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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."

24 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 Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Interesting

      All of this reminds me of the bogus, misplaced effort of the Toms Shoes variety. You know - the guy who's margin on cheaply made shoes is so high, he donates a pair for African charity, for every pair your daughter buys in the Westfield Centre.

      Put your factory there! Employ Africans, and use the charity-profits to train local entreperneurship to become your next competitor! Teach a man to fish, fer godsake!

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    4. Re:Stopped reading at... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      I agree. I grew up in Africa. The problem is the governments, or rather dictators. For example, Zimbabwe (cough), COULD feed the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. It has superbly rich soil, enough water, good rainfall. Yet the silly West have to prop it up as its 10 million inmates are starving. "aid" money hardly ever reaches its intended audience - 99.99% gets gobbled up by government officials, bribes, etc. It is simple the way of Africa. They think differently, no matter how much BS the Greens and Liberals tell you - people in the 3rd world do NOT think or act like YOU.

    5. Re:Stopped reading at... by ProfessionalCookie · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Better yet, get us internet at a speed and price competitive with the US.

      Knowledge is power, we can't even get sufficient 10th, 11th and 12th grade school books this year. (Pemba, Mozambique).

    6. 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?

    7. 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.

    8. Re:Stopped reading at... by JasterBobaMereel · · Score: 5, Funny

      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 - Florida?

      --
      Puteulanus fenestra mortis
    9. Re:Stopped reading at... by makomk · · Score: 5, Interesting

      A lot of Africa has poor soil, and a lot of the more fertile areas are rainforests which we wouldn't want to advocate burning to the ground to turn into farmland.

      The rainforests apparently have really bad soil too actually - there's a thin, slightly more fertile surface layer that's bound in place by the trees and that's it, and once the trees are gone the soil rapidly becomes useless for farming.

    10. Re:Stopped reading at... by TapeCutter · · Score: 5, Interesting

      OTOH: China turned the loess plataue from a moonscape into one of the largest apple producving regions in the world in under 20yrs. The area is about the size of France and was previuously known as "the most erroded place on Earth". Changing the locals from goat hearders using state land into government sanctioned property owners was a key ingredient to the success, as was the Chinese government's desire to stop millions of tons of silt filling up the three gorges dam. However one of my favorite good news stories about rehabilitating an area is a ted talk on How to grow a rainforest.

      So my take home from these examples is that it CAN be done if the problem is viewed in a scientific manner with a heavy emphasis on imporoving the material lives of the locals by assisting them with high tech analysis on how to optimize and maintain the benifits of their natural resources given their real world technological and infrastructure constraints. Giving peseants a chunk of land on the proviso they stick to the basic tenents of the project is a fantastic motivator.

      Interestingly the area was once a natural 'paradise' where Chinese civilization first arose ~10kya, but by the middle ages it was a man made wasteland that forced the main population to largely abandon the area to goat hearders who have inadvertently kept it from regenerating for the last 1000yrs. All they really had to do was plant trees in the right places and stop mowing every new shoot down with hungry goats but when people have been doing the same thing for 1000yrs it's very difficult to convince them that there might be a better way to use what they have.

      Be they good or bad (cultural revolution), such long term socio-economic projects cannot be done without a stable government, which is a huge problem in Africa. In the case of the loess plateau it was a joint project between China and the IMF, the $500M was well spent from what I've seen.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    11. Re:Stopped reading at... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      That's what has always baffled me about slavery. When you look at scale, raw numbers or treatment of slaves, the Arabs were far, far worse than the worst Americans ever were. Well, not arabs, really. Muslims. Slavery was never committed on the scale muslims did it before, and the scrapping of the legal concept of slavery from most (not all) muslim countries' law very nearly totally eradicated slavery, of course only in a superficial sense. In real terms, slavery exists in lots of moder muslim-majority nations (in the form of decades-long "employment" contracts that can't be broken under law by the employee and can be sold between employers. These contracts don't allow the "employee" to choose his/her own housing either, for example). Furthermore, slavery is a fundamental and "holy" part of islam, and those who believe that countries like Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Morocco don't have slavery need to visit them. When it comes to the word "slavery", that has been stricken from their laws (not entirely, as for example it is referenced in the laws about adultery : you are free to rape female slaves, maim them or do whatever you want to them in muslim countries), in practice, what little economy there is essentially runs on slavery*.

      * that does not, in all cases, means the "slaves" are unhappy about that, at all. Like in the Roman Empire, the only way to be a tradesman in parts of Saudi Arabia is to be bound by such a contract. If not, you can't be a programmer, or architect. But of course, the people working outside in the hot sun are the same. Not all slaves are unhappy, and in fact even under the very ill treated slaves many appreciate the certainty that being one of a huge number of slaves provides, which is really another way of saying they've got zero alternatives and are aware of this. Yes, really. I know how it sounds, but really, you should talk to a few of these people. Make sure that you don't have any muslims, especially not local muslims, nearby when you do this in a place like Dubai or Abu Dhabi.

      (though the question can be made very general indeed. Islam means living according to sharia, and that's pretty much the only thing it means. How can this abomination possibly be allowed ? Are you free to impose slavery ? Free to kill for religious reasons ? Free to have racist purchasing habits for "halal" meat ? Free to advocate religious war, support it financially ? Apparently the modern answer is yes. WTF ?)

      There's also the tiny matter that the entirety of Northern Africa has been stolen from it's original inhabitants, just like America (and just like Asia Minor and it's wide surroundings, Indonesia and several other places). There's one difference, I guess, unlike native Americans and imported African slaves, most native peoples who lived in Northern Africa are extinct because of the contest and the constant toll of slavery, and have no descendants.

      And of course, when it comes to America's slaves ... Americans, nor Dutchmen, ever kidnapped people from native African villages. They bought them off of muslims, and exported them. The great schism of protestantism occured at least partly because the Pope thought this cheating. Although it's not like protestants were ever really in favor of it, but they did tolerate it for a while. The issue is that Catholics never tolerated it, and thorougly made sure of this (by regularly executing ship's captains who had bought slaves of muslims in Northern Africa and didn't spontaneously free them, for example in Nice).

      Furthermore, slavery was imposed upon most of Africa for the better part of a millenium by muslims (not necessarily arabs, or perhaps better, not arabs everywhere), far, far longer than anywhere else on the planet.

      And lastly, nobody in America seriously considers reintroducing slavery, when there's plenty of muslims bent on doing exactly that. Even if you put aside the people who "just want to live by sharia" and re-introduce slavery that way (plenty of those ev

    12. 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. Grow stuff that is appropriate for the area. by Gordonjcp · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Re:I KNOW!! by mug+funky · · Score: 5, Funny

    you're crazy. they have oil. it's obvious intervention is required.

  6. Aquaponics by Essef · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:the bigger problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Exponential population growth, contrary to popular belief, is actually a myth. Birth control is actually popular with the people who use it (women). If people can afford it and are educated as to it's existence it works great without any sort of oppressive scheme. See for example, India's rapidly declining birthrate: graph as an example of how population is not as bad as you might think. In my personal opinion, the biggest issue for the environment is intellectual property and microregulations that impede alternative energy development.

  8. 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
  9. 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 !
  10. Permaculturalists are already there doing this by KaiLoi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  11. Re:Why don't you ask Rhodesia? by realxmp · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).