There are not many socialists who do not enjoy David Attenborough's nature documentaries but his talent in that area of expertise does not, however, qualify him as an expert on the economics of food production and population demographics.
He recently has warned that humans have become a “plague on the Earth...It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change. It’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde....Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now...We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia – that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves – and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a co-ordinated view about the planet, it’s going to get worse and worse.”
The truth is that all those claims are actually wrong. It is helpful to set aside any preconceived notions about population and food. For example let us examine his claim about Ethiopia not being able to feed itself because too many people not being able to support themselves. Ethiopia's regions are as distinct as, say, Arizona and Minnesota. According to Oxfam International, Ethiopia now supports the export of fruit, vegetables, and flowers worth $220 million a year. Malthusians like Attenborough argue that population growth inevitably leads to hunger, as the resource "pie" is divided into ever smaller slices. The most obvious flaw in this theory is that technology has thus far allowed the size of the pie to increase. The pie as a whole is big enough for everyone, but the slices for the poor continue to shrink. Africans suffer from hunger and thirst because they are victims of ruthless dictatorships! The Zenawi’s regime has transferred at least 3,619,509 hectares of land to foreign investors. Does it make sense to hand out the country’s most arable land to “foreign investors” to produce food for export and ensure food security in other countries when Ethiopians are dying from starvation?
Ethiopia for most of the past three decades has survived on millions tonnes of donated food and millions of dollars in cash. It has received more emergency support than any other African nation in that time. Its population is increasing by 2m every year, yet over the past 10 years, its net agricultural production has steadily declined. Even in good years, some 5m people need food aid just to survive.Food aid creates dependence on handouts and shifts focus away from improving agricultural practices to increase local food supplies. Ethiopia exemplifies the consequences of giving a starving man a fish instead of teaching him to catch his own. This year the U.S. will give more than $800 million to Ethiopia: $460 million for food, $350 million for HIV/AIDS treatment — and just $7 million for agricultural development. Why bother with development when shortfalls are met by aid? Ethiopian farmers can't compete with free food, so they stop trying. Over time, there's a loss of key skills, and a country that doesn't have to feed itself soon becomes a country that can't. "We import huge amounts of grain from abroad. So this will inevitably affect the internal production and markets," said the Deputy Prime Minister Addisu Legesse. When foreign aid lands, local prices collapse, and farmers who have managed to produce a surplus find their crop is virtually worthless. They have no money to pay for seed or fertiliser for the following year.
All the people of the world could move into the state of Texas and form a giant city with about the same population density as some large cities today (6 billion population divided by 262,000 square miles of land in Texas equals about 23,000 per square mile). Inner London contains 21,000 per square mile and Paris has 50,000. In 1992, the population of Hong Kong City was approximately 247,501 per square mile, while in New York City it was 11,480 per square mile, and in Houston 7,512. If the entire population of the world were put into the land area of Texas, each person would have an area equal to the floor space of a typical U.S. home and the population density of Texas would be about the same as Paris.
Having fewer or no children may be easy for a middle-class person in the United States, where raising children is expensive and most of us expect no economic return from our kids as they grow older. In fact, one could argue that having children in the American context is economically irrational. The situation is quite different in the Horn of Africa. It's true that many families desire access to modern contraceptives, and filling this unmet need is important. However, for many others, children are crucial sources of farm labour or important wage earners who help sustain the family. Children also act as the old-age social security system for their parents. For these families, having fewer children is not an easy decision. Families in this region will have fewer children when it makes economic sense to do so. As we have seen over time and throughout the world, the average family size shrinks when economies develop and expectations for offspring change.
