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Production
increase
No production or data
Production
decrease
global changes in tobacco production since 1961:
99.99%
Puerto Rico
12309.34%
Kenya
99.96%
Slovakia
14291.42%
Polynesia
99.83%
Israel
19960.00%
Tanzania
99.59%
Benin
60739.34%
Mozambique
98.91%
Kyrgyzstan
123299.41%
St. Vincent and
Grenadines
From an American perspective, tobacco may read like a classic Rise and Fall narrative. For more than a century, it was inseparable from an ascendant American economy, a monolithic industry finally slain by science and health policy. But it’s global demise is greatly exaggerated. In the developing world, there are more tobacco users than ever, and that’s no accident: Last year, Reuters uncovered documents from Philip Morris demonstrating the industry’s seismic will to undo tobacco treaties drafted to reduce global tobacco use largely in the developing world. It was a campaign Reuters called “one of the broadest corporate lobbying efforts in existence.” In the industry’s sights are countries like Indonesia, which, after a video was released of a chain-smoking baby, became the exemplar of smoking’s current frontier. As a former Finnish health minister said of the tobacco’s indomitability, “Some people think that with tobacco, you’ve won the battle. No way...The tobacco industry is more powerful than ever.”
annual tobacco production in indonesia since 1961:
1988
2002
2016
1975
1961
300K TONS
150K TONS
tobacco
in indonesia
Production
increase
No production or data
Production
decrease
global changes in wheat production since 1961:
99.60%
New Caledonia
7522.60%
China
98.79%
Martinique
13560.00%
laos
98.47%
trinidad & tobago
35529.27%
vietnam
98.25%
suriname
54568.33%
thailand
97.37%
benin
227233.33%
zambia
How much the arc of history has hinged on the oyster is questionable, but wheat has walked civilization on a leash for 20,000 years—the staff of life that fueled the Agricultural Revolution whose American lobby has ensured the staple’s subsidization into our every dish. But the primarily western commodity is now squarely part of the Asian palette, where it has begun to supplant rice as the carbohydrate of choice. As one analyst told Reuters, “It’s a symbol of lifestyle. Consumers pair them (cakes and pastries) with coffee and chatting, and hanging out with friends.” Since 2005, the United States, Russia, Ukraine and Australia have become critical to feeding Asia’s wheat appetite.
annual wheat production
in australia since 1961:
1988
2002
2016
1975
1961
30M TONS
15M TONS
wheat
in australia
Production
increase
No production or data
Production
decrease
global changes in lentils production since 1973:
98.62%
Hungary
824.96%
Russia
98.31%
cyprus
918.25%
Kazakhstan
98.25%
Jordan
1424.64%
Azerbaijan
98.22%
iraq
2410.44%
united states
97.64%
Egypt
64675900.00%
canada
No other crop in the world has experienced as much as growth in the past fifty years as the Canadian lentil, whose output has exploded by more than 64 million percent since the dataset began. Why Canada? As it turns out, the region of Saskatchewan is an almost impossibly perfect location to grow pulse legumes like lentils and chickpeas, and the booming, largely vegetarian population of India—currently at 1.3 billion, and growing at a faster clip than China—has an insatiable hunger for them. As a result, the otherwise unsuspecting region has become, as one lentil supplier told the Globe and Mail, “the protein basket of the world.”
annual lentils production
in canada since 1973:
1994
2005
2016
1984
1973
4M TONS
2M TONS
Lentils
in canada
Production
increase
No production or data
Production
decrease
global changes in beans production since 1961:
99.32%
Puerto Rico
12309.34%
Egypt
97.49%
Portugal
14291.42%
Northern Europe
96.73%
Bulgaria
19960.00%
Latvia
95.88%
Slovakia
60739.34%
Estonia
94.37%
Hungary
123299.41%
lithuania
Explanations of the 1994 Rwandan genocide have focused almost exclusively on ethnic tensions between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority. But the years leading to the crisis filled the powder keg with not just colonial explosives, but agricultural ones as well. As Rwanda’s population grew through the 1980s, farmers allowed less time for their fields to recover after harvest, making the land less arable. Meanwhile, foreign institutions like the World Bank encouraged the cultivation of coffee to the exclusion of most other crops, decreasing soil biodiversity and sapping soil of nutrients needed for other foods, like beans. When crop production plummeted in the early ‘90s, the genocide’s prologue began, and the ultimate result, as UN Commander General Roméo Dallaire said after leading his unsuccessful humanitarian mission there, was a “failure of humanity.”
