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Ask Slashdot: How To Feed Africa?
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."
"Africa has some of the poorest soils anywhere on the earth". Such a generic statement about a whole continent which contains huge portions of tropical rainforest and grassland is just wrong.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Birth control.
...can save a lot of food and water!
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?
They were the breadbasket of Africa in the 70s, until the blacks took over and chased all the white farmers out.
Relevant: Sam Kinison on World Hunger
If the soil is so poor why farm at all? Why not focus on some other industry to grow the economy and import all their food?
how about something like the hydroponic system being used in Milwaukee, WI where they are also farming fish in the vegetable grows? Thoguh they do need allot more water in much of Africa, Desalination plants would help some, but not for the countries on the interior.
They shouldn't use chemical fertilizers. Use sustainable practices only. The poor yields will help to starve the excess population to death and the yield curve will eventually meet the population curve. Stop hurting Gaia with your chemical food rape.
How about we let the Africans decide! What a CONCEPT! Self determination!
This is a stupid question. Why can't they do all 3? Did Africa recently shrink to the point where they can only try 1 type of farming? This is like asking what type of electrical generation the US should switch to!
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.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Africa is perfectly capable of growing enough food to feed its people. Many nations are capable of growing enough food to export the surplus. The problems are distribution, largely related to corruption and violence. It seems nearly everything we do just makes it worse. The free food shipments have a list of unintended consequences long enough to terrify you. It simultaneously props up the craven warlords that don't like us while depressing the prices for locally grown food so the farmers can't sell any excess they might grow for the tools that they need to buy the tools the need to continue to farm, much less other life expenses like clothes. Tools and clothes wear out, and if you destroy the local economies with our generousity, it does not help these people. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the old saying goes. And hell, I'm not the only one saying it. Good intentions don't matter. Bad results do.
But seriously... strange set of questions for a geeks' board.
While reduction of starvation can certainly help in reducing the myriad of fundamental infrastructure issues that Africa faces - banking, education, basic democracy (which is scarce on the continent), effective tamping down of militaristic regimes that ARE commonplace, and of course systemic corruption - all now removed from the long history of European colonialism that dominated Africa for centuries - it seems to me that even widespread starvation isn't even the fundamental problem with Africa. Basic proper governance is the problem and it will take the people of these countries to fix it.
And I can't imagine there aren't very large areas of sub-Saharan African that aren't eminently arable. If vast jungles exist in Africa, I can't see why they can't grow most or all of the food they need. Do Egyptians suffer from widespread starvation when most of that country is a desert? Don't think so.
"Move to where the food is."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Let the countries in Africa decide on how to deal with their food issues. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., we should divert this energy into trying to keep our people fed. I'm getting real tired of hearing about all of these "food deficient" children on the tv.
What? Everyone thought it was all cool when Jonathan Swift said it.
I'm an African. We cannot afford to waste resources we don't have on "sustainable approaches" when we can simply copy what has worked well everywhere.
26 million people die each year to malnutrition and lack of clean drinking water. The cost of saving a life of one person each day is .33. So the cost for a year is $100. The cost to solve world hunger for a year is 3 billion. The cost to put into motion long term projects to solve world hunger is 30 billion as posed by the UN. The thing we should examine in ourselves is,"Based on the way I live, could I spare some money to help the poor?" It is similar to when Oscar Schindler broke down because he didn't sell his watch and car to save more lives. World hunger could be solved if enough people worked towards a solution.
One solution that doesn't work great is dumping food into areas. By exporting food to impoverished areas, you solve the problem for the short term, but if you stop doing it, there will be no farmers. Why will there be no farmers? Supply and demand kills the demand for food and farmers can't stay in business when dumping occurs. Think to devious competition schemes people have in capitalism when you want to make your competitor go broke. You simply drop the price on your goods where everyone is losing money, but you'll make it back after your competitor goes broke.
This is not to say all dumping is bad. You can dump food into crisis areas, and also provide a version of food stamps too so local farmers get paid. Food stamps is a great way to drive up demand for local foods.
In all this, depending on how much governmental aid or resistance you get is a wild card.
I like the notion of growing fruit trees. In case a farmer dies, or wars and revolutions, fruit trees remain.
The whole matter should be treated seriously. When you look at the US budget 30 billion to solve world hunger doesn't seem like a whole lot, and maybe it is deceptively small. You'd think the UN would have a bunch of countries teaming up to solve hunger, but do you think the reason they don't is the guns/butter slider? If you donate food to someone like North Korea, they'll just build more weapons with their extra money. I'm not sure I buy this argument.
Anyone know the popular arguments why governments don't band together and try and solve world hunger?
God spoke to me
Don't feed them. You're not everyone's nurse, no matter how much you would like to be.
Besides, by feeding them you only sew suffering for future Africans and quite frankly, for us to. What is this mental disease that makes people think we should fight to have billions and billions of people live forever? Do you have no understanding of how the world works? How sheltered were you?
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
CONDOMS.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
Africa is the oldest human society on earth.
Why is it upon the rest of the world to figure out "How To Feed Africa"?
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.
Simple to feed the lot, they should use PERMACULTURE to green their lands. No fertilizers/pesticides needed, the world is capable of growing itself. Why do we (humans) think we can do something better then that what was around millions of years before us and still is flourishing. Except when we messed it up. Or I should say, we did and maybe still not understand how the earth works.
The problem is they have too many children and Africa is overpopulated when it comes to the ability of the soil to feed the population.
It should be a natural process to have less children or even die out for some tribes so that others would be able to live in there.
