Sometimes we will stand on trees and pollinate each blossom extra

Maoism got it to kill the bees. Capitalism will soon get the same. Shall we congratulate us to this victory?

The sparrow was a beloved motive for Chinese landscape painters for centuries. But a sparrow is not only lovely to watch. It picks corn, eats the seeds from fields and damages the harvest with this. So it was logically based, when Mao Zedong let his experts work out this damage. With this result: If a sparrow eats corn of 4.5 kilo per day, a million of sparrows ruin the annual portion of corn for 60.000 people.

Mao believed in scientific socialism and in progress, and so in the fact that human will can defeat wildlife, if only enough people try hard. At 13th December 1958 he sent his 600 million subjects to war. All at the same time started to shoot with slingshots and with guns, to wave flags and cloth about wildly, to strike on pots and tops of pots that the sparrows could not land anywhere that they could not come to rest as long as everywhere in the land they fell from the sky. The war was successful. Hundreds of millions dead animals were swept away and tipped to the garbage.

But some weeks afterwards, China had the next problem.The pests were spreading out. Worms, maggots and grasshoppers became excessive. - Insects that former had been eaten by sparrows. Due to Mao´s belief in progress and in victory of the human will, he let spray poison and pesticide onto the fields. This also was successful. The insects were soon killed. But at the same time the rice on the fields was destroyed. Thirty million Chinese were being killed at the famine of 1959. And with the rest of the insects also the bees were killed.

The last chapter of this story can be seen in Markus Imhoof´s documentary "More than honey" presently running in the cinemas of Graz. This way it works: As soon as in warm southern China the fruit trees come into blossom, clever businessmen hire day-laborer..They go to the fields, put up a ladder, pinch the stamen out of the blossoms, harvest the pollen and fill this stamen carefully into tiny paper bags.

Then the whole company starts off to cooler northern regions. As soon as here the fruit trees are flowering, the day laborer again start to lean a ladder against each of the fruit trees. A paper bag in one hand, a brush in the other, they pollinate every single blossom.

Hundred thousands of Chinese do this in modern China. They carry out the work of the bees, because bees don´t exist any more. O yes, this can be done. If you strongly believe that the human will can defeat the wildlife, if only a certain number of people try hard enough.

Presently in the rest of the world the bees are likely to die aut soon. Completely without Mao, without the great jump forward, without Communists, plot clattering and slingshots. Market economy has other methods. It has farm subsidies, farmer lobbies, stamen patents, EU - quota systems. But concerning the bees, market economy has the same result as Maoism.

Let´s watch, who will do the job with the manual pollinating, every single year, when spring is coming. (My translation of: Sybille Hamann in Die Presse, edition of 14.11.2012, 27)