Africa is often said to be overpopulated. But it is quite easy to debunk this myth. The continent is a spacious and rich land-mass that can support its population well into the foreseeable future. Africa’s population is currently 1 billion covering a vast landmass of 11,668,599 sq miles. Ethiopia’s landmass is 471,775 sq miles, five times the size of Britain’s 94,226 sq miles. Yet Britain’s population of 62 million is three-quarters that of Ethiopia’s at 83 million. As for Somalia, it is 2.6 times the size of Britain but has a population of only 9 million. Sudan and South Sudan provide an even more fascinating comparison. Whilst both countries are 10 times the size of Britain, they support a population of 45 million – about 70 per cent the size of Britain. In fact the Sudans have a landmass equal to that of India which is populated by 1.22 billion people i.e. more than the population of all of Africa! Britain is one-tenth the size of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) which has a landmass of 905,562 sq miles. In other words, the DRC is about ten times the size of Britain but with a population of 71 million, just nine million more than the population of the latter. Uganda’s landmass at 91,135 sq miles is comparable to Britain’s, yet with a population of only 33 million. Similarly, Ghana’s landmass of 92,099 sq miles makes it approximately equal to the size of Britain. Ghana is however populated by only 25 million people, far less than one-half Britain’s population. Angola and South Africa are about 4-5 times the size of Britain but with one-fifth and four-fifths respectively of the latter’s population.
Many parts of Africa are not densely populated, including famine-struck Somalia. The population density of Somalia is about 13 persons per square km, whereas that of the US state of Oklahoma is 21.1. The western part of Oklahoma is also semi-arid, is suffering from a serious drought, and was the poster child for the 1930s Dust Bowl. Furthermore, if we take into account differing levels of consumption, with the average American consuming about 28 times as much as the average Somali in a normal year, then Oklahoma's population density of 21.1 persons per square km equates to that of 591 Somalis. Despite the fact that Oklahoma's per capita impact on the landscape is more than 45 times that of Somalia (when accounting for population density and consumption levels), we don't talk about overpopulation in Oklahoma. This is because, in spite of the drought and the collapse of agriculture, there is no famine in Oklahoma. In contrast, the presence of famine in the Horn of Africa leads many to assume that too many people is a key part of the problem. Why is it that we often isolate population growth as the key environmental problem in the poorest regions of the world? In 2010 Somalia sold more than 4 million cattle in the Arab region. Even today, the hungry southern part of the country exports sugar and rice to neighboring countries.
Nigeria has about 79 million hectares of arable land (less than half of which is under cultivation); and is blessed with highly diversified ecological conditions suitable for the production of a wide range of agricultural products. The country has 267 billion cubic meters of surface water; 57.9 billion cubic meters of underground water; an annual rainfall range of 300 mm to 400 mm; and potential irrigable area of 3.14 million hectares (seven per cent of which is utilised). Yet it cannot feed itself. Why?
On the question of resource, its availability or lack of it, and therefore its ability or inability to support the African population - another component of Africa’s ‘over-population’ fallacy - well over 50 per cent of Uganda’s arable land, some of the richest in Africa, remains uncultivated. Were Uganda to expand its current food production significantly, not only would it be completely self-sufficient, but it would be able to feed all the countries contiguous to its territory without difficulty. Just about a quarter of the potential arable land of Africa is being cultivated presently. Even here, an increasingly high proportion of the cultivated area is assigned to so-called cash-crops (cocoa, coffee, tea, groundnut, sisal, cut flowers, etc.) for export. As for the remaining 75 per cent of Africa’s uncultivated land, this represents 66 per cent of the entire world’s potential. This vast acreage of rich farmlands with capacity to optimally support the food needs of generations of African peoples indefinitely. In addition, the famous fish industry in Senegal, Angola, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana for instance, Botswana’s rich cattle farms, West Africa’s yam and plantain belts extending from southern Cameroon to the Casamance province of Senegal, the continent’s rich rice production fields, etc. The current economic situation demonstrates that if the acreage devoted to cultivation is expanded and expressly targeted to address Africa’s own internal consumption needs rather than land use directed to the calamitous waste of cash-crop production for export there need be no food shortages. It is an inexcusable tragedy that any African child, woman, or man could go without food in the light of the staggering endowment of resources in Africa.