Look at the Inuits - they have similar situation with food, yet they have no such problems.
Imagine your family had 10 or more children. You think your parents would have been able to feed you?
By helping Africa we are only making it worse.
African people are used to live like that, and if you give them food, they will have even more children and still starve (proven, google it).
There is no solution to this situation because of the mentality of those people. Sad but true.
[quote] NGOs must decide whether to subsidize chemical fertilizers like those used in the west or promote more sustainable agricultural practices[/quote]
People should investigate the ties/funding of most important NGO's and realize they have been had all along.
Too bad most people won't because cognitive dissonance is a bitch (so I'm told).
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html
[...]Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.[,,,]
Africa needs education and Internet everywhere. With aid you only support assholes like that christian fundamentalist Joseph Kony.
Education and Internet
Maybe some type of education system would help?
I dont mean that we teach them to farm, because we have tried and tried to set things up there and it doesnt work. They have no money for maintaining expensive farm equipment and such. So after a year it just sit there.
I would actually argue that we should not feed Africa. Africa should feed Africa. If you have large group of generally uneducated people with a ready supply of food, they will reproduce until said food supply is no longer available. No one likes to talk about it for fear of being labeled a racist, but it is what would happen. It is no different than those living in a permanent welfare state in the states. On average, they have many more children than the educated class despite their inability to properly provide for them.
Utilize otherwise wasted porn protein... ;)
I mean corn protein
-HasHie @ TrYPNET.net
AS they can lay pipe lines for gas and oil, why not lay pipes for water to take water away from those countries that suffer monsoon floods? The more water that pipe away as the monsoon starts the less chance there is for a damaging flood for that area, win-win.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Here in Kenya, very productive crop farms (wheat, corn) are been constantly replaced with farms that export fruit, vegetables and flowers to Europe, because government subsidies encourage export over local industry. Not only are the latter much more intensive in their water/energy/chemical requirements, they also mean that the country is seriously dependent on increasingly fickle Western markets (people buy fewer flowers and exotic vegetables in a recession).
This has happened so much that the country no longer is self-sufficient when it comes to things like wheat and corn (which form the basis of the local diet). We now import these things from places like Russia. If instead we hadn't bothered with silly flower farms and stuck to feeding the local population, things would be a lot less precarious.
The ships arrive empty and depart full.
It is better to deal with a war lord over an area of needed mineral wealth vs a stable 2nd world government. They would demand and get an upfront clean up contract and ongoing outside testing.....
If Africa gets its own food security- then steps up to eduction, mining, housing, value added exports....
As it is now you can extract gems, gold, timber, oil for cents in the $. Why risk paying cents + more when you can keep the balance between chaos and a thiefdom for generations.
So provide a flood of cheap food to suppress local efforts and ensure any real charity work is limited.
Mix in tame NGO's that keep a majority of their funds and produce feel good efforts on demand.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Peak phosphorus
Non-Linux Penguins ?
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.".
lucm, indeed.
My daughter is currently a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi and this has been a pretty hot topic in our conversations. Fuel shortages make producing petro-based fertilizers very expensive and transporting it out to the countryside very difficult. Lack of foreign exchange money make importing difficult also, but aid dollars are available for it. The Malawi government encourages use of chemical fertilizers and it is still the default method.
My daughter and most volunteers are trained by PC in permaculture and organic gardening for their personal use for sustainability, plus its is much cheaper (they have to get by on next to nothing and pretzel M&M shipments from their folks...). There are reasonable numbers of livestock scattered throughout and she is working with local groups to set up manure composting businesses locally in her district. It takes about 4x manure (her figure, seems low to me) for the same fertilization value you get from chemical fertilizers. It's more work and more susceptible to insects but no forex and reduced transport dependency, good for the local economy, sustainable, etc etc.
The real problem is that it is different. Malawi is not Sudan where starvation is common, but there are seasons every year when most people in her region are hungry. Taking a risk with the corn crop is not done lightly when you have a proven method and you have less than $1/day to feed your family of usually more than 4. She'll keep trying with demonstration patches etc, but it only works when the locals take up ownership of the result. It ain't easy being green when the short term consequence is so stark. Of course the long term consequences for non-sustainability are pretty rough, too.
Hat's off to the volunteers trying to make it happen and the Malawians brave enough to try.
Ship them a thousand copies of every farming related book and leave them to get on with it. The west has been screwing around in Africa for a very long time and not much has come of it, they need to do this for themselves so they really know how to do it.
There's two types of countries in Africa. Thos that fell into the fertilizer death trap and those that improved the education of their farmers.Guess who won't have massive starvation once the fertilzier or money supply is cut for geopolitical reasons.It is a death trap and a proxy weapon to get a country to adopt fertilizer they have to import. The horror will be significant..
So they will watch TV instead to make more babies. If you give them only food, the population will boom and you will have the same problem.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
greenhouses produce 6+ times compared to out of doors cultivation. Africa has suitable climate for greenhouses ( see Israel greenhouse projects ), then using hydroponics, there is no need in rich soils. of cause there is question of money - there is need in quite a bit of them to start. But this is another question. Africa can produce enough crops, and 'poor' soils do not prevent Israeli deserts to produce a lot of food.
It's not talked about much, but one of the things that helps reduce the price of fertiliser is treated sewage. So it basically sets up a cycle with what's taken out of the land for food being "given back". This frequently works as a double loop with crops grown with Human sewage used to feed cattle and bullshit used to feed the crops for people as this is generally "less yukky" and normally safer because diseases don't switch between species much.
