Besides the obvious humanitarian concerns. I’d say that Susanann is wrong…we can afford to continue our own efforts. The money we’d ‘save’ by curtailing them would be a drop in the bucket beside all the other things impacting the deficit.
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I don’t know tons about it, but the issue is complex.
For one thing, if you give food aid to a country you undercut the local farmers, who end up cutting back on production which could create a vicious cycle of a nation becoming more and more dependent on outside aid to feed itself. Ideally you’d want to find ways to empower local farmers in the region to produce abundant amounts of healthy, nutritious food and have people be able to purchase it. If you give tons of food aid to a foreign nation you could just make the local farmers give up on farming since there is no money in it.
Then you have issues like civil war and natural disasters, which play a big role in famines. Or political ideology. I’ve read that North Korea constantly needs food aid, whereas most nations only need it for a few years. The reason is most nations supposedly cooperate with aid agencies, and learn to improve domestic production until food aid isn’t needed. North Korea is a dogmatic totalitarian state, so any agricultural advice that does not correspond to the state dogma is not followed, as a result problems don’t get better. Concepts like giving individual farmers financial incentives to produce more crops on their individual farms is against the ideology of North Korea.
Either way, I have read back in 1980 about 41% of the world was malnourished, now it is closer to 18%. And a lot of malnourishment is due to certain micro or macronutrient deficiencies. People in the developing world lack zinc, vitamin A, iron, protein. Deficiencies in those make a person more vulnerable to infectious diseases.
But even in the west we are malnourished by those standards. Many people in wealthy countries are deficient in things like magnesium, omega 3s, vitamin d, etc. And deficiencies in those can increase the risk of chronic health conditions.
On balance, African nations have been unable to solve their problems on their own, and on balance they are better off with foreign intervention, aid and expertise than without it. There’s no question the utter lack of average competence at creating modern societies, sustaining modern industries, educating themselves or governing themselves leaves enormous room for corruption (which is magnificently rampant) and dictatorial regimes with bozos willing to leverage outside interests in developing Africa’s vast resources for the personal gain of the bozo in charge.
I disagree with your cynical slant that the developed world is interested in Africa only to the extent that aid buys influence. I think developed countries–the US and Europe in particular–have a genuine heart for the downtrodden as well as a genuine interest in stable, corruption-free governments that provide a win-win in terms of developing Africa as well as opening up its natural resources. Unfortunately, the various populations of African nations have turned out to be particularly un-modernizable.
To what extent is access to water across vast distances, at the right time and place for farming an issue?
We have irrigated the western half of the us, or a tiny enough part of it to be productive enough to feed the rest of the continent (and then some). Is there anything equivalent in Africa? Is it possible given the number of sovereign countries to our one?
I wonder if you got a chance to supplement your paper with comments about how those infernal French foreign interferers are attacking President Gbagbo in the Ivory Coast as part of their nefarious schemes to control African nations?
Well, let’s see. Cote D’Ivoire’s first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny is universally acknowledged to have been one of France’s greatest advocates in modern Africa, and was instrumental in the Francafrique system. He ruled as a one party system from 1960 to 1990, with clear and well-acknowledged military and financial support from France, who saw him as one of their staunchest cold war allies in Africa.
Is it surprising that when he died, the whole place went to hell? A country with 30 years of autocratic, dependent and largely foreign rule is not going to transitions smoothly into independent democracy. Instead of building local institutions and developing a functioning system of government, France subsidized a (relatively decent) dictator. But when that dictator was gone, nobody had any idea what to do next. There was no system for allocating power, and the place disolved into coups.
France played a direct role in the Ivorianen civil war, actively bombing Gbagbo’s airforce. This obviously pissed everyone off. It seems like France has played a role in supporting the rebels.
