Ask Slashdot: How To Feed Africa? 592
gbrumfiel writes "Africa has some of the poorest soil of anywhere on the earth, and over farming is only making matters worse. As the population grows, governments and NGOs must decide whether to subsidize chemical fertilizers like those used in the west or promote more sustainable agricultural practices. In Malawi, the government has decided to subsidize fertilizers, with impressive results. Corn yields have tripled since the subsidies were introduced. More sustainable practices, such as fertilizer trees can't deliver those kind of results in just a few years. The question is simple: does Africa follow the same, unsustainable road as the rest of the world? Or do they become a testing ground for potentially game-changing new techniques? OR is there a third path? Discuss."
Re:the bigger problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Stopped reading at... (Score:5, Interesting)
All of this reminds me of the bogus, misplaced effort of the Toms Shoes variety. You know - the guy who's margin on cheaply made shoes is so high, he donates a pair for African charity, for every pair your daughter buys in the Westfield Centre.
Put your factory there! Employ Africans, and use the charity-profits to train local entreperneurship to become your next competitor! Teach a man to fish, fer godsake!
Re:Stopped reading at... (Score:4, Interesting)
Technically the statement is (or can be) true. There's no reason Africa couldn't have "some of the poorest" AND "some of the richest" soils at the same time.
A lot of Africa has poor soil, and a lot of the more fertile areas are rainforests which we wouldn't want to advocate burning to the ground to turn into farmland. Africa also has more than a billion people to feed. So the question is still a reasonably valid one- how do you turn the large expanses of infertile wasteland into productive arable land?
Grow stuff that is appropriate for the area. (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course we all know that all farms should only be used for growing vegetables because raising animals is bad for the environment, right?
Wrong.
This is exactly why. The only people who think that we should only grow vegetables are people who have only ever seen thousands of acres of rolling Iowa cornfields - much of which gets fed to cows. Most of the world doesn't use "feedlots" the way that the cattle industry in the US does. Most of the world isn't rolling Iowa cornfield, either.
The only thing that makes sense is to try to grow things that will actually thrive in the prevailing conditions. Trying to turn land that is not really suitable for arable crops into land that *is* suitable for arable crops is doomed to expensive failure. Now, the first problem with Africa is that cutting down forests to provide arable land has allowed what soil there was to wash or blow away, depending on whether it's getting deluged with rain or dried into powder with the sun. The first thing is not to worry too much about importing huge amounts of petrochemical-derived fertiliser, but to get irrigation working and grow green manure crops that will tie what little soil there is together, and provide some nutrients when they break down. The great thing about this is that you don't really care if the water is dirty - in fact, you *want* it to be a bit dirty, any sediment or sewage or dead animals will only make it work better. The more biomass you get in there, the better. Sure, it'll smell a bit horrible, but have you ever been near an organic farm when they're spreading the organic fertiliser out? Hint - you make organic fertiliser using cows, sheep and pigs.
A good solution would be to devise some way of processing sewage from towns into something that can be used as fertiliser. The difficulty is that allowing sewage to break down involves allowing human shit to break down, and that requires you to let bacteria multiply rapidly, and you tend to get predominantly E Coli bacteria when you do that. This isn't exactly what you want to fling onto your arable crops, and killing E Coli requires lots of chemicals or lots of heat. They've got a lot of sunshine, so maybe you could do something with that - a sort of solar steriliser to bake off the E Coli and give you a nice, dry, easy-to-handle compost.
Of course you're going to need to find some sort of livestock that thrive in these conditions, and goats do pretty well, but goats eat everything and will destroy ground-covering plants which is how we got into this mess in the first place. Hens would do pretty well, as long as you had a biggish grassy patch with plenty of bugs for them to eat. Cows would be good if you could get enough forage in for them initially, because there's nothing quite so good at turning poor grassland into fertile arable land as getting some sort of ruminant to eat the tough inedible grasses and pass them through that complex set of stomachs.
We can't afford the arable land for everyone to be vegetarian, and when the oil runs out the situation will get worse. We *all* need to plan now and act soon.
Aquaponics (Score:5, Interesting)
I have recently started an aquaponics system at home. I'm African, but an expat living overseas. I am massively impressed with the potential for this particular technology to allow for microfarming on small tracts or even in your backyard.
