Starving Africa
BBC – ‘Barren future’ for Africa’s soil
Africa’s farmland is rapidly becoming barren and incapable of sustaining the continent’s already hungry population, according to a report.
A World Connected – Norman Borlaug: A Billion Lives Saved (from a year ago)
One would think that saving a billion lives in developing countries, winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and being regarded in many parts of the world as among the leading Americans of this age would be enough to make someone a household name within America.
Hah. But anyway:
…he has chosen to work outside the media spotlight, engaged in the rather unglamorous enterprise of improving crop yields in parts of the world that receive little attention in the Western media, except to report sensational disasters or scandals.
But, an even more significant and disturbing reason is… “Borlaug’s mission — to cause the environment to produce significantly more food — has come to be seen, at least by some securely affluent commentators, as perhaps better left undone. More food sustains human population growth, which they see as antithetical to the natural world.”…
According to David Seckler, the director of the International Irrigation Management Institute, “The environmental community in the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations not to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa.” As a result, high-profile yet ‘image-sensitive’ organizations such as The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the World Bank, once sponsors of Borlaug’s work, have begun disassociating themselves from it.
Support for the International Maize and Wheat Center — where Borlaug helped to develop the high-yield, low-pesticide dwarf wheat upon which a substantial portion of the world’s population now depends for sustenance — has also dwindled. The net result, according to Easterbrook, is that “although Borlaug’s achievements are arguably the greatest that Ford or Rockefeller has ever funded, both foundations have retreated from the last effort of Borlaug’s long life: the attempt to bring high-yield agriculture to Africa.”
And there you have it. The BBC weeps, people starve, and the Seattle Zoo puts up a bunch of material about “education” to control “population growth” to protect wildlife habitat because farmland is spreading.
March 31st, 2006 at 12:41 am
Borlaug still alive! I read about him in the Sixties! They should drop the “arguably” in “achievements are arguably the greatest”. Ain’t no argument about it.
March 31st, 2006 at 2:21 am
There aren’t many countries with a lower population density than Canada. Australia shares that honour with Namibia, Botswana and Mauritania.
Over-population is not a problem in Africa. I didn’t see one African country with a population density greater than any European country (excluding Russia) in the list.
March 31st, 2006 at 2:25 am
(and excluding Sweden and Norway, and other snowy countries).
March 31st, 2006 at 9:22 am
Right, which is why it’s all such a joke. And man, the Seattle Zoo made me mighty uncomfortable, cuz in the African Safari section (which is directly opposite from the entrance) they’ve put up a little model African village, with some little thatched huts the kids can play in, and a model school room with a big school map of Africa rolled down and on a huge chalkboard all this writing on how we’re going to preserve habitat. But it’s such a big installment, and since the Safari fields are so big you have to walk around them to see all the zebras and giraffes so from that one spot all you see are these African huts and a lot of grass, maybe one or two gazelles, so it’s very much “Come to the zoo and see how the funny little Africans live” which I told Peter made me feel very uncomfortable, but then figured since we weren’t British we didn’t have to really worry about the residual guilt from the Empire, but still.
But yeah, there’s no one there, yet they’re all starving. And those rose farms I linked to a couple months ago? They’re draining that one lake. They can’t get a brake. And here’s this guy that could have solved his problems but a bunch of socialist environmentalist intellectual types who think what’s better for the Africans is to keep them starving because then they’ll still get to live in those sweet little huts that we can put in Seattle zoos to show how wonderful their native culture is, all without actually asking the Africans what they think. And then we get lectured to by Rock Stars for not caring enough.
Bah.
March 31st, 2006 at 9:30 am
We just prefer them picturesque. Part of the fauna.
March 31st, 2006 at 2:21 pm
Man first developed in Africa, but has since ceased to do so there. The zoo could put a plaque with that (P.J.) quote just outside the pretend village.
March 31st, 2006 at 2:32 pm
No, I think that would be making a point rather worth making. They’d surely prefer to take the opposite tack.