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."
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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?
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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.
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Exactly
Do you know what else has poor soil? The Amazon Forest http://rainforests.mongabay.com/0502.htm [mongabay.com]
Quoting Professor Kinnison (Score:3, Informative)
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And when they was no meat we ate fowl. And when they was no fowl we ate crawdad. And when they was no crawdad to be found, we ate Sand.
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Newsflash. Rainforest is terrible soil.
Newsflash. Africa is suffering desertification, and the grasslands are mostly deep sand.
Here is what africa needs to do:
Healthy, fertile arable soil is about 50 parts clay, 20 parts sand, and 30 parts organic sponge. The types of clay in the 50% clay figure are important.
Parts of africa are loaded with clay and organic sponge. Parts of africa are loaded with sand.
Get the african nations to stop fighting each other over tarot roots, and get them to ship dirt to each other.
We have the technology to do this. It isn't hard. The benefits greatly outweigh the costs over time. Chemical fertilizers do not solve the soil nutrition and arability problems. Pouring miracle grow on sand won't help you for long.
Trade big shipments of river silt (organic sponge), heavy clay, and washed sand. Plow it into unproductive fields that are suffering deficits.
Watch shit fucking grow.
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+1 insightful. I've never thought of that!
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While your solution for soil improvement may be technically correct (though you need lots and lots of shiploads of dirt to make it work), it's commercially impossible.
The Africans themselves don't have money. Well not entirely true, there is a lot of money, but all in the hands of a few people who are not interested in sharing any of it. Subsidising such activities is difficult, as it's hard to prevent the money to end up in the wrong hands (i.e. those with a lot of money already, and only eager to get more).
Finally, most Africancs are hungry RIGHT NOW. So they want food on the table RIGHT NOW. An instant solution is needed to solve that issue; only when they are fed RIGHT NOW they will be interested in thinking about being fed tomorrow, next week and next year. Artificial fertiliser can solve that part of the problem, but will need a more longer-term strategy to follow up.
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The problem with quick easy fixes, is that people use them, then abuse them, and treat them like permanent ones.
We nerds in IT should be well aware of this by now. How many "temporary fixes" have your employers twisted into permanent ones?
Same thing here. There is money to be made. LOTS of money to be made, by *NOT* properly improving the soil. Shafting starving vllagers for miracle grow while the soil's mineral content dries up, leaving them with soil that won't even grow weeds in the rainy season is *VERY* profitable.
That is why it must be avoided, and done right, if you really want the african people to not suffer.
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How many "temporary fixes" have your employers twisted into permanent ones?
Hence one of my laws of IT: There ain't no such thing as a "temporary solution" - if it works, it becomes permanent. If it doesn't work, it's not a solution.
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Better is to provide them with food while they do the improvements. This way they don't become complacent and misuse chemical fertilizers as some kind of magic bullet.
Agreed that they need to eat now. Disagree that introducing them to liquid fertilizers that cause collateral soil damage is the best temporary solution.
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Subsidising such activities is difficult, as it's hard to prevent the money to end up in the wrong hands (i.e. those with a lot of money already, and only eager to get more).
That's why talking about food is useless. It isn't about insufficient food, but poor distribution of food.
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Want to help fix that? Stop buying Fairtrade products from Africa. Growing export crops (often ones that require a lot of water) takes farmland away from growing food for local consumption, which pushes the price up beyond the reach of the poorest people.
This is so wrong. Staple crops, such as grain, tend to grow poorly in nitrogen depleted tropical soils. Export crops, such as fruit and vegetables, tend to do much better.
Africa should try to follow the example of southern Mexico. In Chiapas, most farms grew corn on small plots, and it was the poorest state in Mexico. Today, the corn plots have been replaced by mango orchards. The mangoes are exported to the USA, and bring in ten times the income that the corn did. To make tortillas, they buy corn gro
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An honest question...how does buying fair trade products hurt the situation?
An honest question...why respond to a comment without even fucking reading it?
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Eat the rich!
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.
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Let MOST die of starvation. It's what used to happen all over the world, Europe included. Population rose to the maximum allowed by food production, then a drought or something similar knocked it back down. But there was no country that would get food shipped to it for free year after year.