Africa can feed not just itself but the world. The continent, which is blessed with good weather and geographical conditions, has the capacity to produce food to feed its inhabitants, all things being equal. Only 4 percent of the cultivated land in sub-Saharan Africa is currently equipped for irrigation. This is the claim made by Kanayo Nwanze, the president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development. In the 1970s, the World Health Organisation announced that we could feed a world population seven times its then size, and as late as 1995 admitted that Africa could feed a population six times its present size were western farming techniques to be introduced there. There are 10 to 12 million hectares of land with agricultural potential in Congo, according to government data, but only 2 percent is farmed. Africa constitutes a spacious, rich and arable landmass that can support its population, which is still one of the world’s least densely populated and distributed, into the indefinite future.
Arable land occupies just 11 per cent of the Earth’s surface at present. Between 1982 and 2003, national parks grew from nine million square kilometres to 19million, 12.5 per cent of the earth’s surface – or more than the combined land of China and South-East Asia. In the US more than one billion acres of agricultural land is lying fallow. In Europe, farmers have received payments to not grow food - ‘set-aside’ (although the practice has effectively been suspended since 2008, after food prices rose sharply that year). Meanwhile, developing countries are starting to act to turn once-infertile land into farmland. In Brazil, a huge area of dry savannah called the cerrado has been converted into productive land. The amount of land we have available for food is flexible.
“The potential to increase agricultural production in Africa is enormous,” the World Bank said in a report.
“Yields for many crops are a fraction of what farmers elsewhere in the world are achieving and output could easily increase two to three times if farmers were to use updated seeds and technologies. Too often borders get in the way of getting food to homes and communities which are struggling with too little to eat," said Makhtar Diop, World Bank vice-president for Africa. By all rights, Africa could be a breadbasket for the world. Its fertile land, lengthy rivers, and farm labor tempt investors from around the globe.
The food business seeks to pile up profits and not to eliminate hunger. In fact the more hungry we are, the more profit they make. It is abundantly clear that the factors which have contributed to determining the very poor quality of life of Africa’s population presently have to do with the non-use, partial use, or the gross misuse of the continent’s resources year in, year out has been thanks to those nation-states whose strategic resources are mostly used to support foreign capitalists and advance the interests of the groupings of the local overseers - the national government and its capitalists - that exist solely to police the dire lot of the average African. African farmers do need support. They desperately need decent roads and access to consumers, processing equipment to add value to their own diverse farm produce, storage and drying facilities to prevent post-harvest losses, and basic amenities such as schools and health centres and water wells to improve rural lives, so that farming communities can thrive. But foreign investors are not in business to provide any of these things. They are not in Africa to help impoverished African farmers improve their own farms, or to combat hunger. They are far more likely to destroy the family farm in Africa and aggravate hunger, all in the name of economies of scale, a global corporate food chain, and profits. The speculators, bankers and investors who had a hand in inflating food prices and bringing the global economy to its knees are now consolidating control of global food production and of land.
Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world's food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,200 calories a day. That doesn't even count many other commonly eaten foods - vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs - enough to make most people fat! The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. The late Roger Revelle former director of the Harvard Center for Population Studies estimated that Africa, Asia and Latin America alone, simply by using water more efficiently, could feed 35 billion to 40 billion people - seven to eight times the current world population - and that assumes no change in technology.The former director of the Agricultural Economic Institute at Oxford University, Colin Clark, has estimated that if the world's farmers were to use the best methods of farming available, an American diet could be provided for 35.1 billion people. If a Japanese-style diet were provided, this number would be trebled.
"To understand why people go hungry you must stop thinking about food as something farmers grow for others to eat, and begin thinking about it as something companies produce for other people to buy...The problem, of course, is that people who don’t have enough money to buy food (and more than one billion people earn less than $1.00 a day), simply don’t count in the food equation." - Richard H. Robbins, Readings on Poverty, Hunger, and Economic Development.