annual beans production
in rwanda since 1961:
1988
2002
2016
1975
1961
500K TONS
250K TONS
Beans
in rwanda
Production
increase
No production or data
Production
decrease
global changes in coffee production since 1961:
99.60%
New Caledonia
7522.60%
China
98.79%
Martinique
13560.00%
laos
98.47%
trinidad & tobago
35529.27%
vietnam
98.25%
suriname
54568.33%
thailand
97.37%
benin
227233.33%
zambia
Colombia is one of the world’s top coffee producers and the second highest producer of the coveted arabica bean, whose global demand exploded with the rise of specialty coffee. High altitudes, cool temperatures and just-right rainfall make Colombia ideal for producing the difficult-to-yield crop, but its coffee regions are as fraught as they are fertile, and have for years been vexed by politics and ecology alike. In 2016, the country finally signed a peace agreement with FARC rebels, a detente in a 53-year-old civil war that had wreaked widespread agricultural instability and prevented large international buyers like Nescafe from venturing into guerilla-controlled regions. At the same time, climate change has made coffee yields (which rely on a calibration of climate factors) unpredictable. The result is not a boom or a bust, but a trail of volatility, characteristic of Colombian history itself.
annual coffee production
in colombia since 1961:
1988
2002
2016
1975
1961
1.25M TONS
750K TONS
coffee
in colombia
Production
increase
No production or data
Production
decrease
global changes in Hops production since 1961:
98.77%
Hungary
167.16%
ethiopia
95.64%
united kingdom
206.67%
argentina
90%
portugal
249.28%
austrlia
88.18%
russia
386.81%
south africa
82.50%
slovakia
1185.40%
china
Ale may function as the England’s national drink, but British hops are nearing extinction. In the long term, land traditionally purposed for hops was ceded to apples, as the UK imported cheaper hops from countries like the U.S. and Germany. But more recently, Brits, like Americans, have developed a taste for pungent microbrews with high alcohol contents and intense (some might say unendurable) flavor profiles, a taste not easily brewed with the UK’s lighter varieties. In Kent, local brewers organized a two-week beer festival using only local hops as a campaign to stymie the loss of Brits’ taste for domestic hops. As one brewer told the Guardian of the festival, “We hope [it] will flag this up to a few more people and in turn raise the issue of what's going on with the UK hop industry and that if we don't use it we'll lose it."
annual hops production in
the united kingdom since 1961:
1988
2002
2016
1975
1961
15K TONS
7.5K TONS
Hops
in the U.K.
Production
increase
No production or data
Production
decrease
global changes in banana production since 1980:
97.54%
Japan
5783.19%
Turkey
96.44%
Timor-Leste
7399.53%
China
93.31%
Saint Lucia
15824%
Laos
91.56%
Cook Islands
16591%
Morocco
83.9%
Tonga
1296770%
iran
Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the 1979 Iranian Revolution that turned the country into an Islamic republic, made national self-sufficiency a pillar of his regime. It would, in Khomeini’s thinking, provide a barricade against the imperial influence his coup was designed to topple in the first place. At the same time, Iran had been economically ostracized by an ever-creeping web of American sanctions, frustrating its relationships with foreign markets even when it wanted to engage. So Iran developed its own agricultural production, focusing on anything it could grow itself, leaving a chart that reads like an endless banana bonanza. Since the revolution, banana output has risen by 1.3 million percent.
annual banana production in iran since 1980:
1998
2007
2016
1989
1980
150k tons
75k tons
Bananas in Iran
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T
here are historians who argue that you could tell the story
of America through cotton, or that the motivations of
contemporary China are merely a sustained fight to win back the dignity it lost 150 years ago when it fought Britain over opium. The ascension of capitalism left a trail of corn, the marriage of money and health consciousness a scatterplot of Bolivian quinoa production that looks like a child’s drawing of a mountain peak.
The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization maintains a database of more than 170 crops grown in all countries where data is available, from 1961 to 2016. The data read like a journal of civilization, one that’s dense and webbed, no chapter more meaningful than any other. You could pick any seven you want (and you can head over to our interactive map if you want to try), but these are the seven we chose to tell us something about the years between the middle of the Cold War to whatever we one day decide our present period is.
design by tri vo
words & Analysis by andrew thompson
From the rise of Iranian bananas to the decline of English hops, every crop tells a story.
seven
harvests