So just stop aid shipments. Let them figure out how to either earn enough money to buy food or grow enough themselves. Sure many will die, but many die anyway. If not from hunger then from civil wars. If the population dr
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Eventually enough people will die that the wars themselves will die out. Sure if they are stubborn it might take a 99% die-off, but look on the bright side. Just hunting-gathering may be enough to sustain those people.
The people who started wars in Europe were NOT the ones starving, just bored. Any yes, there were still wars - but they kept the population in check since farmers were prime targets - easy prey without the walls of castles and cities. So the farmers dies, food got scarce and things calmed dow
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Vast farming fields - don't need 'em. Let each family work their backyard.
Chairman Mao? I thought you were dead!
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Get the african nations to stop fighting each other
Impossible. I was to going make some comments about the situation there but everything I wrote sounded racist. How do you address the fact that seems to be a clear pattern of behaviour in that continent that doesn't look like it will ever be solved while the locals are in charge?
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The ask slashdot question was how to solve the soil fertility problem. Not how to solve human nature.
Humans fight each other over bullshit all the time. Catholics and protestants in ireland. Jews and arabs in the middle east. Vietnamese and laosians. On amd on and on.
I was asked how to solve the hunger. Creating world peace? Somebody else can solve that one.
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I was to going make some comments about the situation there but everything I wrote sounded racist. How do you address the fact that seems to be a clear pattern of behaviour in that continent that doesn't look like it will ever be solved while the locals are in charge?
Race != Culture.
You want to solve Africa's problems? Take the damned place over and set up a modern Western-style central government.
Gee, does that sound a bit too much like colonialism? Hey, guess what, Africa's colonial period counts as the only part of its history (post-Egypt, itself an exception due to the Nile and Mediterranean) where it had any meaningful level of economic output. You might argue that it only managed that by exploiting the local populations... But, if others can make money exploiting you, you can "exploit" yourself for the same gain!
Quit fighting each other over petty crap, clean up the water, focus on better using what resources you have (Yes, parts of Africa has some of the worst soil in the world - It also has enough arable land to feed its entire population with plenty of room for growth), and join the modern world. On the flip side of that, when you regularly make the "look, point, and laugh" headlines for burning witches over stealing your penises... Not a sign of good things to come.
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MFW Ghana, Eritrea are amongst the fastest growing real GDPs in the world. "Quit fighting"? "Join the modern world"? Most of the stunted growth everyone is referring to here is due to an overabundance of liquid assets - food, money, medication - being reappropriated by force and placed into the hands of oppressors; the individuals stuck in these sustained power vacuums can't help but face the problems of the here and now. Their only thought is to see the next sunrise. While in that state, they have no luxur
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Funny thing about "richer" - It only matters when participating in a larger economy, not when subsistence farming.
Case in point, look at how the US's Great Depression affected varying regions of the country in radically different ways - The wealthy coastal cities, whose economies and interests had largely separated from agriculture, suffered horribly; Rural farming communities, by contrast, barely noticed anything had changed (and despite the ever-popular fairy-tale about the evil bankers foreclosing on the poor ignorant farmer, at the peak of the Great Depression they suffered a mere one tenth of the foreclosure rate we experienced just two years ago).
So whether or not Africa has money only influences whether or not they can opt for our modern pathological approach to every problem - Buy their way out by importing expensive resources from "somewhere else". Problem with that approach, eventually you run out of money or somewhere-elses to exploit.
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Case in point, look at how the US's Great Depression affected varying regions of the country in radically different ways - The wealthy coastal cities, whose economies and interests had largely separated from agriculture, suffered horribly; Rural farming communities, by contrast, barely noticed anything had changed
That is a load of dingo's kidneys. Rural farming communities, by contrast, were in a big fucking dustbowl where nothing would grow, which is how it became a great depression and not just a recession. Not just no work and no money, but no food. It took massive public works projects and a massive farmer re-education effort to turn that around. Now, guess what? Big Ag is doing the exact same things that led to the dustbowl in the first place, PLUS some new ones.
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It's really not about who's richer. By that logic, if we just gave up all our wealth brought to us by democracy and "evil" capitalism, we could be just as destitute and hungry as them. I have to point out the similarity I see to survivors' guilt in what you are implying.
