This triggered the great leap forward. Mao believed that agriculture and industry should grow at the same time. It didn't matter whether there was sunlight or moonlight, people still had to work. The municipalities did not allow any type of family life. Children would stay at home while the elderly would go to work. The peasants had to eat at their workplace and sometimes even sleep there. Mao told the peasants that the harder they worked they could overcome England and reach America. This gave people the motivation to work as hard as possible. Additionally, the farmers had to find all the scrap metal and cast it into steel for the buildings. This required valuable people from production agriculture to produce the steel. Not only did it damage agricultural production, but the methods farmers had to use to produce steel were very primitive and essentially useless. In an attempt to make Mao happy, commune officials, who worked for the government, lied about grain production. Even though they only produced a certain amount of grain, officials told Mao that the farmers were producing several times the amount of grain than they actually produced. The officials considered it a game and every time a municipality exceeded their production numbers, they lied again and created even a high grain total. Therefore Mao appropriated all the grain produced by the communes. The Chinese were starving because they had no grain to eat. Nobody would talk to Mao because people were afraid of him. Farmers had to resort to eating bark, grass and even dirt. When people began to starve, the Chinese were too weak to move the corpses or keep the rats away. An estimated 30 million people died in this 3-year time frame without food. The government blamed floods and drought, but behind closed doors