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粮食涨价历史重演 Today Evan Fraser teaches sustainable development at the University of Leeds in England. But if he had his way, he would have liked to have been born in the Middle Ages.Being born somewhere around 1240, 1250 in Western Europe - relative to the centuries before or after that - was actually a really nice time.It was a time of high culture, when great cathedrals were built and renowned universities were founded. The society fed itself through a sophisticated continent-wide trading system, where each region specialized in a few crops and transported them to far-flung marketsFraser gives much of the credit to networks of monasteries across Europe whose monks have spent the preceding few centuries cutting down Europes forests with evangelistic zeal. He says that newly deforested land was tremendously fertile and productiveThey created all this huge amount of food that allowed people to move to the cities and created enough wealth in society that people could invest in universities and build cathedrals. So that was great.But it wouldnt last. The soils wore out. Productivity declined. And then, Fraser says, 1315 comes along. The weather started to cool a bit. A bunch of rains destroyed the crop. 15% of Europe died suddenly over a 4-year period in a series of catastrophic famines. 粮食涨价2 Europe had overextended itself, he says. And it wasnt the first society to do so. In his book, Empires of Food, Fraser says this arc repeats itself over and over throughout history, from Mesopotamia to Rome, to Han dynasty China and beyond. Civilizations grow when the weather is good and soil is fertile. Their farmers specialize in a few crops and trade for the rest of their needs with faraway suppliers.But farmers eventually exhaust the soil. Climate changes. And when crops fail, specialized agriculture and faraway suppliers become a liability.And Fraser says were doing it all over again today.The reason that we wrote the book is that we havent learned these lessons that the modern