> Application of fertilisers and pesticides sets Americans free to do
> other things, while less developed nations have a greater
> proportion of people tied to the land.
>
Capital-intensive agriculture, which can't survive without heavy government subsidies, indeed freed Americans to do other things, like slaving at Wal-Mart, guarding prisoners, and going to war -- such are the jobs available in rural America. It is noteworthy that the United Kingdom and the United States, the two successive hegemons of global capitalism, also destroyed more of their peasants sooner than other industrialized countries like France (see "Labor: Agricultural Workers, Percentage of Total Labor Force," <http:// earthtrends.wri.org/searchable_db/index.cfm? theme=4&variable_ID=205&action=select_countries>). If you want to make your nation the biggest empire that polices the entire world, the best way to go is of course to first kick peasants off the land and then offshore industrial workers' jobs to other countries. Otherwise, you don't enjoy a big surplus population willing to go to war at low costs.
The Iraq War, fought by a volunteer military, illustrates this point best: <blockquote>Altogether, a nearly equal percentage of Americans aged 18 to 54 live in counties with a million or more inhabitants as live in counties of 100,000 or fewer. And yet, of the soldiers who have died in Iraq, 342 came from densely populated counties while 536 came from smaller ones. Derived from Pentagon and census data, this chart ["Death Rates by County Population," <http://graphics8.nytimes.com/ images/2005/07/19/opinion/20cushing.gif>] shows the Iraqi war death rates for every 100,000 people ages 18 to 54 by the size of their county's population.
The difference is visible not just in the size of a soldier's county of origin, but also in its location. Counties disconnected from urban areas tend to have higher death rates, regardless of population size. Small rural counties have a death rate nearly twice that of counties that have the same population but happen to be part of metropolitan areas.
Why should this be? It's not that Iraqi insurgents are singling out rural soldiers, or that commanders are putting them at particular risk. Rather, the armed forces themselves must be disproportionately drawn from rural communities - a fact not immediately discernible from recruitment data, which report the race, age and education of recruits, but not their home counties.
This is above all an economics story. Military studies consistently find that a poor economy is a boon to recruiting. The higher rate of deaths from rural counties likely reflects sparse opportunities for young people in those places.
(Robert Cushing and Bill Bishop, "The Rural War," 20 July 2005, <// www.nytimes.com/2005/07/20/opinion/20bishop.html>)<blockquote>
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org>