So while the current problems are not directly France’s fault, France’s hands are all over it. It’s not a “nefarious scheme” as much as a nasty legacy of short-sighted Cold War policy that didn’t magically fade away as the Cold War became irrellevent. Everyone is tangled up, tied to each other and left with the ghosts of a system that doesn’t even make sense any more. It’s a tragedy, not a victim-victimizer story. But yeah, France played an instrumental role of putting that tragedy in motion and letting it be as drawn out as it is.
Irrigation can be a factor, but it’s not an easy one to sort out.
In the US, we displaced our native populations to create commercial farmland without really worrying too much about how we were screwing over the former landholders.
In Africa, however, it’s not so easy. A lot of land is held by small farmers, who farm for themselves and maybe make a small profit. To bring in industrialized agriculture would displace these farmers, who are likely not keen on losing the land that has happily supported them for generations. Nobody wants to become hired labor on what was once their own land. In practice, displaced farmers end up migrating to cities, where they end up in slums. Now you’ve gone from a relatively functioning village society to relatively dispossessed people in slums with no system to support them.
Not to mention that the people with capital to start industrialized agricultural operations are usually foreign multi-nationals (Dole, Chinese government enterprises, etc.) So now you have foreign companies displacing local farmers and probably not returning the profits to the country except whatever investment it takes to keep the farm going. Where I lived in Cameroon, the majority-French owned cotton company maintained the roads. That meant they’d fix them during cotton harvest season, and let them slowly rot to the point of unsuitability the rest of the year. Corporations are a poor substitute for governments.
Finally, a lot of water projects just plain go wrong. The Khulna Jessore Drainage Rehabilitation Project in Bangladesh, for example, was a multi-million dollar massive water scheme that failed completely and made everything a hell of a lot worse. It turns out that local farmers had a pretty functioning traditional system that “experts” armed with modern scientific knowledge largely ignored. They build their modern water systems, and it ended up water logging huge areas of land and making everyone a lot worse off.
So it’s a lot harder than “let’s just build some big modern farms.”
When has an African government been “on its own”, without the influence and pressure of European interests, to try to solve its own problems?
It sounds like their property taxes in Africa are too low…or non-existant.
Raise the property taxes of those farmers, and then have the government use that tax money to build good roads. That is how we did it- it works!
There is actually a school of thought that posits that a government’s success is directly a function of its ability to collect taxes.
Taxes collection is a well-known problem in much of Africa. A lot of the toughest countries are huge, sparsely populated, and don’t have a lot of roads. The civil service is inefficient and would probably skim so much off any tax revenues that it’d hardly be worth trying to get them out there. Their contract is basically “you pay to become a bureaucrat and the government only pays you sporadically but you get to keep any money you can make in bribes.” They would (somewhat rightly under the existing system) see any taxes they collect as their personal income.
Farmers are often working at just-above-sustenance level anyway. I knew people who made $16.00 cash for the entire year from their farms. You basically grow your food and hopefully have enough to sell to cover the cost of cooking oil and the occasional scrap of meat during the year. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone.
Businesses avoid taxes through bribes and connections. Obviously this stunts business something fierce. But it’d usually be cheaper to pay off the tax officer personally rather than paying what you really owe in taxes.
It’s a sticky problem all around. Furthermore, if you tax people until they are angry enough you will start to see instability. People don’t want to give money to a government they have no confidence in.
I’ve heard that in response to the food shortage of 2008, large scale modern farming is being expanded in places like Africa and Eastern europe, which supposedly have tons of un and underutilized acres of farmland. Supposedly a mix of foreign governments and foreign companies were investing in that to avert future food shortages and drive down costs. Did you see any of that pick up around 2009?
I agree, but I am not sure I agree with your direct or indirect assessments of US irrigation history. For instance, little if any of the US irrigation system, at least in the Far West, is built by, owned, or run by corporations.
At the time it was beginning to be built - certainly no later than when the Mormons reached Utah - there was not really the kind of money available that the US would have later.
Even with that in mind, it took perhaps ~ 100 years to build the irrigation system we have now.
During that time, we went from none of the land west of say, the 100th meridian under either public or private ownership, to all of it being thus, and a small fraction of that under irrigation.