The only solution I ever hear put forth for addressing economic inequality is to reduce all of us to a common baseline through taxation, regulation, and sending our wealth elsewhere. Maybe what we really need to focus on is sharing our
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Glaciers made the north fertile which the south largely lacked. They ground up mountains then dropped the minerals in the flatlands when the glaciers melted. Rock dust is an established way to make ground fertile but they don't line the pockets of oil companies so they are largely ignored. A combination of things like rock dust and kelp would make the ground fertile yet oddly aren't even discussed. The other factor is water which all the oil based fertilizers in the world won't change. One of the benefits to rock dust over oil based fertilizers is it actually restores lost minerals. In our society if it doesn't line the pockets of the rich we loose interest fast. Africa has large amounts of volcanic as well as other forms of rock that can be turned into fertilizer. It also has a massive amount of coastline that could be used to harvest kelp and other ocean based forms of fertilizer. There are a lot of fishermen yet why aren't they encouraged to use bi-catch, worthless fish, as fertilizer? Anything not sold is discarded when it could be fertilizing poor soil. All that is lacking is the will to use things that don't make the rich richer.
Here are a few articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockdust
http://www.rock-dust.co.za/
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I agree. I grew up in Africa. The problem is the governments, or rather dictators. For example, Zimbabwe (cough), COULD feed the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. It has superbly rich soil, enough water, good rainfall. Yet the silly West have to prop it up as its 10 million inmates are starving. "aid" money hardly ever reaches its intended audience - 99.99% gets gobbled up by government officials, bribes, etc. It is simple the way of Africa. They think differently, no matter how much BS the Greens and Liberals tell you - people in the 3rd world do NOT think or act like YOU.
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Aid money is destroying Africa. There's no need to work on a functioning social or government organizations when you can stay in power perfectly well just off of what's getting shipped to you from the West.
Most government budgets in Africa treat aid as a core part of their income - some as much as 50%. They don't use it to cover short term shortfalls, they expand spending to use everything. And these are the governments that are actually using the money and not just pocketing it.
"We" (we being the west) cannot fix Africa short of turning it into east Carolina. They need to come up with their own functional modes of government and funding, whatever those are, on their own. The people have no chance when their local tinpot dictators are being propped up by someone with 100x their power and economy.
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The second point he makes sounds racist the way he stated it, but it is not necessarily so (I do not know if he meant it in a racist way or not). He is correct that most people in 3rd world countries do not think or act like people in developed nations. This is not biological. It is not a product of their "race". It is cultural. They have learned to think the way they do because that is how things work in the countries they live in. They can learn to think and act differently. Of course, this does not mean that there are no aspects about the way that people in developing nations think that would improve the lives of those in developed nations were to learn to think that way.
I have worked with an organization that works with the extremely poor in several developing nations. It was amazing to see what a difference was made over time because the leader of the organization dealt with the local governments assuming that once the rules were made, they would not change arbitrarily. The leader knew that such was not traditionally the case, but she was able to establish such a reputation with the locals that they were embarrassed to not live up to her expectations. Of course it also worked because she worked with those at the other end showing them that if they worked within the system, they would make more progress than if they went outside it. It also only worked because she limited the size of the organization to where she could establish a personal relationship with people at various levels.
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Tropical rain forest is actually not a very good soil, if you try to use it as farmland you'll probably end up with a desert.
http://library.thinkquest.org/C0113340/text/biomes/biomes.rainforest.soil.html [thinkquest.org]
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Nevertheless, Africa is a whole continent. It has plenty of good farmland. Look at the US, most of it is "some of the poorest soil on earth." But the reality is you can still do a lot with it, using conventional farming techniques.
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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!
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Knowledge is power, we can't even get sufficient 10th, 11th and 12th grade school books this year. (Pemba, Mozambique).
For Mozambique ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's time to change your government
Mozambique should not be a poor country - look at the resources your country has
Mozambique is poor because of the mismanagement of the government
Re:For Mozambique ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozambique IS because of the great powers that carved up Africa at the end of the nineteenth century chose it to be.
