for millenia we've drawn on the principles of natural selection and nature genes mutate well naturally with the most successful alterations to spread it so following generations over the centuries humans have employed selection to create plants with greater yields as well as more productive animals in this so called artificial selection the only difference is that we've decided which traits are beneficial and are targeted to be passed on. here in russia the push for artificially selected food was championed by nicholas veal of a soviet botanist in geneticists back in the twenty's and thirty's he was at the forefront of genetic selection in not only the soviet union but also the world his work took him all over the globe collecting various seed samples he created a massive bank of all those varieties he gathered which is preserved even through the seeds are living grad during world war two much like alexander naismith of he had his eye on the future hinder stood the need for preserving certain plant species and sought to find a way to sustain agricultural production. at present now or f

we have had economies that went back many, many m millenia and were successful until 1492. >> and indians had a form of property rights before white settlers came here and messed that up. >> before contact with whites indians were very much aware of markets and trading and property rights. some indians actually owned the salmon streams. they managed those streams so that they let the larger salmon go up to spawn and the result is that even today those streams have larger salmon than the streams that were held in a commons owned by everyone and hence anaged by no one. >> john: the clan, not an individual indian but a clan would even the stream and why today would they still have more salmon. >> that just goes back to what was superior management over a century ago. and at the same time i should note we are mismanaging our salmon stocks by chasing them around the ocean, open ocean and overharvesting salmon and many otherish species. we could learn from what the native americans did to husband their resources. >> john: and you say you can see the private property difference just by driving t

. >> reporter: for millenia, it wasn't like that. the fertile silt of the nile made egypt a nation of farmers, producing daily bread for all the people. the nation had a secure food supply, created at home. now, with 85 million people, egypt is the world's biggest importer of wheat. much of it comes from the u.s. and russia. government support for small farms dwindled under the mubarak regime, and with strong encouragement from u.s. a.i.d., a major shift took place. a new policy arrived: growing high value cash crops, for export. >> we were the first company to go and farm potatoes in the middle of the desert out of nowhere. people thought that we were lunatics. >> reporter: in the late 1980s, when mubarak enticed egyptian capitalists with incentives to green up desert lands, entrepreneur tarek tawfik, among the first to answer the call. >> i went to look at the land where the factory would be built and it was just pure desert. it was depressing, i said, "for heaven's sake, this is where i'm going to be working." >> reporter: tawfik