Agriculture, livestock farming and fishing: between myths and scientific data

Brightly coloured wall painting on a yellow background: a man pushes a plough drawn by two spotted cows. — Painting from the burial chamber of Sennedjem, in ancient Egypt, around 1200 BCE. Painter of the burial chamber of Sennedjem, Public domain, source

Agriculture is often told as the great step forward that made everything possible. For some years now, it has also been told as humanity’s worst mistake.
Both stories are too clear-cut. The reality is far more mixed, as the scientific data reveal.

1. It was invented at least eleven times

There is no single cradle of agriculture.

Populations began to cultivate plants and raise animals separately, in at least eleven regions of the world, without knowing one another.¹

Domesticate: to gradually transform a wild plant or animal into a variety that depends on humans — and on which humans depend in turn.

Geographical centre	Domesticated species
Near East	Wheat, barley, sheep, goats (the best-documented centre)
China	Rice, millet, pigs
Mesoamerica	Maize, beans, squash
Andes	Potatoes, llamas
Sub-Saharan Africa	Sorghum, African rice, yams
North America	Sunflower, squash
New Guinea	Taro, bananas

Sources for the table²

2. Before, people did not merely gather

Saying that hunter-gatherers wandered and gathered denies them any intention. In reality, they actively shaped their environment.

Controlled fire: burning small areas made it possible to:
- Stimulate the regrowth of tender young shoots;
- Attract game;
- Open safe passages;
- Prevent the spread of large, uncontrollable wildfires.

This was not passive movement through untouched nature, but genuine landscape management.³

Thinking about words
The term “nomad” poses a similar problem: it describes as wandering what is in reality a highly structured territorial cycle. When a label describes a population, it is worth asking whether it acknowledges that population’s skills or erases them.

3. What the skeletons say

Compared with hunter-gatherers, osteological analysis of the first farmers reveals counter-intuitive health indicators:

Lower average stature;
Increased signs of malnutrition;
Poorer oral health (caries, early wear).⁴

Why would greater calorie availability damage health?

A monotonous diet: access to a more stable volume of calories, but a loss of nutritional variety.
Density and crowding: life in close-packed communities alongside domestic animals, facilitating the spread of zoonoses and epidemics.
Heavier toil: an increase in physical workload from labour in the fields.

Lessons from a study of hundreds of skeletons from Central and Southeast Europe
The decline in stature was reversed very slowly, over several thousand years.
The gradual improvement was more pronounced among women.⁵

4. The second misconception, to be handled with care

Since the publication of a popular article by Jared Diamond in 1987, the phrase describing agriculture as the “worst mistake in the history of the human race” has become a widespread cliché.⁶

What this simplifying phrase leaves out:

It was not a scientific article. It appeared in a popular-science magazine, without a scholarly apparatus. And the famous phrase is the title; the text only gives a variant of it, near the end.
A frequent decline, not a universal one. The studies on which he relied do not show the same effect everywhere: health declines in 19 of the 21 societies studied, but not in the other two.
The thesis evolved. Ten years later, in a far more famous book, the same author made agriculture the main driver of the development of societies.
A repeated choice. If agriculture had been nothing but a constraint imposed on people, its independent adoption on eleven occasions would be very strange.⁷

5. What farming does to the land

Farming irreversibly transforms the structure and chemistry of the soil.

In Mesopotamia, intensive irrigation in an arid environment without adequate drainage caused salinisation: the rapid evaporation of water draws mineral salts up to the surface, gradually sterilising the crops.⁸

This phenomenon was not an isolated accident, but a recurrent environmental mechanism that still affects many agricultural regions.

6. Livestock farming: much more than meat

Livestock farming makes it possible to use land unsuited to cultivation. Grasslands and rangelands cover a considerable share of the land surface — the exact proportion depends on what one decides to include — and support around one billion people.⁹

The 3 fundamental contributions of livestock farming

Manure: an organic soil improver essential for maintaining soil fertility.
Draught power: working the land and transporting loads.
A store of value: the herd acts as savings on the hoof, which can be drawn on in an economic or climate crisis.

The environmental cost

Greenhouse gas emissions: livestock farming contributes a significant share of them if the whole chain is counted, from growing fodder to transport; ruminant digestion is the largest item.
A lasting footprint: in Kenya, researchers measured old livestock enclosures abandoned for varying lengths of time, up to forty years. They emit around ten times more nitrous oxide than the neighbouring savanna. At the scale of the continent, these abandoned enclosures are thought to account for nearly 5% of Africa’s emissions of this gas from human activities.¹⁰

This last point deserves emphasis: a land use that ceased forty years ago can still be measured in the air today.

Transhumance and desertification
Nomadic pastoralism was long blamed for degrading soils. Recent research shows that, on the contrary, herd mobility is the best way to make the most of arid and changing climates. Yet for a long time efforts were made to reduce this mobility, or even to eliminate it.¹¹

7. Fishing and the state of the oceans

The FAO has tracked the state of the world’s fish stocks since the 1970s, using a fixed list of stocks, so that the figures remain comparable from one year to the next.¹²

In 1974, 90% of stocks were exploited sustainably. In 2021, 62.3%. Conversely, the share of overfished stocks rose from 10% to 37.7%.¹³

Two figures, two questions

The next point is more subtle. Alongside this 62.3%, the FAO publishes another number: 76.9%.

It does not contradict the first. It answers a different question.

62.3% is the share of stocks. Each stock counts as one, whether it is huge or tiny.
76.9% is the share of fish caught. The large stocks, which are better monitored, carry more weight in it.¹⁴

In other words: the majority of stocks are in good shape, and an even larger majority of the fish consumed comes from stocks in good shape — but many small stocks are in poor shape.

Counting stocks or counting fish does not give the same answer. Neither is wrong.

Targeted management works

Overfishing is not inevitable: it is a matter of rules.

The best-managed areas have more than three quarters of their stocks at sustainable levels, while the worst-off fall to a third. And among tuna stocks, 87% are fished sustainably — thanks to quotas based on scientific assessments.¹⁵

The FAO itself draws the conclusion: effective fisheries management reaps positive outcomes. What is lacking is not the method, but its application.¹⁶

Note 1

At least 11 regions of the Old and New World were involved as independent centers of origin, encompassing geographically isolated regions on most continents, but several more have been suggested (Fig. 1) (3, 7, 11, 15, 16).

Larson, Greger et al., “Current Perspectives and the Future of Domestication Studies”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 111, no. 17, 2014, p. 6139-6146