In Africa (in general) this cycle doesn't exist, the sanitation is often poor and the sewage treatment worse. Even when sanitation does exist many people seem to prefer a quiet spot in the bushes. Without the cycle fertiliser is expensive without fertiliser you will only get a couple of crops from a piece of land before you drain it of nutrients.
This is a basic rule of farming, another way of doing the same thing is crop rotation now this works on a much more local scale which keeps big business out of the equation but but will probably work best if the soil recovery is aided by a contract with the local 'nightsoil collector.'
Charities have been putting out ads about starving Africa for the last 40+ years, and the population has more than doubled in that time. My sympathy is now gone, but the charities and media don't care, and they run the show. My (and your) opinion is irrelevant.
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
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Take the guns away from the men and give the pills to the women. Accept the fact that it's going to take a couple of generations to stabilise, and there is no quick fix. In many places, the problems seem to be not poor soil, or lack of rain, but the fact that around harvest time, some asswipe rolls up in a jeep with a bunch of his buttboys and helps himself to whatever he fancies.
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.
Where do they get the excess Potash to make the areas (60% or of subsaharan) viable, higher yielding-- it ain't cheap you realize. So Liebig's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_law_of_the_minimum
Let's start out by making transportation non-retarded Survey all wasetwater plants for possible fuel sources, & take advantage of what shi tyou already have lying around like WVO. Then, once that shit is monetized you bring in the raw materiol needed to aerate the land while the farmers do their shit like that I'm sorry I'm on ambien right now & I was just about to go to sleep bye
The assumptions in the summary are wrong in general, you must live here before coming up with solutions to problems you don't understand except by watching documentaries .. some photos from rwanda and ghana to give you an idea what it is like
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150555032114134.428576.665564133&type=3&l=45fe9c1d8d
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150615484079134.438141.665564133&type=1&l=a6ab9d3a8e
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150490910759134.419413.665564133&type=3&l=7809a12c56
The entire tone seems pretty darn paternal. And ignorant. Maybe even a little racist. Africa is a lot of different nations and tribes and climates and such. We shouldn't tell them what to do, nor should we make some blanket statements about all of Africa. They can determine their own future.
The problem with Condoms is unfortunately Catholicism . . . maybe it should be ban Catholicism.
Sorry no condom for you, go straight to hell . . .
Wait , , , 15 children starved to death and aids epidemics . . . they are in hell already.
If you give them more food, they'll make even more babies who will grow to adulthood, who will then in turn need more food and on and on. This is the eternal fate of Africa.
Despite a gobal slowdown Africa saw robust growth in 2011. Prospects remain strong but elevated downside risks in the global economy could dampen the regions economic momentum.
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/0,,contentMDK:23004589~pagePK:146736~piPK:226340~theSitePK:258644,00.html
We all know that Africa is controlled and exploited by industry and governments of the 1st world. We take their resources and give nothing back except the toxic waste. We flood their markets with low quality, cheap subsidised import food (EU meat for example), killing local markets, increasing poverty. At the same time we force them to grow cheap food for the first world (peanuts for instance), instead of growing food for themselves. If world market prices for these crops dive, their income drops, we don't care. We take their water and sell it to their rich population, leaving the poor with dirty water. We make them believe they need to buy our seeds and fertilizer and unlearn how traditional farming works. We enforce patents on medication even in Africa, so we can extort money from a few rich. We deliver boat loads of waste and garbage to Africa.
http://www.ksl.com/?sid=19748145&nid=1014&title=tacocopter-would-deliver-tacos-via-unmanned-drone&s_cid=featured-4
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!.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Africa is so diverse that you can not condemn all of it as infertile and backward. They have nice places too. Just like any other continent.
I would suggest that you look for examples in other arid areas like South Africa, Spain, Israel, Australia, China, Mexico, USA or Kazakhstan even.
I must admit that I'm surprised that in nearly 200 comments there have only been a couple of mentions of Permaculture. I would have expected that the highly systematic and evidence based approach to sustainable high yield food cropping would have been right up the slashdot crowds alley.
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).
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.
Give them contraception, change the culture there , and forbid the pope and otehr religious leader to say outright lie on contraception. Once the population level drop down, feeding will be self evident, self sufficient.
Years ago I rented a property and the well dried up. Rather than reach out to the government for assistance, we did something amazing: WE MOVED!
Rather than continuing to throw more good money in after bad, spend the money on a few U Haul trucks. Since we're already shoving our beliefs down their throats, scoop these people up and transplant them somewhere where the land CAN thrive. Anyone who refuses to move as sealed their fate.
any other solution will just cause more suffering.
The one change that would make the single largest improvement to the issues Africa is facing would be that all religions, politicians, etc. EMBRACE the condom. Not just tolerate it, but actively promote it.
It would ease overpopulation, reduce the spread of AIDS, decrease the number of single mothers, orphans, and abortions, etc. etc. etc.
This whole thread is up to its ass in imperialist, racist white privilege. You are not some great white savior, who with his superior intellect knows what's best for all the poor dark races of the world. (And if you're one of the 2% of Slashdot readers who's not a white male, my point still holds.)
No matter how much you've read about Africa, you don't have the expertise to decide for them that one form of fertilizer is better than another. You don't get to decide whether they'd be better off being "exploited" by big business or left to fend for themselves. You don't get to decide whether food security is more or less urgent than contraception.