David Attenborough repeats hoary old tales of too many mouths to feed instead of directing attention to the real cause of hunger - capitalism
He recently has warned that humans have become a “plague on the Earth...It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change. It’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde....Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now...We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia – that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves – and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a co-ordinated view about the planet, it’s going to get worse and worse.”
The truth is that all those claims are actually wrong. It is helpful to set aside any preconceived notions about population and food. For example let us examine his claim about Ethiopia not being able to feed itself because too many people not being able to support themselves. Ethiopia's regions are as distinct as, say, Arizona and Minnesota. According to Oxfam International, Ethiopia now supports the export of fruit, vegetables, and flowers worth $220 million a year. Malthusians like Attenborough argue that population growth inevitably leads to hunger, as the resource "pie" is divided into ever smaller slices. The most obvious flaw in this theory is that technology has thus far allowed the size of the pie to increase. The pie as a whole is big enough for everyone, but the slices for the poor continue to shrink. Africans suffer from hunger and thirst because they are victims of ruthless dictatorships! The Zenawi’s regime has transferred at least 3,619,509 hectares of land to foreign investors. Does it make sense to hand out the country’s most arable land to “foreign investors” to produce food for export and ensure food security in other countries when Ethiopians are dying from starvation?
Ethiopia for most of the past three decades has survived on millions tonnes of donated food and millions of dollars in cash. It has received more emergency support than any other African nation in that time. Its population is increasing by 2m every year, yet over the past 10 years, its net agricultural production has steadily declined. Even in good years, some 5m people need food aid just to survive.Food aid creates dependence on handouts and shifts focus away from improving agricultural practices to increase local food supplies. Ethiopia exemplifies the consequences of giving a starving man a fish instead of teaching him to catch his own. This year the U.S. will give more than $800 million to Ethiopia: $460 million for food, $350 million for HIV/AIDS treatment — and just $7 million for agricultural development. Why bother with development when shortfalls are met by aid? Ethiopian farmers can't compete with free food, so they stop trying. Over time, there's a loss of key skills, and a country that doesn't have to feed itself soon becomes a country that can't. "We import huge amounts of grain from abroad. So this will inevitably affect the internal production and markets," said the Deputy Prime Minister Addisu Legesse. When foreign aid lands, local prices collapse, and farmers who have managed to produce a surplus find their crop is virtually worthless. They have no money to pay for seed or fertiliser for the following year.
All the people of the world could move into the state of Texas and form a giant city with about the same population density as some large cities today (6 billion population divided by 262,000 square miles of land in Texas equals about 23,000 per square mile). Inner London contains 21,000 per square mile and Paris has 50,000. In 1992, the population of Hong Kong City was approximately 247,501 per square mile, while in New York City it was 11,480 per square mile, and in Houston 7,512. If the entire population of the world were put into the land area of Texas, each person would have an area equal to the floor space of a typical U.S. home and the population density of Texas would be about the same as Paris.
Having fewer or no children may be easy for a middle-class person in the United States, where raising children is expensive and most of us expect no economic return from our kids as they grow older. In fact, one could argue that having children in the American context is economically irrational. The situation is quite different in the Horn of Africa. It's true that many families desire access to modern contraceptives, and filling this unmet need is important. However, for many others, children are crucial sources of farm labour or important wage earners who help sustain the family. Children also act as the old-age social security system for their parents. For these families, having fewer children is not an easy decision. Families in this region will have fewer children when it makes economic sense to do so. As we have seen over time and throughout the world, the average family size shrinks when economies develop and expectations for offspring change.
