In article
<1576c078-cfa2-4bb7-a8cb-a64412862727@z16g2000prn.googlegroups.com>,
Robert Chung <
[email protected]> wrote:
> On Jun 28, 7:23 pm, Kurgan Gringioni <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Jun 28, 6:57 pm, Robert Chung <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > > On Jun 28, 6:27 pm, Kurgan Gringioni <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > > > > You know as much about African agriculture as you do about economics.
> > > > > The fundamental problem with Africa's food production, especially in
> > > > > Sub-Saharan Africa, is poor soil fertility, exacerbated by climate
> > > > > patterns that aren't conducive to most of the modern high-yield crops.
> >
> > > > Dumbass -
> >
> > > > Political stability is a prerequisite to solving that problem, which
> > > > by the way is a problem they've always had.
> >
> > > Which problem have they always had? Political instability or poor soil
> > > fertility? In the tropical parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, it's certainly
> > > true that poor soil fertility is innate -- but in other parts it's due
> > > to depletion. And political stability isn't going to do much about the
> > > climate patterns.
> >
> > Dumbass -
> >
> > Poor soil fertility. They've always had that.
> >
> > As for depletion - political stability is necessary to solve that
> > problem. Without political stability, you dont' have literacy and
> > without literacy the government or others will be severly limited in
> > their ability to educate the farmers of what is causing the poor soil
> > quality and the steps they need to take to mitigate it.
> >
> > thanks,
> >
> > K. Gringioni.
>
> First you say they've always had poor soil fertility, then you say
> it's because of depletion. Is this like one of those two mints, two
> mints, two mints in one?
>
> I claim that there are two different problems: in some areas, poor
> soil fertility is innate. In others, poor soil fertility is the result
> of depletion. Political stability or instability is not the cause of
> innate soil infertility. Cousineau thinks that "bad domestic policy
> has done far more to destroy African agriculture than ethanol." I
> agree that political stability is necessary to deal effectively with
> either problem, but I don't think "bad domestic policy" is identical
> to political instability, nor do I believe that bad domestic policy
> destroyed soil fertility in cases where it was innate.
I'll take the hit for conflating "domestic policy" with bad politics,
bad wars, and bad neighbours, all of which are in surplus across wide
swathes of Africa.
Kveck, however, seems to be making my point: Malawi made a small
political change (in this case $30/acre fertilizer subsidies) that drove
a massive expansion of its crop yields.
Now, I am a pragmatist on such things: the goal in a land as poor as
Malawi is to ensure that people don't die of something ridiculous like
starvation on a planet that is, ethanol-hysteria aside, in quite an easy
food surplus, globally speaking.
I mean, here's an article from the IHT in December 2007 talking about
how global food prices are rising and there's a bit of a supply crunch:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/17/europe/food.php?page=2
That's terrible, until you read this part:
"In Europe, officials said they were already adjusting policies to the
reality of higher prices. The European Union recently suspended a
"set-aside" of land for next year - a longstanding program that
essentially paid farmers to leave 10 percent of their land untilled as a
way to increase farm prices and reduce surpluses."
Which is kind of a WTF moment for me, in terms of worrying about food
supply, at least in the short term. I am routinely assured that US
agricultural policy is even more screwed up than European agricultural
policy, so I'm just going to take it as a given that there's some slack
in the system right now.
And of course (?), this returns us to Malawi, a nation previously
suffering because its farmers (and in a really poor nation, that's a lot
of people) couldn't afford fertilizer and couldn't sell their crops into
a market flooded with food aid.
Since fertilizer is a lot cheaper than love-bombs of food, if you're
going to buy something for the Malawis, the latter sounds like a better
gift. But really, we're not talking about whether or not to subsidize
Malawi's food security, only the nature of the subsidy. The article
Kveck found also ominously touches on how fortuitious the rain was that
year, which ought to give even me pause.
Nope, too boring, next thought!
Ahem. Rainfall is hardly ever an issue touched by domestic policy,
unless it was a decade-old policy of deforestation of watersheds, and
today you have no watersheds or something. More to the point, even if
food security is grim, actually starving to death in an African country
has, for a good 20-30 years, taken some doing unless you were busy
fleeing a war or your own government was doing one of the more egregious
impressions of a tin-pot dictator (ordinary corruption hardly cut it;
real starvation politics takes something like disposessing most of the
farmers and handing their land over to more politically connected
non-farmers and watching to see what happens).
Heck, Tanzania survived 21 years of Julius Nyerere, my personal favorite
socialist dictator EVER!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Kambarage_Nyerere
I know I'm going off-topic, but I'd like to point out two things here
that are very important from that article:
1) Julius' picture makes him look like Eddie Murphy with a ******
mustache, and that is exactly as funny as you would expect.
2) 'In an act of candor in his farewell speech while commenting on his
economic policies he declared "I failed. Let's admit it."' That's
basically the best line from a political farewell speech ever.
Okay, maybe this part of the article is more important:
"This ujamaa system failed to boost agricultural output and by 1976, the
end of the forced collectivization program, Tanzania went from the
largest exporter of agricultural products in Africa to the largest
importer of agricultural products in Africa."
That's an old example, but one frequently repeated in Africa, just as
elsewhere.
Yes, I'm sure Africa's agricultural capabilities are limited by the
quality of the soil and rainfall. But they're nowhere near that most
inherent limitation in a great many countries, and it's not why the
starving in Africa are starving, and they won't run up against that
limitation, at least in a continent-wide way, until a large number of
political problems (ranging from war to Mugabe) are no longer problems.
Aside from politics and the boring subject of food logistics in a
frequently hostile and corrupt environment, the problems of Africa are
boring diseases like cholera (which can be thought of as a water-supply
problem) and less-boring diseases like AIDS.
I'm not belittling the problems of Africa in any way. I think it's
virtually the only place on the planet that's worth considering as a
sink for serious, ongoing injections of wholesale development-aid*.
However, I don't think the current limiting problem of Africa is soil
quality. There's too many other bad things going on that dwarf soil
quality as an issue.
*my idea invites the question of whether international development-aid
actually works.
--
Ryan Cousineau
[email protected] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"In other newsgroups, they killfile trolls."
"In rec.bicycles.racing, we coach them."