That's not to say that you should do nothing, though. Your wealth grants you educational advantages: you can provide information. Tell folks in Africa what their options are, brainstorm new ideas (like this one). Your wealth grants you logistical advantages: you can help to implement the solutions they decide they like.
But they decide, not you.
It sounds like arrogance and condescension.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
McDonalds Franchises. Noone wants to eat the shizzel over here.. send it somewhere else where the food quality isn't such an issue (.. or is that considered inhumane?).
Africa (and the rest of the world too) need to turn to permaculture.
We need to observe ecological systems, and figure out how we can design simmilar eco-systems that are more suitable for our needs.
Such tailored systems can provide enormeous yields compared to industrial agriculture.
This is our only hope, if we are to survive the comming decades.
Peak-oil is allready upon us, and it will be a bumpy ride from here.
EU subsidies deny Africa's farmers of their livelihood. This has to stop NOW, Africa has enough potential for food production and doesn't need our junk subsidized by EU taxpayers. If we cared about them, we'd invest that money in African companies so they can get off the ground faster, but what we do is exactly the opposite. The EU agricultural policy is borderline criminal in many aspects.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
You can't unless you put down Wall Street.
Food is an asset! It's that simple!
This question is the same as: How to defend Africa against the Empire?
Again, you can't especially as Africa is the next longterm target for the Empire. China and those traitors at NATO are pushing more and more to steal Africa's resources.
There are solutions, just not "legal" ones thanks to governments controlled by multinational corporations and corrupt international bankers.
HEMP || Use hemp (Cannabis sativa variety) to replace wood for cooking. Cannabis can grow in poor soil. Hemp seeds are highly nutritious (double entendre intended). One hectare of hemp (grown for fiber) can replace more that 4 hectares of forests, and can also be used to make building construction materials.
PYROLIZATION || Easily constructed ovens can be used to pyrolyze hemp fiber into flammable cooking gas, and to create bio-char.
TERRA PRETA || This is a farming technique that uses bio-char to enrich soil. It provides an "anchor" for healthy micro-biotics to convert natural fertilizers into plant-ready usable nutrients. The fertilizers feed the micro-biotic organisms, and these organisms feed the cultivated plants. Over time, the percentage of carbon in the soil actually increases, due to the life cycle of those useful micro-biotic organisms.
MANURE || Properly treated manure (mulching) can be safely used to help enrich that terra preta treated soil.
Most areas of Africa have the ability to feed themselves, if only governments and greedy multinational corporations get out of the way, including such evil corporations as Monsanto. GMO seeds are, by definition, unsustainable, as well as dangerous to other living organisms in the food chain, especially humans. Sequestration of carbon (credits) through the use of terra preta farming techniques could provide the seed money for the micro-finance of sustainable agriculture at the village level. There is no good reason why solar power / photovoltaics cannot be employed with dramatically good results to operate pumps for wells for irrigation and drinking water, as well as purifying that water for drinking. Good solutions are available to improve the lives of millions of people, instead of using them as lab rats for eugenics-inspired Big Pharma medicines, vaccines, etcetera.
Go NFT/vertical farming, use SEA-90 and some minor chemical supplementation of nitrogen, and teach the people how to operate the system.
Disclaimer: I design these kinds of systems - here's one of them featured on BBC's CountryFile.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Soylent Green
Teaches them how to properly grow and sell their crops instead of simply giving them everything.
Until energy crisis has been resolved there can be no solution to poverty or hunger problems.
If you subsidize fertilizers and peak oil comes on board, subsidies WILL vanish.
If you build sustainable farms and peak oil comes, you will have to resort to manual labor which means subsistence farming for all, YAY!
Maybe if Zimbabwe wouldn't have killed and drove the white farmers away, food wouldn't be quite so scarce in Africa.
By stopping the wholesale carving up the the country by foreign corporations who see a resource (for example a lake fill with fish or farm-able land), simply take it (preventing all the resident Africans from using it), hire a few residents at minimum wage and start depleting that resource and shipping huge amounts of food oversees and they watch the residence population starve to death.
Even the countries in Africa where it is worse then average, even when they are going through deathly famines, are shipping millions of pounds of food overseas so you can buy it in your local food mart.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Square foot gardening might be a viable option.
http://www.squarefootgardening.com/
It turns out that the instructions on most seed packets are designed for planting in rows suitable for mechanical processing. The seeds can be planted much more closely together when a human hand is doing the tending. And, when you plant closely together there is little room for weeds, so weeding is a once-a-month activity.
You can make a raised bed planter 4' by 4' in size and only 7" deep, fill it with a mixture of 1/3 compost (manure), 1/3 peat moss and 1/3 vermiculite and you have a planter that is capable of feeding one person for an entire growing season. Once the mixture has been made, you only need to occasionally add compost and the mixture is good for five years.
Mel Bartholomew, the inventor of Square Foot Gardening, is a process engineer, and he has spent the last 20 years optimizing the heck out of this growing method. He's traveled the world working with organizations and governments to help people grown their own food.
There'll be a stock pile of it soon. Send it over.
Task Mangler
The question is simple: does Africa follow the same, unsustainable road as the rest of the world?
There is absolutely no basis for suggesting modern agriculture is unsustainable. Crop yields in the USA are at record highs and continue to climb. No till farming conserves moisture and builds organic matter in the soil. Most of what is advertised as "sustainable farming" has no scientific basis.
Surprisingly the areas where humanity have been the longest have been farmed to oblivion.
So why are we trying to turn the large expanses of aird semi-desert into farmland? How about getting them to stop living in the bad areas and have them move to the good areas to start with?
