“A resource arrangement that cannot work in theory can stumble on in practice.”

Frank’s Law of Monoculture (FLOM)

Monocultures are one of the great projects of industrial modernity. From the corn fields of Iowa to date palms in the Sahara, from banana plantations in the Americas to eucalyptus trees in India – wherever we go on this planet, we find organic production regimes that gravitate towards a focus on one single commodity. They supply the lion’s share of the world’s food and create a plethora of economic, social, political, and environmental problems. Quite a few of these monocultures have collapsed, and we can explain why monocultures are prone to failure. What we lack is a decent explanation why monocultures are still with us. There is no biological theory of monoculture – and plenty of evidence for the benefits of biological diversity. Monoculture is probably the greatest project of global modernity that people have embarked upon without a satisfactory paradigm.

The MaMoGH project seeks to produce a roadmap that helps to understand the resilience of monoculture around the world. We draw on the classic case for a historical approach to current problems: if something does not make sense in conceptual terms, it is rewarding to trace the path that we have taken and to inquire how we have made it so far. The following comments present the broad outlines of our guiding questions and some tentative ideas on how we seek to use the mystery of monoculture as a lens to write a new world history of food and agriculture. The problems of monoculture are legion, and many scholars have explored them for agricultural production regimes around the world. This project takes the next step: if monocultures create so much trouble in so many different ways, why are they still with us?

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (MaMoGH, Grant agreement No. 101019086).