Between Food and War
Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch weren’t developing a way to chemically produce the source of all life with humanitarian motives alone. Germany, like much of Western Europe, had spent the end of the previous century amounting unreasonable fortunes by colonizing Africa through war and genocide. The dramatic advancements in weapons made possible by industrial steel required an unimaginable amount of gunpowder. But through colonization, and now through chemistry, gunpowder could be turned to gold.
Raj Patel explains in a History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, “there were strategic imperatives behind their research. Guano, an important source of ammonia, had been mined prodigiously and been replaced by Peruvian saltpeter (sodium nitrate, NaNO3) from the Atacama Desert. This “white gold” was vital to the production of gunpowder and to soil fertility, and the British controlled its trade. The Haber-Bosch process delivered a substitute- one so significant that Haber won a Nobel prize in 1918” (at the height of the bloodiest war Europe had yet seen). “As it happens, Alfred Nobel had made his fortune in explosives, and Haber’s and Bosch’s work provided Germany with key inputs for TNT and gel ignite, which Nobel had patented. Their knowledge decoupled the manufacture of gunpowder from the extraction of resources from specific sites and allowed the production of weapons through the use of nothing but energy and air. More than one hundred million deaths in armed conflict can be linked to the widespread availability of ammonia produced by the Haber-Bosch process.”
Admittedly, while our own urine is a powerful, natural alternative to fossil fuel fertilizer, we do not produce nearly the amount that would be necessary to grow acres of plantains with our pee alone. Our Pee Plantain, towering over its neighbors by virtue of valuing our waste, is a symbolic proof to the power of reconnecting ourselves with nature. That reconnection, or reinsertion, by necessity, means that we will never raise acres of plantains alone - that wouldn’t be natural. Nor would it be natural to expect plants to grown on urine alone. There is always a threshold where a dose becomes poisonous, and so during dry times we run our waste water over pee-fed plants so they aren’t killed by nitrogen burn. What is seen as a limitation by industrial agriculture can instead be seen as natural wisdom. The farther that we stray from this wisdom, the more work is required to sustain the unnatural growth - both on a farm level and a nation level. Unnatural growth is forever doomed to hit the barrier of nature, yet instead of listening to the wisdom, the response for centuries has been war.
Before the Haber-Bosch process of making the main ingredient of both mass life and mass death, wars were fought to acquire guano. The U.S. declared ownership of over a hundred islands in the 1850s in the Guano Islands Act, and still disputes ownership over such an island with Haiti. The islands were scraped clean of their resources one by one. Then there were the Saltpeter Wars which changed the borders of Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. But Haber and Bosch were able to bring the power of war into their labs, detach it from nature, package it up, and sell it to the world.
This is the paradox of imperialism: the progress, growth, and production is predicated on the destruction, extraction, and exhaustion. Death and abundance are not pitted as opposites, but rather sides of the same coin, as if we can’t have one without the other. The noble discovery of life is awarded at the height of the carnage of the First World War, which said discovery made possible. It is as if discovering the source of life, at the same instant, uncovers the source of death. This is the mythology inherent in U.S. expansion - that people must die so that the nation may live, and the Haber-Bosch process has only accelerated the long history of the U.S. arms race.
As Raoul Peck, the director of Exterminate All The Brutes, an incredible four-part film that fearlessly and necessarily recalibrates the telling of world history, explains, “The industrial development of firearms [played] an important role in U.S. colonization... As a war president, George Washington thought it unreasonable to rely on foreign weapons. With generous start up funds, lucrative long term contracts, and heavy tariffs on foreign imports, he literally jumpstarted the U.S. arms industry into becoming the world’s first arms manufacturer. The very first corporation established by the United States was the Springfield Armory in western Massachusetts, founded in 1777. It soon introduced standardized interchangeable parts and assembly line production, key factors in the take off of the industrial revolution in the U.S. and its establishment as a capitalist imperialist state. And having more arms allows more expansion. More expansion means more wars, for which you then need more arms. A profitable chicken and egg bonanza in a totally incestuous relationship between military, industry, and government.”
Public artwork by Bemba (@bembapr) in Mayaguez. Photo by Alex Matzke. The caption reads: “How will we explain to future generations that ‘it was good for the economy?’”
And every factory needs a farm - a way to cheaply feed underpaid factory workers. The vertical expansion of skyscrapers in the city requires the horizontal expansion of frontiers in the countryside. The two are integrally connected, a riff in one causes a response in the other, and the separation is often global. Nonetheless, the same war that prompted the need for expanded frontiers is used to keep the workers of that frontier in check. Like the banana plantation workers of Ciénaga, Colombia who were massacred along with their families, by the thousands, for going on strike in 1928.