Honestly, this is like trying to start a rice farm in the middle of the Sahara desert. it's just stupid to even try it there. Step 1 is to identify the areas where it's possible, step 2 is to use sustainable processes like crop rotation, irrigation, and fertilizer (cow poo is sustainable) to make the marginal areas farm-able.
This is not rocket science. any homesteading book from the 1800's will have every bit of information needed to do what is needed in africa with some tweaks.
I dont think it's the farming problem causing the food shortages, let's start with the scumbag leaders of most of the countries and the rampant militias and gangs.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Its getting the food to the people that need it. A small part of that is logistics, but the biggest part is the various governments ( mostly local ) that get in the way.
Lots and lots of food goes to waste every year that never made it to the person that was hungry.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Methane, natural gas, and liquified natural gas all are very abundant to the point of annoyance. They can readily be used to create mass quantities of fertilizers. Furthermore their use reduces their 25x impact on global warming gasses as compared to CO2. Let me be clear I am not a global warming nut, but I do know that methane concentrations on the north coast of Russia are producing a likely self feeding pattern of ice melt. I suspect that favors future Russian economic development, but it also is a "pollutant". Gas is also customarily burned off on oil rigs rather than being collected and picked up "free" by low cost ships or trucks. The coastal Russian methane concentration can be seen on the Wikipedia page for atmospheric methane.
JJ
It's one of distribution. Even if they have to resort to imports to fill their food needs, the bigger problem is that the violence and genocide that plagues much of the continent makes security a real problem.
By the way, hardcore libertarians take note: Africa is a perfect example of why a "governmentless orderly anarchy" can never exist. The inevitable outcome of that is tribalism, as we've seen time and again. Without a central authority, the cartels take over and extort the hell out of everyone else and there is no recourse except to respond in kind. This can quickly turn into a giant civil war, and this is not the kind of society any sane person would want to live in.
Why is fertilizer an "unsustainable farming method"?
The following people are already demonstrating it is possible to reverse desertification using sustainable methods that will not further degrade the soil, but improve it short and long-term:
Bill Mollison
Geoff Lawton
David Holmgren
Sepp Holzer
There are many others along this chain, but these are the "big four" in my book. Google any of them for a good start.
We are going to have to stop the war against birth control. George W. Bush's and the Republican stance for abstinence only politics was exported to Africa and did real damage.
It is a very simple fact that if Africa had fewer people it would have fewer problems.
Oprah's school for young girls is a huge step in this direction. Studies clearly show that the more educated the woman the smaller the family size.
We love our fertilizers and pesticides, not to mention growth hormones. They make apples grow big and red, give our chickens lots of white breast meat, and over all look at how much more food we get out of a crop.
Unfortunately, the food does not contain the same nutrients as it once used to. To get the nutrients we need on a daily basis, we have to eat much more food - many more calories. This has assisted in creating the North American obesity problem.
There are lots of published studies showing just this, a few listed here.
- Journal of Complimentary Medicine, 2001 - decline in trace minerals of up to 76%
- News Canada, 2003 - potatoes lost 100 % of their vitamin A content, 57% of their vitamin C and iron, and 28% of their calcium.
- Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 2004 - declines were observed in protein, calcium, phosphorous, iron, riboflavin and ascorbic acid
- Food Magazine - milk's iron content had fallen 62%, magnesium down 21%, copper disappeared completely
So where did the nutrients go? Our farming practices are one part of it. There are lots of the nutrients in the soil that we grow our food in, however, the plants cannot absorb them in the naturally occuring state. They need to be broken down by micro organisms in the soil, or at least the ones there before we killed them off with our pesticides. So the plants are not as healthy, because they are not getting the nutrients they need. The farm animals are not healthy becasue they are not getting their nutrients. We are not healthy because we are not getting the nutrients we need from our food.
Organic farming, gets back to having healthy soil for the plants. The micro organisms are there to break down the minerals. The plants get the nutrients from the ground. The farm animals get the nutrients from the feed. We get our nutrients from the food. And we do not need to eat as much to ge the nutrients - so the cost per nutrient is actually lower, even if the organic bananna is more expensive.
Now in Africa, Asia, and the rest of the world, we are helping them to follow in the route we have taken. Heling them to speed grow lots of calories with little nutrition. Instead of a billion malnourished people in Africa that need to be fed, we will help them create a population of malnourished overweight people. Just like us.
The solution is to help them get good nutrition. As someone else suggested, move the sand/clay/organic sludge around, to great good soil. Let the organisms flourish, so what does grow in the soil is healthy. As the plants die at the end of a season, the stalks, leaves, and whatever else we do not eat, can return to the soil and feed the micro organisms. That cycle will improve the quality of the soil for the next season, and so on.
However, out chemical companies - the ones that make their money selling pesticides, fertilizers, and hormones will step in and do their best to not lose all the potential revenues. Just think of how much they have to lose with a billion people needing pesticides and fertilizers for their food, and then vitamin supplements and medicine to keep them healthy, because the food is not nutritious.
I hate to be pessimistic, but I forsee profits for big corporations before healthy food any day of the week.
Less people around, less people to feed. This solution is already happening naturally. Less resources, more conflict. More conflict, more dead people. Less people.
Africa has vast amounts of quality farmland. I know I have seen it over 35 years. As usual the problem is Governments, particularly the US governments, the UN and NGOs who have conspired to destroy farming, support corrupt undemocratic dictators eg Dr Kaunda and create dependency on outside aid where none was needed or existed. At the same time the leaderships send billions to Zurich.
