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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.
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.
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.
The rest of the world doesn't have unlimited food production capacity. Trying to import food for one billion people into Africa will mean other places in the world will need to produce one billion peoples' worth of new food. That's no small thing.
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
"allot" does not mean what you think it means.
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.
"Move to where the food is."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
we already do, the government pays farmers to burn their crops to keep prices artificially inflated so that the farming is actually profitable and people will do it.
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.
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.
Allot is allot when looking food for a few hundred million people and you aren't next to what amounts to a fresh water sea.
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?
I always thought this was dumb. If there is a known market someone is going to satisfy it. If food prices were aloud to go down, there would simply be fewer farmers not necessarily less food. The remaining farmers would increase production to satsify the demand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Education and Internet
They need books on farming. They lack practical knowledge of large scale farming methods.
What they don't need is the west screwing around and abusing them more. Just let them get on with it and figure it out for themselves.
It is estimated that Europe wastes around 50% of the food they produce, I assume the same is true for USA. People in the West eat much more meat than is needed. Limiting the amount of meat in the Western diet and limiting the wasted food will give us more than enough food to feed the world. Not that such a solution is easy.
Africa is the oldest human society on earth.
Why is it upon the rest of the world to figure out "How To Feed Africa"?
Because the western world is convinced it knows better than the rest of the world. It seems to be a mixture of feel good factor and arrogance.
The really wicked thing is that Gaddafi's plan for a united states of africa could have helped these people help themselves but the west ( US and France mostly ) had to screw that one up too.
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.'
It's nice to grow a little extra food, you know, just in case. It's not very nice to be dependent upon foreign nations for essential commodities. Consider oil shocks or when Russia shuts off the pipelines to Europe -- now imagine if food was being cut off instead.
That said, much of the government subsidy is trade brinkmanship between US and EU. It has the unintended consequence of making poor countries unable to compete in the world agriculture market.
A better system would probably be government "food banks", which would buy food futures from world market instead of national one. Agricultural lobby is never going to support that, and they have real clout.
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.
It is estimated that Europe wastes around 50% of the food they produce, I assume the same is true for USA. People in the West eat much more meat than is needed. Limiting the amount of meat in the Western diet and limiting the wasted food will give us more than enough food to feed the world. Not that such a solution is easy.
Then what? We ship the excess to Africa and their population increases until they are starving again?
Your plan will work short term but only short term. It won't help these people to help themselves.
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?
Sounds reasonable but what has the average African got to sell that he could practically make some profit from? The Oil is all owned by corrupt governments.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
allot /lt/ Show Spelled[uh-lot]
verb (used with object), -lotted, -lotting.
1. to divide or distribute by share or portion; distribute or parcel out; apportion: to allot the available farmland among the settlers.
2. to appropriate for a special purpose: to allot money for a park.
3. to assign as a portion; set apart; dedicate.
I'd guess you meant "a lot", as in much.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
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.
It's not about capacity, it's about latency. Look at what happened when China decided to reduce exports of rare earth metals. The rest of the world has massive stocks of these in the ground, but it will take about 2 years to reopen the mines and ramp up production to meet the demand. With food, the time is typically about a year, maybe six months. The point of farm subsidies is to ensure that your population won't starve if you are suddenly unable to import food.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Speak for yourselves on the toxic waste subject: Europeans are not allowed to export toxic waste out of Europe.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
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.
So you trade other goods and use some of the profits to buy in food and some to improve your own land for growing in the future. Independence doesn't have to come all at once but you have to start somewhere. Besides, lots of richer countries don't produce nearly enough food to feed themselves without relying on some imports.
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 ----
Why is fertilizer an "unsustainable farming method"?
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
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.
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.
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.
Africa is the oldest human society on earth.
Why is it upon the rest of the world to figure out "How To Feed Africa"?
Grandma is the oldest person in my house. Why should it be up to me to feed her?
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
Not just that, such plans will be (and have been) detrimental to local farmers. Same problem as with a lot of the other free shit we've shipped there.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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 :)
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
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
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."
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.
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
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...
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
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