Benefits I persieve so far:
a) High yields over comparable soil-based techniques
b) Allows for both protein and carbs to be sourced from one system
c) Staples like corn have been successfully grown on *very* short cycles
d) Small family-sized setups can be built to supplement a small family's needs or large "community systems" can be built to leverage economies of scale.
e) Highly efficient water use compared to soil-based methods with only losses due to evaporation.
f) Once it gets started the system is self-stabilising
Challenges I see:
g) Technically not the easiest thing to get started
h) Cycling the system to establish the nutrient and bacterial load can take up to a month
i) First fish harvest can take up to 9 months (Tilapia)
j) A typical flood-and-drain system needs a waterpump running 24/7 as well as potentially an airpump for the fishes. Electricity !?
I would be very much in favour of aid which goes toward establish self-sustaining community farms. I'm not a fan of aid which breeds dependency.
Re:the bigger problem (Score:4, Interesting)
How about not growing the population in an area that can't sustain it? Our whole planet is going to have to do this at some point unless there's some sort of breakthrough. Is it really too early to start talking about managing population growth or are we still so blind that we can't distinguish between human rights and long term survival?
Yep. And one problem is the church which is doing much of the aid work in developing counries. Church does not allow birth control. Quite opposite, their bible says people should spread and fill the earth. They don't undestant that it happened allready over a hunderd years a go.
Re:the bigger problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:the bigger problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Aquaponics (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm currently running an AC waterpump capable of delivering 3000liters per hour at pump exit, and less than half of that at 1.5 m head height. This pump uses a whopping 40W of electricity.
I think that a windmill is an excellent idea, however since the wind can be rather fickle, I don't know how one would keep the nutrient-rich water flowing, and the fishtanks aerated.
An alternative is to have a biodiesel pump. There is a particular waterplant called "duckweed" which makes an excellent fish food, and also just so happens to have enormous potential as a biodiesel. Estimates are of delivering 200L of biodiesel from a modest planting of the stuff.
It certainly is a sticky problem and one which I've wrestled with for some time now.
Re:Stopped reading at... (Score:5, Interesting)
Knowledge is power, we can't even get sufficient 10th, 11th and 12th grade school books this year. (Pemba, Mozambique).
Down with Discusses (Score:2, Interesting)
This is off-topic but I have to say, whenever I see a post that ends with "Discuss." I feel the urge to print it then crumple the printout, stick it in a garbage bag full of dead squirrels, then hire a bum that has to eat asparagus for an entire day before peeing in the bag, then set the bag in the sun and let it simmer for a week, then build a brick wall around it, then spray a bunch of lame graffitis on that wall, then build a low quality house around that wall and sell the house to low quality people that I know will not take good care of it, then when there is a foreclosure (which is unavoidable) buy the house back then build a huge barn around it and put a sign on it saying: here lies arrogance.
To whom it may concern: take your _discusses_ and do something unbearably disgusting with them.
I'd rather get stuck in an elevator with six mouth breathers, a stinker and a middle-aged woman selling Quixtar products than take one more "Discuss.".
Permaculturalists are already there doing this (Score:5, Interesting)
They are already turning this kind of environment into productive landscape in even harsher climates than Africa (the very salty depleted areas of low lying jordan for example) Look on youtube for "greening the desert" (over view here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sohI6vnWZmk [youtube.com]).
Permaculture (while it has it's hippy adherents) is moslty based in very well understood horticultural and scientific processes for repairing damaged landscapes in a rapid and sustainable way using pioneer species that not only stabalise the environment but enhance it. (Natural Nitrogen fixing precursor species) alongside cheap human manageable earthworks and seed planting techniques.
I highly recommend any geek interested in ecological revitalization read up on and get into permaculture.
Re:Stopped reading at... (Score:2, Interesting)
... Africa is not ours to fix.We could build them roads, but how do we get our money back, tolls?
If you're going down that road, how do they get back what we stole from them in the last couple of centuries? I'd argue it is ours to fix. We broke it, we fix it.
Re:Stopped reading at... (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of Africa has poor soil, and a lot of the more fertile areas are rainforests which we wouldn't want to advocate burning to the ground to turn into farmland.
The rainforests apparently have really bad soil too actually - there's a thin, slightly more fertile surface layer that's bound in place by the trees and that's it, and once the trees are gone the soil rapidly becomes useless for farming.