De colonialization was and is a disaster caused by Lefty do-gooders. When will these idiots realize that their model of Democracy does not transplant to the Arab or African world, and its hols is tenuous even where it is strongest.
Only China, which regularly punishes corruption, and gives the the finger to the UN and its NGOs seems to ba able to get things done in Africa and they are re-collonizing it which is exactly what is needed.
MFG, omb
Africa is full of life. It is still very much the untamed world.
African can feed itself if they use their heads and stop having children they can't feed, and learn to engineer solutions instead of walking miles on end to get a bucket of water. DUH!
Start realizing that AIDS is spread by sex, not some magical way.
Several reasons. 1. They live in a DESERT. Kind of hard to grow food in sand. 2. They are mostly uneducated. 3. Too many "kingdoms" and warlords 4. They've lived that way pretty much since the world was created. Until you change #1 & #2, nothing will change.
So-called "sustainable" approaches are called that exactly because the current large-scale farming system is viewed by many to be unsustainable. For instance, if you look at the topsoil depth of the American midwest over time, you'll see that it's growing shallower and shallower. If nothing changes, this land will eventually become unfarmable. This type of farming is borrowing against the future to pay the present.
You can copy what "has worked", but there's a significant amount of evidence to show that it won't work long term and will be detrimental to long term productivity. Perhaps unsustainable techniques are the short term answer to kick start production, but then you have the problem that it will stay in place far longer than it should because nobody has the motivation to make difficult changes. This is an opportunity for governments, scientists and farmers to locally take control of their own destiny and learn from the mistakes of others. It's also an opportunity to avoid ceding yet another local resource to a powerful multinational.
www.clarke.ca
Feeding Africa in the long run can only be done if there's serious action on climate change on our end. The continent might literally dry up in less then a century. I'm not talking metaphorically either--massive global drying is considered to be a potential catastrophic result of rising temperatures (although more research is needed). http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2010/10/20/206899/ncar-daidrought-under-global-warming-a-review/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ8pjOG4pXI
I think I have an idea. Maybe they should correct a mistake that was made thousands of years ago. As the article itself states, Africa doesn't support human life so everyone there should move to a place that does support human life. That's so genius it's almost stupid! I mean seriously, who thinks "Hmmm, the soil won't grow anything, it's unbearably hot, everything here wants to eat us, and there's no water...let's keep living here!"
we feed Africa by growing more food. Don't we have that already? Food distriution is the problem here. Look at your trash can, see how much food you ate that overpasses what you really need. I guess Malawi Government is trying that approach because no other country wouild actually help in the way they need. Other than experiments with chemicals, medicine and what not. Africa's problem is that is the back(grave)yard of the rest of the world.
Poor soil not a problem for aquaponics system.
Cannibalism solves both the hunger and population problems.
What is slashdot?
Or just stop giving them food and things will even out - without enough food to sustain a fetus, women stop ovulating. Eventually their population will be a size that can be sustained by their natural food resources. Let's not fuck up the whole world to keep a culture alive that can't see that when food is scarce they should not grow their population.
Africa could probably feed it's population if it had the infrastructure, machinery, supplies and knowledge to operate modern farms. They don't and their population keeps growing while the rest of the world feeds them.
You're contributing to the problem by feeding people who can't sustain themselves.
Food + humans = 2x humans in under 20 years.
What part of overpopulation don't you understand?
Leave Africa alone... If the wild animals are more suited to thrive in that pristine natural environment, then humans and agriculture should not take priority. The great wilderness and wildlife depend on it, and would be significantly diminished with a human population boom.
It seems the logical course is to subsidize chemical fertilizers to increase production immediately, and at the same time encourage the sustainable practices so that a few years down the road they can take the place of chemical fertilizers.
Famine has been part of the picture for millions of years.
Attempting to change that now is just another example of
the hubris of modern man, who creates as many problems
as he solves ( You don't believe this ? You haven't been paying attention. ).
The world produces plenty of food, enough to feed everyone, including everyone in Africa, with enough to spare that we can all get fat. The problem is infrastructure and distribution.
Forget sending over food to Africa. So much of it will be spoiled or destroyed before it reaches a starving person. If we decide that "fixing Africa" is what we ought to do (that's a debate for another topic), we should go about it intelligently.
Build an infrastructure of roads, railroads, and highways. Nice modern ones, and then maintain them well and make sure they reach everyone. Then send over a lot of nice refrigerated trucks and railcars, and maintain them well. Then package food well, to prevent damage and spoilage. Even in the modern west we lose a lot of food and other products to improper packaging, so we should continue developing better packaging here at home, and share those advances. Next, build an electrical grid to consistently power tens of thousands of super markets across the continent, and maintain it well. Then, build those nice refrigerated super markets, and maintain them well.
Then, send over the food, if it's even needed anymore. My guess is we'll need to send hardly any food over at all, the existing agricultural output of the continent will be properly distributed without damage and spoilage and we can continue fattening ourselves up guilt-free.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
This seems like a good question to be posted on an African website. I'm sure there will be lots of interesting ideas on slashdot, but unfortunately the implementation will most likely result in (surprise!) western troops killing people in Africa.
See aquaponics, cybernated farm systems, vertical organic self sufficient farming, automated farming.. we CAN already do this. It is not profitable to do so. But money is just ink, paper and numbers on a computer screen. They don't have it in star trek - we DON'T need it now! See www.thevenusproject.com for more information and watch www.zeitgeistmovingforward.com :)
A MUCh easier fix .. POPULATION CONTROL. Stop making babies if you cant feed em. And Africa cannot feed itself. Its isnt the wests job to subsidize their inability to use birth control.