African countries have at least three problems, two of them internal and one external. The internal problems are that they were given (or in some cases took independence) without any significant attempts to create an educated elite, and that their boundaries are not based on culture. For examples of the latter, look at Nigeria with its Christian coastal dwellers and Islamic folk inland, or the current problems in Mali with the Toureg in the north fighting for independence. Also note how Sudan and Ethiopia have both had civil war and been split in the last decade or so, both along religious or ethic lines.
The external problem is that both political and commerical interests benefit from African states being badly run. There was much jostling over the African states during the cold war, and it is much easier to deal with a dictator or bribe a government when you are after the many resources Africa has to offer rather than have to deal with the vagaries of public opinion.
And let's not forget that some of these nations have had independence for less than 50 years (1974 in the case of Mozambique).
Anyone interested in reading up on the carving up of Africa might want to take a look at Thomas Pakenham - The Scramble for Africa.
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I wonder if rigid geographic boundaries are even appropriate for African governance. They certainly weren't for native Americans.
Re:For Mozambique ... (Score:4, Insightful)
While Western Imperialism did not help Mozambique in any way, to say that the poverty of African nations is a result of Imperialism is misguided. Ethiopia is a good example of this. It was only recently (the mid-20th century) and very briefly (1936-1944) brought under the control of a proper empire. For most of the rest of its history is has been a monarchy and has always had the potential to be fairly affluent - the soils there are quite fertile compared to neighbouring nations and the nation sits high above much of the rest of Africa making it the source for a dozen or so major rivers. However the nation is a poorly organized communist society - so very little of its fertile land is irrigated by its vast water reserves and it is usually one drought away from disaster.
Are there things we could do to make things easier for Ethiopia? Sure. Because of her robust economies anything the west does has significant effects on the rest of the world. However there are many contributing factors to the poor economies of Africa, many of which have more to do with the people and the governments of these nations than anything the western world has done. Compare Ethiopia and Mozambique to Botswana, which gained independence in 1966 and was, at the time, the poorest country in Africa. Now it has a robust economy and the 2nd highest GDP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa (after Seychelles).
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the nation sits high above much of the rest of Africa making it the source for a dozen or so major rivers. However the nation is a poorly organized communist society - so very little of its fertile land is irrigated by its vast water reserves and it is usually one drought away from disaster.
It's not that simple. For instance: [afronline.org]
Nine nations lay claim to the water, but two existing agreements had given the lion’s share to arid Egypt and Sudan.
Under the current agreement, brokered by the British in 1929, Egypt gets 87% of the river’s water and veto power over upstream water projects. A 1959 agreement gave Sudan secondary rights to the water.
Ethiopia hasn't been *allowed* to develop its water sources for economic gain. Egypt has in the past threatened to go to war with Ethiopia if it interferes with the Nile.
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Another example might be the USA, with Protestants of a hundred variaties, Catholics, Mormons, Eastern Orthodox, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Animists, Confucianists, Athiests, every kind of -ist you can imagine.
Oh, wait....
Note, by the way, that you just argued that the Europeans who are worried about Muslim influx into Europe are right to worry, since it will bring down their civilization.
On the other ha
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What about the gluten intolerant?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_resources_curse [wikipedia.org]
On a related note, one of the problems plaguing the the poorer parts of the continent is rampant corruption. Efforts to improve conditions are sabotaged by corruption and greed. You can't feed the starving if the food is just being taken by the government and sold off for profit, or if warlords roll in and take the food from the mouth of the starving. You can't even build businesses without rule of law. You need order. But you can't have order if you have
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You don't get it. Imagine setting up a factory in a place without a stable power or water supply, decent roads, large enough ports, with a corrupt dictatorship, tribal warlords, gigantic wildlife and weird tropical diseases.
It's slowly getting better in some places, but Africa is not ours to fix. We could build them roads, but how do we get our money back, tolls? They don't have enough cars for that. We could lend them money to build roads but it would be squandered by corrupt politicians who would default on the debt.
It really has to be solved by them (think Arab Spring), unless you want to colonize the place again and develop it for your own people to use.
Like I said, it's getting better in Angola, for instance, and all they had to do was to stop fighting their silly guerrillas and get a stable government. They're attracting lots of international investment nowadays.
