuries, one handful of grain used as seed would get you back, on average, about three handfuls. Generation by generation the yield went up, until today, when American farmers get a ratio of 15 or 20 to 1.

As each farmer produces more food, more of the farmer's children not only survive childhood but grow up bigger, stronger and smarter. More food does that. More and more of the kids don't have to be farmers. They can go off and build other things, like roads, castles, artillery and Western Civilization. More food means more stuff, and better stuff. Look around you and you see what ten generations of more and more productive farming can do.

Which brings us back to China, where genetic engineering has created a pest resistant strain of rice. The new strains produce 28 percent higher yields, and use less manpower as well. This will provide a dramatic boost for the Chinese economy, where 80 percent of the population is still employed as farmers. For thousands of years, Chinese have recognized that the basis of Chinese power was farming. China developed high-yield (rice) farming before anyone else and 800 years ago Chinese were about 25 percent of the planet's population (today it is about 20 percent). New hybrid rice strains, based on Western technology, have enabled China to feed its population over the last few decades.

In fact, much of China's energetic economic growth in the last two decades first came from better crop yields. This provided wealth for the growth of the private sector, increased tax revenues and the subsequent updating and rebuilding of the Chinese armed forces. The new rice strains will have an even more dramatic effect, because, unlike the earlier hybrids, the genetically modified stuff will require less work from the farmers.

More unemployed farmers may backfire. China is still a communist dictatorship and the economy is not completely free. Thus more than a hundred million unemployed farmers are already wandering about the country looking for work. Moreover, in the last decade the government has taxed the farmers heavily, and done little to rein in corrupt local officials, producing a decline in farm income. The farmers are upset to the point of unrest. While the new rice strains should increase farm income, if the government remains greedy and corrupt, there could be a farmer rebellion. Throughout Chinese history, this has been the sort of thing that brings governments down.

If the government wises up, which it appears to be doing, rich farmers and food exports will provide the money for more weapons. Rich farmers send their kids to school, and this provides able workers in an industrial and information economy. So the genetically altered rice will either turn China into a military superpower, or tear the country apart.

Food is a weapon in more ways than you can imagine.

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