Re:Stopped reading at... (Score:5, Interesting)
So my take home from these examples is that it CAN be done if the problem is viewed in a scientific manner with a heavy emphasis on imporoving the material lives of the locals by assisting them with high tech analysis on how to optimize and maintain the benifits of their natural resources given their real world technological and infrastructure constraints. Giving peseants a chunk of land on the proviso they stick to the basic tenents of the project is a fantastic motivator.
Interestingly the area was once a natural 'paradise' where Chinese civilization first arose ~10kya, but by the middle ages it was a man made wasteland that forced the main population to largely abandon the area to goat hearders who have inadvertently kept it from regenerating for the last 1000yrs. All they really had to do was plant trees in the right places and stop mowing every new shoot down with hungry goats but when people have been doing the same thing for 1000yrs it's very difficult to convince them that there might be a better way to use what they have.
Be they good or bad (cultural revolution), such long term socio-economic projects cannot be done without a stable government, which is a huge problem in Africa. In the case of the loess plateau it was a joint project between China and the IMF, the $500M was well spent from what I've seen [youtube.com].
Re:Stopped reading at... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Stopped reading at... (Score:4, Interesting)
Reduced food production
Not just that. Initiatives like Fairtrade have made a lot of farmers shift from growing food for local consumption to growing things like roses and coffee for export. Guaranteeing a price above the market value of these crops made them a lot more lucrative.
Re:Stopped reading at... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what has always baffled me about slavery. When you look at scale, raw numbers or treatment of slaves, the Arabs were far, far worse than the worst Americans ever were. Well, not arabs, really [gentleislam.com]. Muslims. Slavery was never committed on the scale muslims did it before, and the scrapping of the legal concept of slavery from most (not all) muslim countries' law very nearly totally eradicated slavery, of course only in a superficial sense. In real terms, slavery exists in lots of moder muslim-majority nations (in the form of decades-long "employment" contracts that can't be broken under law by the employee and can be sold between employers. These contracts don't allow the "employee" to choose his/her own housing either, for example). Furthermore, slavery is a fundamental and "holy" part of islam, and those who believe that countries like Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Morocco don't have slavery need to visit them. When it comes to the word "slavery", that has been stricken from their laws (not entirely, as for example it is referenced in the laws about adultery : you are free to rape female slaves, maim them or do whatever you want to them in muslim countries), in practice, what little economy there is essentially runs on slavery*.
* that does not, in all cases, means the "slaves" are unhappy about that, at all. Like in the Roman Empire, the only way to be a tradesman in parts of Saudi Arabia is to be bound by such a contract. If not, you can't be a programmer, or architect. But of course, the people working outside in the hot sun are the same. Not all slaves are unhappy, and in fact even under the very ill treated slaves many appreciate the certainty that being one of a huge number of slaves provides, which is really another way of saying they've got zero alternatives and are aware of this. Yes, really. I know how it sounds, but really, you should talk to a few of these people. Make sure that you don't have any muslims, especially not local muslims, nearby when you do this in a place like Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
(though the question can be made very general indeed. Islam means living according to sharia, and that's pretty much the only thing it means. How can this abomination possibly be allowed ? Are you free to impose slavery ? Free to kill for religious reasons ? Free to have racist purchasing habits for "halal" meat ? Free to advocate religious war, support it financially ? Apparently the modern answer is yes. WTF ?)
There's also the tiny matter that the entirety of Northern Africa has been stolen from it's original inhabitants, just like America (and just like Asia Minor and it's wide surroundings, Indonesia and several other places). There's one difference, I guess, unlike native Americans and imported African slaves, most native peoples who lived in Northern Africa are extinct because of the contest and the constant toll of slavery, and have no descendants.
And of course, when it comes to America's slaves ... Americans, nor Dutchmen, ever kidnapped people from native African villages. They bought them off of muslims, and exported them. The great schism of protestantism occured at least partly because the Pope thought this cheating. Although it's not like protestants were ever really in favor of it, but they did tolerate it for a while. The issue is that Catholics never tolerated it, and thorougly made sure of this (by regularly executing ship's captains who had bought slaves of muslims in Northern Africa and didn't spontaneously free them, for example in Nice).
Furthermore, slavery was imposed upon most of Africa for the better part of a millenium by muslims (not necessarily arabs, or perhaps better, not arabs everywhere), far, far longer than anywhere else on the planet.
And lastly, nobody in America seriously considers reintroducing slavery, when there's plenty of muslims bent on doing exactly that. Even if you put aside the people who "just want to live by sharia" and re-introduce slavery that way (plenty of those ev