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Imagine setting up a factory in a place without a stable power or water supply, decent roads, large enough ports, with a corrupt dictatorship, tribal warlords, gigantic wildlife and weird tropical diseases - Florida?
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An Arab Spring isn't going to happen over there, people actually vote their politicians in even if they hate him. A strict adherence to tribal culture will make sure the nominee they hate is their guy instead of person X even if he has better policies.
Plus it isn't in most parts of Africa to 'fix' anything, they build something and use it till it breaks then make a new one, maintenance isn't something a lot are interested and this is with houses, never mind roads!
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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
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By "we" I mean "we, the first world countries". Yes, that includes the US too. And yes, I will give you slavery. A car analogy: if you pay a thief to steal a car for you, does that make you innocent?
But I will give you more than slavery: how about other resources, like diamonds, gold, oil and rubber? Africa is still being exploited by first world countries for their natural resources, and that includes the US.
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to become your next competitor!
And there you have it. The plain and simple reason why that is NOT happening and the plain and simple reason why the west is pressing on Africa to not use the same farming methods the west is using. We'd all like Africans not to starve, but only so they can be our customers. Teaching a man to fish sounds like a good idea until they fish well enough so they can undercut our own fishing industry. I'm not saying I agree with this, but it seems to be the reality for most charity money.
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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].
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by letting the food you grow rot, and capturing the resulting gas, duh.
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The Haber process converts H2 and N2 into ammonia. Carbon is not a major growth-limiting resource in most plants. They have this wonderful thing called CO2 fixation. You may have heard of it.
(At any rate, all the cool kids get their fertilizers from decommissioned German World War I munitions, also made using the Haber process.)
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or just stop feeding them. let the population adjust naturally to the food supply. keep on feeding them with no infrastructure = more starving people not less.
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the bigger problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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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, Insightful)
Why "troll"? Abortion should be safe, legal, and these days EXTREMELY RARE. If all our children were given adequate access to education and when of a suitable age, access to birth control, I think abortion rates (and over-population) would become less and less.
One man's opinion, obviously.
I KNOW!! (Score:5, Insightful)
How about we let the Africans decide! What a CONCEPT! Self determination!
Re:I KNOW!! (Score:5, Funny)
you're crazy. they have oil. it's obvious intervention is required.
They have to chose? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid! (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html [spiegel.de]
Re:For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid! (Score:5, Insightful)
We're tackling the problem backwards. Instead of treating the symptoms, we need to be treating the problem. First and foremost, we need to be helping African nations build an economic base. Help the countries there establish stable governments conducive to economic growth, develop educational structures to provide a skilled workforce, and provide economic assistance to help them start up their own businesses and trade. Once you get the economic ball rolling, they will build their own fresh water wells and distribution system; they will build their own farms and irrigation canals; they will build their own hospitals and train their own doctors. Doing it the way we're doing - providing food, water, and medicine for free - is just increasing their population while killing what economies they have. We're stunting their economic growth while simultaneously moving the goalpost of economic self-sustainability further away.
How about we just stop "helping" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Really? You mean dumping and unlimited supply of free food and lowering prices destroys the ability of the local farmers to make a living?
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that western governments and NGOs have been spending an enormous amount of other people's money "helping" in a way that never actually solves the problem but assures themselves perfect job security.
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.
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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.
I'd also like to say (Score:2)
So many factors, and I only know a couple. (Score:2)
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The cost to put into motion long term projects to solve world hunger is 30 billion as posed by the UN.
That's low enough that Africa could do it all themselves.
Anyone know the popular arguments why governments don't band together and try and solve world hunger?
It's throwing good money after bad.
Solution (Score:2)
Solution is to stop subsidising farming everywhere. Africa could supply huge amounts of grown food much cheaper than many other places can, but there is a problem: other places are heavily subsidised and compared to the wealthy nations that do the subsidies, African nations cannot compete.
Of-course that, and stopping with the meddling of the foreign affairs of countries of the world, maybe no longer supporting the dictators that are convenient to support.
Compete against who? (Score:2)
Who are they competing with? What do US far subsidies have to do with Africa not having enough food? Africa is not a huge consumer of US farm goods.
