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Ask Slashdot: How To Feed Africa?

Posted by Soulskill on from the infinite-gnutella dept.

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."

11 of 592 comments (clear)

  1. Stopped reading at... by gentryx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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
    1. Re:Stopped reading at... by wierd_w · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Newsflash. Rainforest is terrible soil.

      Newsflash. Africa is suffering desertification, and the grasslands are mostly deep sand.

      Here is what africa needs to do:

      Healthy, fertile arable soil is about 50 parts clay, 20 parts sand, and 30 parts organic sponge. The types of clay in the 50% clay figure are important.

      Parts of africa are loaded with clay and organic sponge. Parts of africa are loaded with sand.

      Get the african nations to stop fighting each other over tarot roots, and get them to ship dirt to each other.

      We have the technology to do this. It isn't hard. The benefits greatly outweigh the costs over time. Chemical fertilizers do not solve the soil nutrition and arability problems. Pouring miracle grow on sand won't help you for long.

      Trade big shipments of river silt (organic sponge), heavy clay, and washed sand. Plow it into unproductive fields that are suffering deficits.

      Watch shit fucking grow.

    2. Re:Stopped reading at... by wierd_w · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The problem with quick easy fixes, is that people use them, then abuse them, and treat them like permanent ones.

      We nerds in IT should be well aware of this by now. How many "temporary fixes" have your employers twisted into permanent ones?

      Same thing here. There is money to be made. LOTS of money to be made, by *NOT* properly improving the soil. Shafting starving vllagers for miracle grow while the soil's mineral content dries up, leaving them with soil that won't even grow weeds in the rainy season is *VERY* profitable.

      That is why it must be avoided, and done right, if you really want the african people to not suffer.

    3. Re:Stopped reading at... by hairyfish · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Get the african nations to stop fighting each other

      Impossible. I was to going make some comments about the situation there but everything I wrote sounded racist. How do you address the fact that seems to be a clear pattern of behaviour in that continent that doesn't look like it will ever be solved while the locals are in charge?

    4. Re:Stopped reading at... by eggstasy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You don't get it. Imagine setting up a factory in a place without a stable power or water supply, decent roads, large enough ports, with a corrupt dictatorship, tribal warlords, gigantic wildlife and weird tropical diseases.
      It's slowly getting better in some places, but Africa is not ours to fix. We could build them roads, but how do we get our money back, tolls? They don't have enough cars for that. We could lend them money to build roads but it would be squandered by corrupt politicians who would default on the debt.
      It really has to be solved by them (think Arab Spring), unless you want to colonize the place again and develop it for your own people to use.
      Like I said, it's getting better in Angola, for instance, and all they had to do was to stop fighting their silly guerrillas and get a stable government. They're attracting lots of international investment nowadays.

    5. Re:Stopped reading at... by mdarksbane · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Aid money is destroying Africa. There's no need to work on a functioning social or government organizations when you can stay in power perfectly well just off of what's getting shipped to you from the West.

      Most government budgets in Africa treat aid as a core part of their income - some as much as 50%. They don't use it to cover short term shortfalls, they expand spending to use everything. And these are the governments that are actually using the money and not just pocketing it.

      "We" (we being the west) cannot fix Africa short of turning it into east Carolina. They need to come up with their own functional modes of government and funding, whatever those are, on their own. The people have no chance when their local tinpot dictators are being propped up by someone with 100x their power and economy.

  2. For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid! by little1973 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid! by Solandri · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In addition to that article, I'd add that there's a strong inverse correlation between economic development and population growth. The vast majority of population growth is in developing countries. Industrialized nations have close to zero and in some cases negative population growth. Food, clean water, and medicinal aid to developing countries may be well-intentioned, but it's just exacerbating the problem. Families which would've stopped after x babies continue to have more offspring because of the availability of food and water. Africans who would've died of starvation or disease survive, adding to a population which isn't sustainable with the infrastructure that's present there.

      We're tackling the problem backwards. Instead of treating the symptoms, we need to be treating the problem. First and foremost, we need to be helping African nations build an economic base. Help the countries there establish stable governments conducive to economic growth, develop educational structures to provide a skilled workforce, and provide economic assistance to help them start up their own businesses and trade. Once you get the economic ball rolling, they will build their own fresh water wells and distribution system; they will build their own farms and irrigation canals; they will build their own hospitals and train their own doctors. Doing it the way we're doing - providing food, water, and medicine for free - is just increasing their population while killing what economies they have. We're stunting their economic growth while simultaneously moving the goalpost of economic self-sustainability further away.

  3. How about we just stop "helping" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:the bigger problem by dwywit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why "troll"? Abortion should be safe, legal, and these days EXTREMELY RARE. If all our children were given adequate access to education and when of a suitable age, access to birth control, I think abortion rates (and over-population) would become less and less.
     
    One man's opinion, obviously.

    --
    They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
  5. For Mozambique ... by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's time to change your government

    Mozambique should not be a poor country - look at the resources your country has

    Mozambique is poor because of the mismanagement of the government

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !