“Over thousands of years crops, grains, vegetables and fruits had followed the footpaths of humankind. As humans crossed continents and oceans, they had brought plants with them and thereby had changed the face of the earth. Agriculture linked plants to politics and economy. Wars had been fought over plants, and empires were shaped by tea, sugar and tobacco.” (Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature Alexander Von Humboldt’s  New World, p.128, Alfred A. Knoff 2015).

Wars or so-called Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) wherein one “partner” – say the European Union – offers a group of African nations the opportunity of “opening” over eighty per cent of their market to European goods – and gaining excise-free access to the European market, of course.

I can see it now: heaps of empty cans of European-grown and packed transgenic tomatoes basking in the sun. Offering vast new perspectives for ingenious African neo-artefacts featuring tin can trolley cars and tin can crocodiles. Bought wholesale at 5 centimes per, and resold 15€ in European novelty shops.

Oy, Alexander. Oy. Oy. Oy.

“By showing unexpected analogies, the Essay, with its engraving of the Naturgemälde, unpeeled a previously invisible web of life. Connection was the basis of Humbdolt’s thinking. Nature, he wrote, was ‘a reflection of the whole’ – and scientists had to look at flora, fauna and rock strata globally. Failure to do so, he continued, would make them like those geologist who constructed the entire world ‘according to the shape of the nearest hills surrounding them’. Scientists needed to leave their garrets and travel the world.” (P. 128, as above).