Africa is often said to be overpopulated. But it is quite easy to debunk this myth. The continent is a spacious and rich land-mass that can support its population well into the foreseeable future. Africa’s population is currently 1 billion covering a vast landmass of 11,668,599 sq miles. Ethiopia’s landmass is 471,775 sq miles, five times the size of Britain’s 94,226 sq miles. Yet Britain’s population of 62 million is three-quarters that of Ethiopia’s at 83 million. As for Somalia, it is 2.6 times the size of Britain but has a population of only 9 million. Sudan and South Sudan provide an even more fascinating comparison. Whilst both countries are 10 times the size of Britain, they support a population of 45 million – about 70 per cent the size of Britain. In fact the Sudans have a landmass equal to that of India which is populated by 1.22 billion people i.e. more than the population of all of Africa! Britain is one-tenth the size of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) which has a landmass of 905,562 sq miles. In other words, the DRC is about ten times the size of Britain but with a population of 71 million, just nine million more than the population of the latter. Uganda’s landmass at 91,135 sq miles is comparable to Britain’s, yet with a population of only 33 million. Similarly, Ghana’s landmass of 92,099 sq miles makes it approximately equal to the size of Britain. Ghana is however populated by only 25 million people, far less than one-half Britain’s population. Angola and South Africa are about 4-5 times the size of Britain but with one-fifth and four-fifths respectively of the latter’s population.
Many parts of Africa are not densely populated, including famine-struck Somalia. The population density of Somalia is about 13 persons per square km, whereas that of the US state of Oklahoma is 21.1. The western part of Oklahoma is also semi-arid, is suffering from a serious drought, and was the poster child for the 1930s Dust Bowl. Furthermore, if we take into account differing levels of consumption, with the average American consuming about 28 times as much as the average Somali in a normal year, then Oklahoma's population density of 21.1 persons per square km equates to that of 591 Somalis. Despite the fact that Oklahoma's per capita impact on the landscape is more than 45 times that of Somalia (when accounting for population density and consumption levels), we don't talk about overpopulation in Oklahoma. This is because, in spite of the drought and the collapse of agriculture, there is no famine in Oklahoma. In contrast, the presence of famine in the Horn of Africa leads many to assume that too many people is a key part of the problem. Why is it that we often isolate population growth as the key environmental problem in the poorest regions of the world? In 2010 Somalia sold more than 4 million cattle in the Arab region. Even today, the hungry southern part of the country exports sugar and rice to neighboring countries.
Nigeria has about 79 million hectares of arable land (less than half of which is under cultivation); and is blessed with highly diversified ecological conditions suitable for the production of a wide range of agricultural products. The country has 267 billion cubic meters of surface water; 57.9 billion cubic meters of underground water; an annual rainfall range of 300 mm to 400 mm; and potential irrigable area of 3.14 million hectares (seven per cent of which is utilised). Yet it cannot feed itself. Why?
On the question of resource, its availability or lack of it, and therefore its ability or inability to support the African population - another component of Africa’s ‘over-population’ fallacy - well over 50 per cent of Uganda’s arable land, some of the richest in Africa, remains uncultivated. Were Uganda to expand its current food production significantly, not only would it be completely self-sufficient, but it would be able to feed all the countries contiguous to its territory without difficulty. Just about a quarter of the potential arable land of Africa is being cultivated presently. Even here, an increasingly high proportion of the cultivated area is assigned to so-called cash-crops (cocoa, coffee, tea, groundnut, sisal, cut flowers, etc.) for export. As for the remaining 75 per cent of Africa’s uncultivated land, this represents 66 per cent of the entire world’s potential. This vast acreage of rich farmlands with capacity to optimally support the food needs of generations of African peoples indefinitely. In addition, the famous fish industry in Senegal, Angola, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana for instance, Botswana’s rich cattle farms, West Africa’s yam and plantain belts extending from southern Cameroon to the Casamance province of Senegal, the continent’s rich rice production fields, etc. The current economic situation demonstrates that if the acreage devoted to cultivation is expanded and expressly targeted to address Africa’s own internal consumption needs rather than land use directed to the calamitous waste of cash-crop production for export there need be no food shortages. It is an inexcusable tragedy that any African child, woman, or man could go without food in the light of the staggering endowment of resources in Africa.