Cheap synthetic fertilizer made it possible for United Fruit Company, now Chiquita, to expand its production on a global scale. United Fruit Company was a conglomerate of banana traders that merged at the end of the 1800s. Latin America, like Africa, experienced an influx of European and United States trading companies in those years, which replaced the trading of enslaved humans with the trading of terribly underpaid, and sometimes again unpaid labor. This time, through political and military power, private companies and governments alike could reap profits in London, Berlin, and New York with even less investment costs than was required to traffic enslaved humans globally, and instead could exploit people from their own communities. In some cases, food produced in colonies were traded literally to pay for war in the colonizing powers. During the Second World War, the British repaid hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. loans partially in cocoa (the third largest export behind tin and rubber) shipped directly from the British-run colonies in Africa.
By the late 1920s the United Fruit Company had climbed toward what the company calls its ‘golden age’ and it enjoyed economic and political power across millions of acres in Latin America. The massive plantations again required cheap labor, often coerced of “independent contractors” trapped in company towns, and conditions were abominable. When Colombian banana workers stopped working for nearly a month to demand the end of obvious exploitation, it was a threat to the cheap food that U.S. industry depended on. United Fruit Company turned to the U.S. government, and telegrams between the U.S. embassy in Bogatá and the U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg portrayed the strike as a communist threat. United Fruit called on the U.S. to threaten the Colombian government with military invasion and they had the leverage to cut off Colombia from the global banana trade. Caught between U.S. profits, the possibility of devastating war, and de facto sanctions (war by another name), it was the Colombian government that called the workers into the town plaza for a special announcement by the Governor and then ambushed the crowd with rooftop machine guns on all sides. According to State Department telegrams received by Secretary Kellogg, over a thousand Colombian men, women, and children were murdered on the Sunday afternoon known as the Masacre de las Bananeras.
And that estimate is almost certainly an undercount, some estimates claim that upwards of 3,000+ life’s were taken, but exact counts are impossible because the bodies were dumped into the ocean. Barely three months prior to the massacre, Frank B. Kellogg coauthored an international peace pact, the Kellogg-Braid Pact, and compelled forty six countries to agree against using war as a means of advancing foreign policy. Secretary Kellogg received his Nobel Peace Prize the next year.
Food is a necessary factor left out of Peck’s chicken and egg explanation of U.S. expansion. Food is necessary to make weapons, which are used in the wars of imperialist expansion, in order to acquire more food, enforced by more weapons. The Haber-Bosch process is still used today to make both bananas and bombs in an endless cycle of control, detached from natural limits. Fossil fuels make this possible, and have been a principal factor in the decades of continued wars and plunder in the Middle East. As a result, the U.N. Is warning that Afghanistan faces the threat of losing upwards of fifteen percent of its population, six million people, to starvation this winter. Whether the use of fossil fuels is phased out willingly in attempt to alter the course of climate change, the people make it impossible to continue their use by putting their bodies on the line, or they simply run out or become too expensive to extract, this status quo is not forever. War on the land and on the people inevitable causes apocalypses.
History warns, though, of what plundering nations are willing to do to survive and advance. Poor nations and peoples will not survive a remake of the tragic Green Revolution which leans even harder on the exploitation of people and land. The topsoil is already in the lake. Soil repair requires investment that does not yield immediate profit, and so is only possible when it does not come at the risk of losing everything. Some options for supporting this necessary labor include funding soil remediation, ensuring secure housing and land access, universal basic incomes, the end of exploitation of Black, brown, and poor people and nations and the payment of reparations to the victims of said exploitation, among many others. Without that support, modern industrial agriculture is at odds with the survival of the people doing the farming, and therefore, that of the entire world. Business as usual means that nations and peoples that have been robbed and are currently being robbed will continue to be robbed - unless massive resistance is met. This resistance may be the natural barriers that are rapidly being exceeded, or it may be people demanding the end to constant extraction, expansion, and exploitation. It is the difference between the Pee Plantain and endless war.
This blog post was made available courtesy of the author, Steven Casanova. It is part of the article “The Pee Plantain and Endless War”. It was edited by Alex Matzke, Caron Swanson, and Pam Roberts.
To read the entire article, see all the photos and footnotes, go to StevenCasanova.substack.com