I think the point is more that Africa, as a whole (excluding some countries) is not able to produce the amount of food to sustain their population.
Supply and Demand Growth (Score:4, Insightful)
It is immaterial how much can be grown so long as there is no widespread use of contraception. The more food grown, the more mouths there will be demanding the food grown.
One word. (Score:3, Insightful)
CONDOMS.
Guns and Contraceptive Pills (Score:5, Insightful)
Accept the ugly truth that inter-uterine and infant malnutrition can directly and permanently affect brain growth. Unlike many other parts of the body, which seem able to recover, if sufficient food is presented later, the brain doesn't seem to recover. Entire areas have been hit by famine, whether caused by weather conditions or the janjaweed militia, and the damage is clear and permanent, and won't go away overnight no matter how much food you ship in.
With no appropriate infrastructure, a lot of aid ends up wasted, damaged, or just diverted to whichever local asswipe has the most guns. Aid needs to be specific. I saw a TED talk on the amazing water-purifier bottle - he scooped up some filthy muck, gave it a couple of pumps, and out came pure water. A truckload of those in the right place would probably do some good. I also remember hearing about a village where the thing that made the most difference to their food supply was teaching the local craftsman to make catapults. The local monkeys would help themselves to the crops and they lost around 30% of their crop each year. They gave the local boys catapults, so they could hit the monkeys with stones without getting too close. The problem cleared right up, as the monkeys learned that going anywhere near the fields got them nothing but a sharp stone at high speed.
The problems are not insurmountable, but they are huge in scope. Getting people to give a shit for extended periods of time might be the largest challenge of all.
Re:Guns and Contraceptive Pills (Score:5, Insightful)
Solution? Tacocopter! (Score:3)
http://www.ksl.com/?sid=19748145&nid=1014&title=tacocopter-would-deliver-tacos-via-unmanned-drone&s_cid=featured-4 [ksl.com]
The ability to have tacos delivered at their feet is an idea many people wouldn't hesitate to get behind - especially when the tacos are being delivered by a robot. The Tacocopter - an unmanned drone helicopter that gives customers tacos on demand - would without a doubt be wildly popular were it to exist throughout the world. All you need is the GPS location and hot sauce!.
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.
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The rest of the world doesn't have unlimited food production capacity. Trying to import food for one billion people into Africa will mean other places in the world will need to produce one billion peoples' worth of new food. That's no small thing.
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It is estimated that Europe wastes around 50% of the food they produce, I assume the same is true for USA. People in the West eat much more meat than is needed. Limiting the amount of meat in the Western diet and limiting the wasted food will give us more than enough food to feed the world. Not that such a solution is easy.
Then what? We ship the excess to Africa and their population increases until they are starving again?
Your plan will work short term but only short term. It won't help these people to help themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
"allot" does not mean what you think it means.
Re:Why don't you ask Rhodesia? (Score:5, Informative)
They were the breadbasket of Africa in the 70s, until the blacks took over and chased all the white farmers out.
Surely there must be a few 'blacks' there that saw the kind of mechanized farming the 'whites' were performing and learnt how to do it. We are not talking degrees in agriculture here, just practical knowledge of how to farm. Why are the smart, enthusiastic, hard workers getting anywhere? Don't try and tell me they don't exist.
There were blacks who knew how to farm efficiently, however these farm labourers were chased out along with the white farmers who owned the farms. The land didn't go to black folk who knew how to farm, it went to the so called "war veterans", aka people who backed the right political side. They also parcelled up the land into smaller parts. The result of all this was subsistence farming.
The problem wasn't just that the system for taking over land was corrupt, but that it was completely mismanaged. Strangely if the party elite had actually taken their corruption far enough, parcelled out whole farms amongst themselves and kept on the existing labourers it would probably still be a breadbasket. Alternatively they could have been patient and taken the land over but kept the white farmers on as tenants and then used the money to fund decent projects for the country (though realistically they would have skimmed off the top from this too).
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Well said.
But I would like to add something. Once they decide on a course of action, and you foot the bill for it, they should stick to it. If the leader spends the money for personal gain, STOP helping them. Wait until the leadership is replaced then try again. Don't give the people food in the mean time. That just ensures there is never enough outrage to start a full blown revolution.