While I don’t want to dismiss the issue completely, I don’t think Native Americans were generally farming the land anywhere, they were more nomadic in those regions. I think the issue of the growth of railroads, as it relates to land coming under public and then private ownership is more relevant to the history of irrigation in the Western US than the displacement of the Native Americans was.
So while a very complex set of issues regarding ownership was worked out in the courts during that time, and even taking until our lifetimes to resolve some of it, at the same time equally complex issues surrounding water rights were settled as well.
Just really briefly by way of illustration, these decisions left California with no limits on the size of farms that could receive Federal water, while (most of?) the rest of the country has a 160 acre limit (= 1/2 mile x 1/2 mile).
Also, much of California, esp. the southern part gets lots of water from the Colorado river which originates in the Rockies and passes through Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada before reaching California. And probably very few drops leave California for Mexico where the water would originally have gone without the irrigation systems in place, before washing out to the sea.
Where is this germane to Africa?
Well, that water crosses a lot of jurisdiction lines, and some people are happy ab out it, some are neutral, and some probably feel left out. But it is a matter of stable laws and treaties that keep trouble from breaking out, and influencing people to let precious water simply go by against what is probably their own best interests.
And so that is what I wonder about in Africa. I am not really familiar with the geography of where water is - rivers, etc. - and where reservoirs can be, vs. where people and fertile land are.
But I do know there are a lot of countries in Africa, whereas here we only have one, plus states that generally cooperate, plus people who like it that way here. The issue of no water to MX is probably an issue for them, but in the bigger scheme of politics, given the power imbalance, they probably swallow their pride and suck it up unhappily.
All of this took 100 years to put in place, recall.
In Africa, in general, I wonder are the many sovereign nations able to cooperate, or likely to?
Do they have the patience to build it themselves over time? What are land ownerships issues really like?
What about water ownership? Does the water go to whoever owns the land on the banks of the river, or to whoever uses is upstream or downstream?
Could treaties be trusted if a reservoir for water was 3 countries away, much as California’s water originates 3 or more states away? Or, if there is not the relative power imbalance that the US and MX have, could access to water be a weapon in the hands of whichever government it passes through that decides impounding it would be advantageous for whatever reason?
Since the US’s system was and is maintained built essentially with public funds, I don’t see in principle why the same thing could not happen in Africa if there was sufficient patience and stable government(s) in place.
Is it feasible to even think that the governments of Africa individually, let alone collectively, will ever be mature and stable enough to address these issues?
I don’t think any of the statements are myths, they’re just exaggerated wording, if anything.
For example, it is wrong to say all aid is lost to corruption. But it would be true to say that when charities and NGOs try to track how much foreign aid appears to get distributed to those that need it, they tend to find most aid fails to reach its target.
I make regular donations to Oxfam, so I am not trying to trying to belittle aid to ease my conscience. But I am of the opinion that political and economic reforms would be much more significant than giving out food, or even investing in, say, schools.
I recommend the book The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier for a discussion of the kinds of reforms that would be most effective.
Lots of issues here obviously. Here are some:
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You are perfectly free to do whatever you want to do with your money and resources. So if you want to go feed starving people, then knock yourself out. Now, when you want to take money from other people and use it to feed starving people, you get into a whole host of other issues.
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Countries with starving people typically have several other problems besides simply the existence of starving people. Simply providing food aid to such a country can cause more problems than it solves depending on the circumstances.
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Providing food aid to one country obviously has ramifications on relationships with other countries.
I can’t believe nobody posted THIS yet.
Let me point out this statistic:
In the modern world, the nation with the highest child mortality rate is 26.2% (Sierra Leone). In medieval Europe, the rate is estimated to be around 30%.
During the Ethiopian famine of 1984, approximately 1 million people (of a population of about 40 million) are estimated to have died. That is to say, about 2.5% of the population died. In Northern medieval Europe, the Great Famine of 1315-1317 killed at least 5% of the population. During the entire 14th century, between 40-70% of most European nations died.
