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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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
They were the breadbasket of Africa in the 70s, until the blacks took over and chased all the white farmers out.
Surely there must be a few 'blacks' there that saw the kind of mechanized farming the 'whites' were performing and learnt how to do it. We are not talking degrees in agriculture here, just practical knowledge of how to farm. Why are the smart, enthusiastic, hard workers getting anywhere? Don't try and tell me they don't exist.
There were blacks who knew how to farm efficiently, however these farm labourers were chased out along with the white farmers who owned the farms. The land didn't go to black folk who knew how to farm, it went to the so called "war veterans", aka people who backed the right political side. They also parcelled up the land into smaller parts. The result of all this was subsistence farming.
The problem wasn't just that the system for taking over land was corrupt, but that it was completely mismanaged. Strangely if the party elite had actually taken their corruption far enough, parcelled out whole farms amongst themselves and kept on the existing labourers it would probably still be a breadbasket. Alternatively they could have been patient and taken the land over but kept the white farmers on as tenants and then used the money to fund decent projects for the country (though realistically they would have skimmed off the top from this too).