Africa also has some of the richest soil in the world.
One of my favorite stories about my visit to Zaire (now Congo), is when we were taken to see the air strip.
We were visiting a little mission hospital on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, near Uvira, and one day they said that we were going to walk out to the air strip. They didn't get many planes in, and each time they were expecting a plane in, they'd send out some folks to make sure that it was clear.
But this was just after the rainy season, and there hadn't been a plane for almost two months, and we couldn't find the air strip at first because there were full-sized trees growing all over it. We found the markers, and it was clear where it had been, but it looked like a full-grown forest.
As others have mentioned, saying that Africa has some of the poorest soil in the world is absurd. So does the USA. It's a little like saying "Australia has some of the youngest people in the world."
Apache guy, Open Source enthusiast, runner
it is much more environmentally friendly to let them starve to death rather than use "harmful" fertilizers and pesticides that improve crop yields.
lose != loose
White Americans really usually have no clue about the nature of Africa or it's problems. We almost seem born that way. But for my two cents the climate and insects in Africa would steer me to want to do indoor crop production in a very controlled and well contained environment. Raising everything in Africa seems to be way too challenging. Here we don't have elephants or even camels eating our gardens at night. We don't have to play tag with cobras while picking strawberries either. And Africa has insects that are just way too hard to deal with as well. Then if we get past all of that and we have a indoor fish farm and tomato factory what do we do with the huge number of workers in agriculture that are always left out when better production takes place. We did that in India. Given a few tractors, pesticides and fertilizer we displaced so many farm workers that we kicked off mass starvation as the now unemployed farm workers now had no money to buy food and the farmers exported the crops. Nothing is easy in Africa.
I've been following the story of terra preta (Portuguese: "Black Earth") in the Amazonian basin since I saw a program on how it seems to have enabled a pre-contact civilization there that numbered in the millions, because its amazing fertility allowed the inhabitants to get up to 3-4 crops a year. They know that the soil was manufactured, not natural, and that it regenerates if left alone. In Brazil they mine it from known deposits and sell it as potting soil to the coastal cities.
If they can figure out how to recreate terra preta in Africa, they can more than feed themselves. They can grow diverse crops, not just nutrient-poor ones that thrive in marginal soils. And if they can learn to stop over-grazing sahel, they can stop and reverse desertification.
As other posters have pointed out, most of Africa's problems are political in nature. They cannot resist spoiling the eden they live in. And, no, it's not all the fault of the big, bad European colonizers. Africa was a basket case long before that era. It is a tribal continent and always has been. But if, and it's a big 'if,' they can move past the internecine conflict they'd quickly be one of the wealthiest regions in the world. I sincerely hope they do, because there is an underlying vibrancy to Africa that can change the world, if allowed to flourish.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I know this is politically sensitive. I am NOT trying to be a troll. I just want to be practical.
The solution is: Birth Control.
More practically, the solution is alleviating the need to have a large family.
Look at the countries that are on the top of this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_birth_rate
This is REALLY simple folks. You want to have a MASSIVE famine? Step 1 is have a lot of babies.
Throwing food at them just extends their demise, giving them technology to build their own tools for survival is what will fix that. I'm sure there are tens of thousands of bright minds in Africa ready to be creative if they just go the means and the tools
Hydroponics; Forget about soil, you don't need it but if you do want to use a substrate than there's Rockwool (they use fibreglass insulation back in the day), Clay Pebbles aka Hydroton, Coco Fiber and Peat. A lot of the plants can be grown in Deep Water Culture, Aeroponics and Aquaponics which require no substrate at all. All you need is access to fresh water and design way to recapture the water that is transpired through the plants and recycle it. Maybe some kind of fully sealed greenhouse where water vapor is recaptured. Mind you you'd than have to supplement co2 but that can be done with burning propane/ng which also creates water vapour which could be captured.
From http://www.ucar.edu/learn/1_4_2_18t.htm
Plants transpire vast quantities of water - only one percent of all water a plant absorbs is used in photosynthesis; the rest is lost through transpiration. In one growing season, one corn plant transpires over 200 liters.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
1) Kill all the warlords,
2) Set up locals to own their own shops
3) set up infrastructure to be able to utilize local resource.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
have less babies...
less babies=less people=less demand for resources...
same can be said for the rest of the world
small problem - how to implement...
For one thing, Kenya's population has increased 10 times since the 1930's, thanks to the outsider's agricultural and transportation advances. Even the crop in question -- maize -- was brought by the Europeans from the Americas. So I'm not so sure that Africa was doing so great, by today's standards, before the outsiders came. The argument that "if we let things get bad enough, the leaders will be forced to do something" is proven incorrect by a look at history. Exactly how bad do things have to get?
The whole planet is on an unsustainable course, and we'll all end up living in a way that takes less out of it. But by sharing information we can have less waste on the one hand, and less hunger on the other.
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
Those displaced by the great depression didn't own the land they were using in the first place - so this wouldn't show up in your one-tenth rate but same sort of hurt/loss happened...
I don't know how this factor would affect the rate you mentioned.
There's nothing wrong with using technology and culture to increase productivity, but it might also be reasonable to consider where the limits on growth are - maybe start thinking about population and its limits.
You know how I know all these "We're So Concerned About Africa So Lets Spend Lots More Money There" elites aren't serious about helping Africans?