Africa can feed not just itself but the world. The continent, which is blessed with good weather and geographical conditions, has the capacity to produce food to feed its inhabitants, all things being equal. Only 4 percent of the cultivated land in sub-Saharan Africa is currently equipped for irrigation. This is the claim made by Kanayo Nwanze, the president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development. In the 1970s, the World Health Organisation announced that we could feed a world population seven times its then size, and as late as 1995 admitted that Africa could feed a population six times its present size were western farming techniques to be introduced there. There are 10 to 12 million hectares of land with agricultural potential in Congo, according to government data, but only 2 percent is farmed. Africa constitutes a spacious, rich and arable landmass that can support its population, which is still one of the world’s least densely populated and distributed, into the indefinite future.
Arable land occupies just 11 per cent of the Earth’s surface at present. Between 1982 and 2003, national parks grew from nine million square kilometres to 19million, 12.5 per cent of the earth’s surface – or more than the combined land of China and South-East Asia. In the US more than one billion acres of agricultural land is lying fallow. In Europe, farmers have received payments to not grow food - ‘set-aside’ (although the practice has effectively been suspended since 2008, after food prices rose sharply that year). Meanwhile, developing countries are starting to act to turn once-infertile land into farmland. In Brazil, a huge area of dry savannah called the cerrado has been converted into productive land. The amount of land we have available for food is flexible.
“The potential to increase agricultural production in Africa is enormous,” the World Bank said in a report.
“Yields for many crops are a fraction of what farmers elsewhere in the world are achieving and output could easily increase two to three times if farmers were to use updated seeds and technologies. Too often borders get in the way of getting food to homes and communities which are struggling with too little to eat," said Makhtar Diop, World Bank vice-president for Africa. By all rights, Africa could be a breadbasket for the world. Its fertile land, lengthy rivers, and farm labor tempt investors from around the globe.
The food business seeks to pile up profits and not to eliminate hunger. In fact the more hungry we are, the more profit they make. It is abundantly clear that the factors which have contributed to determining the very poor quality of life of Africa’s population presently have to do with the non-use, partial use, or the gross misuse of the continent’s resources year in, year out has been thanks to those nation-states whose strategic resources are mostly used to support foreign capitalists and advance the interests of the groupings of the local overseers - the national government and its capitalists - that exist solely to police the dire lot of the average African. African farmers do need support. They desperately need decent roads and access to consumers, processing equipment to add value to their own diverse farm produce, storage and drying facilities to prevent post-harvest losses, and basic amenities such as schools and health centres and water wells to improve rural lives, so that farming communities can thrive. But foreign investors are not in business to provide any of these things. They are not in Africa to help impoverished African farmers improve their own farms, or to combat hunger. They are far more likely to destroy the family farm in Africa and aggravate hunger, all in the name of economies of scale, a global corporate food chain, and profits. The speculators, bankers and investors who had a hand in inflating food prices and bringing the global economy to its knees are now consolidating control of global food production and of land.
Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world's food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,200 calories a day. That doesn't even count many other commonly eaten foods - vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs - enough to make most people fat! The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. The late Roger Revelle former director of the Harvard Center for Population Studies estimated that Africa, Asia and Latin America alone, simply by using water more efficiently, could feed 35 billion to 40 billion people - seven to eight times the current world population - and that assumes no change in technology.The former director of the Agricultural Economic Institute at Oxford University, Colin Clark, has estimated that if the world's farmers were to use the best methods of farming available, an American diet could be provided for 35.1 billion people. If a Japanese-style diet were provided, this number would be trebled.
"To understand why people go hungry you must stop thinking about food as something farmers grow for others to eat, and begin thinking about it as something companies produce for other people to buy...The problem, of course, is that people who don’t have enough money to buy food (and more than one billion people earn less than $1.00 a day), simply don’t count in the food equation." - Richard H. Robbins, Readings on Poverty, Hunger, and Economic Development.
David Attenborough repeats hoary old tales of too many mouths to feed instead of directing attention to the real cause of hunger - capitalism
Under the Common Agricultural Policy farmers get paid on average 200 euros a hectare in direct payments for doing little more than owning land.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21171472