Overall, what we’re looking at isn’t a continent living in poverty, we’re looking at a continent which is still living in the medieval ages. We don’t look back at the reigns of Edward II and Henry VIII and think, “Gosh, those people really needed multivitamin pills!” We think, “Gosh, that’s quaint. I’m glad our society picked up technology, social equality, modern economics, etc. and moved on into modern day!”
The problem with Africa is political. Food is used as a weapon. It’s really easy to do this when you have refugees all crowded in camps. You simply cut off the road to the supply line.
Here’s an interesting fact. The USA or Canada, either nation, has the ability, if they wanted to, to produce enough food to feed the entire world. Both of these nations are so rich in agriculture if we wanted to we could produce the food.
But then what? We deliver it to a country and it’s not sent to the starving people. Why? It is being used as a weapon. Look a California. It’s a great state, a rich state. Then look at a country like Mozambique, this country is similar enough in terms of raw minerals and land to be just like California. But it isn’t.
Africa’s problem is vision. There really are no leaders that care about their countries. Virtually every leader has been someone interested in stuffing their pockets full of money and sending their kids to Europe or America to be educated.
Africans are also very conflicted about their culture. They want to remain faithful to their historical past. This is subsistence farming, this is a rural way of life. But the world has changed and isn’t like that anymore. Many Africans are thus conflicted. They want to be part of this new world but can’t reconcile it with their traditional values.
And no one is saying those values are wrong, they’re just different. So when someone speaks up about bringing Africa into the 21st century, people yell, “You’re trying to destroy our culture,” and then politics comes back into it.
Food is not a problem, distribution of the food is the problem. Whether this is from infrastructure or politics that is where the problem lies
Since I live right smack dab in the middle of the most productive farm land in the world, in California’s Central Valley, and I never have heard this asserted before, I am going to have to ask for a cite of this “fact”. the US contains roughly 5% of the world’s population and feeds itself for the most part.
Are you suggesting that the US ag industry is operating at ~5% of capacity? I find that pretty hard to believe.
Not only that, but as I mentioned above, what mass agriculture there is is west of the 100th meridian, and relies on irrigation in large part, entire on it in California. If there is underused capacity, how do you propose to bring the extra water (what extra water???) to the farms?
Incompetent and dependent populations of any kind are inevitably susceptible to outside influences, in proportion to their competence at managing themselves. The history of the world is a history of competent populations exploiting less competent ones. It’s unlikely any undeveloped nation with exploitable resources will be left alone, and the degree to which it is “managed” by sources outside the nation will be in proportion to its ability to manage itself.
There isn’t a shred of evidence that African nations would be anything beyond what they were a couple thousand years ago without the influence of outside nations and peoples. And for the most part, they have remained dependent on those outside resources for what little development they have managed to attain. I see no evidence they would ever be able to solve their own problems, if you are talking about things like disease or violence or corruption or creation of an industrialized, modern society.
You could make a similar argument for much of the developed world, where for example in Europe we have to at least credit the assist to chinese inventions and islamic mathematics.
My own position is somewhere between the extremes of “It’s all the West’s fault” and “Africans are unable to develop”.
Certainly the way borders have been drawn has not helped – right across tribal lines and in some cases creating whole nations with no access to rivers, seas or any obvious material assets.
And neither do the various market manipulations that make it difficult for African exports to compete.
But ultimately, Africa’s poor because it’s poor. Or rather, it’s become a poverty trap. How it got that way is a separate point, but that’s the reason it continues to be.
North Korea has a GDP well below that of many african nations (measured either as total GDP or PPP). Yet you can bet that if NK opened its market and made relatively modest political changes, the country’s economy would skyrocket in no time.
It’s not the same within Africa. Every percent of growth is very difficult to achieve, and all it takes is a single coup or civil war (which are far more likely in poor countries) to potentially bring down a whole region.