They've funded nothing in the area of smart drugs that might be a very inexpensive way to help Africa. Why the selective loss of cognitive function, oh thou Holier-Than-Thou-Intelligensia? Why can't you talk honestly about IQ when it comes to Africans? Is that because you enjoy the social status of appearing to nubile Harvard coeds and Harvard teaches its nubile coeds that it is Sin to think about Race and IQ?
Seastead this.
for our amusement. mwahahahahaha~
When you meddle, you become the sugar daddy and the other countries will either hate you for being rich and not being able to solve all their problems, or will hate you for controlling their countries even if your intentions are good.
Another writer expressed this better than I can.
Futurist Traditionalism
Get the african nations to stop fighting each other over tarot roots, and get them to ship dirt to each other.
Logic error, line 11: Impossible to satisfy conditions
Compilation aborted
It is the richest countries in the world, yet her riches are her problems. All the factions are fighting for her riches and want to control that. To fix the poverty issue, we need to make them wealthy first. That with a moral commitment and strong police force, will help.
I think we're addressing the wrong problem here.
Give a man a fish, you know?
If we keep feeding Africa they'll gain a representative expectation that we're going to feed them. Instead we need to convince them to:
1. Stop having sex so much. Sex makes babies. If you can't afford to feed a kid, don't insert your penis into a vagina.
2. Do stuff. You have to work a lot in order to have an economy. Sitting around chewing qat doesn't build community centers.
3. Don't pay the country's leaders very much or give them any real power. As long as there's lots of money and power in leadership people will campaign for the wrong reasons.
4. Don't reward bad behavior. If you provide foreign aid and the country's leadership and civilians don't do their part to rebuild, stop providing foreign aid.
Polytunnels are the way forward for arid or semi-arid regions: they're cheap, they protect the crops from harsh sun, maintain water levels, protect soil from erosion, etc
http://adreama.blogspot.com/2011/06/polytunnel-in-desert.html
Another tidbit of history: one of the several reasons the settlers of Texas fought for their independence was that the Mexican government forbid slavery, and was going to enforce that law in Texas. The settlers stated that without their slaves there was no way they could prosper...
Forbid US corporations to interfere in Africas local government and stop stealing their natural resources.
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
If Sally Struthers, and her let them eat cake attitude, is not part of the solution...
To be fertile, soil also needs micronutrients held by the clay and organic matter; see:
"Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach" by R.W. Widdowson
http://www.amazon.com/Towards-Holistic-Agriculture-Scientific-Approach/dp/0080342116
You can also see ideas about high nutrient gardening here:
http://www.squarefootgardening.com/
See also, for the natural way to get such soil:
http://www.kidsgeo.com/geology-for-kids/0052-volcanoes-and-plant-life.php
"While it is true that the immediate effect of volcanoes on plant life is death, the long term effect is very positive. Magma from the Earth’s core contains a rich source of nutrients that plants need to survive. Each time a volcano erupts, it brings these nutrients with it. When volcanoes explode, spreading ash around a large area, this ash acts as a fertilizer, enriching the soil. It is no surprise that the soil near volcanoes is among the richest and most fertile on Earth."
We can reproduce that effect by simply grinding up appropriate rocks:
http://www.remineralize.org/
"Remineralize the Earth is a nonprofit organization assisting the worldwide movement of remineralizing soils with finely ground rock dust, sea minerals and other natural and sustainable means to increase the growth, health, and nutrient value of all plant life. Adding minerals and trace elements is vital to the creation of fertile soils, healthy crops and forests, and is a key strategy to stabilize the climate."
See the pictures there for what vegetables are supposed to look like when raised on truly fertile soil.
I agree with you though that much energy that could go into solving problems gets ironically dissipated in fighting -- often just over the problems that energy otherwise could solve if applied imaginatively. See also the section on "What Are The Limits on Food Production?" In "The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment" by Julian Simon:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
An important reason Africa is such a mess politically is from the legacy of European colonization though (although that is not the only reason):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonisation_of_Africa
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
See my comment here: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2753171&cid=39536735
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Today on the radio, the results of a think tank about the economy and the aging population came out with the following:
In the USA, with outsourcing of work, companies need fewer and fewer people as the actual manufacturing will be done outside of the USA. The engineering work, by a select few people, will result in major employment outside of the USA and in large unemployment within.
The projections are: Today, 40 percent of unemployed and the retired are supported by 60 percent of the employed. By 2025, the figures will be reversed.
This will cause hardships for the large corporations, and some will merge with others as there will not be enough domestic consumers with money.
Moreover, the small entrepreneur will not be able to compete with the oligopoly of large corporations. Democracy will also suffer as lobbyists may have more say than citizens.
What can be done?
The radio report suggested that large corps have a responsibility to ensure that there will be domestic jobs to permit paying customers. That is only possible of there is local manufacturing. This means, curtailing outsourcing, or insisting at least, that half of the critical products be manufactured domestically (such as is done with cars).
This projection does worry me, but it will be a concern for the generation now in high school -- my kids and grandkids. (By the time it take effect, would I be alive to see it, as I am in my early 70's).
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I'm going to go with unsustainable so that it matches the world's population growth.
But seriously, who in their right mind asks how to feed a continent full of people like it's some town that just suffered flash-flooding?
Most nutritious food source known with modest water and soil nutrient requirements. Gotta love this drug war thing......
Everyone please read Genesis 1:29 and think about it a while........ http://net.bible.org/#!bible/Genesis+1:29
(might want to read the whole book actually, considering all that's happening in the world these days........)
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11