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Edited on Fri Jul-17-09 10:19 AM by HamdenRice
It's somewhat distressing to read the constant malthusian explanations and predictions of hunger and famine. No one who specializes in these areas -- agricultural economists, development analysts, farmers, etc. -- believes this stuff. Malthusianism has all the intellectual respect among the people who study this as creationism has among paleontologists.
Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his life's work explaining, among other things, famine and hunger as caused by economic forces rather than by lack of food production.
There are an endless number of diverse reasons why people go hungry in any particular region at any particular time. There is no single reason such as lack of land. The world is not anywhere near running out of land to grow food -- although the environmental cost of growing more food on more land is unacceptable to most reasonable people. But give yourself a reality check: I've read countless times here about Africans starving because of population pressure, but do you ever stop to juxtapose that with the massive amounts of megafauna still existing in Africa or the scale of the wildlife parks of East Africa?
Africa is the "hungriest" continent. It is also the one with the most countries with low population densities, empty lands and Rhode Island sized game parks.
Food production is much more a function of how people are organized to produce food on land, not how much land there is, and on what they bring to the task (capital, technology), and what their incentives are (markets, prices).
Just to show you how counter-intuitive these problems can be, let me summarize the observations of Goran Hyden, who wrote a ground breaking book on Tanzania in the early 1980s. Hyden had lived in East Africa for many years, spoke the local languages fluently and spent many years just talking to African farmers about their problems and perspectives. He was socialist who was originally from Sweden (Norway?). He wrote a book as a result called, "Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania," about that country's development efforts, and it was so influential the Ford Foundation hired him as their official representative to east Africa, specializing in development, for a few years.
Many parts of Tanzania were blessed with abundant land and relatively low population density. Yet food production was low and the government (which was quite benevolent by African standards at the time -- headed by Julius Nyerere) found it very difficult to increase production.
Hyden noted that in many areas, because there is enough land for everyone -- it is generally distributed by local authorities to farm families for free -- every family is a small scale farm family. The average family is quite cash poor, but has land.
The problem with that situation is that everyone is basically doing the same work. No one is landless. That means that all the labor that a family can muster to work its farm has to come from within the family. There are no people to hire as farmworkers if the family wants to expand production. The number of able bodied family members is an absolute limit on production (it's not land because they can get as much land as they can justify asking for), and that limit is usually pretty low. Because production is low, people remain too poor to buy capital goods, such as the simple human powered machines that are so common in poor rural parts of Asia.
Also, because everyone does the same thing, no one is specialized. Because no one specializes, there is no trade between farm families, or between various parts of the country. Because there is no specialization, there are no efficiencies. Everyone is trying to produce the same thing -- a little maize, some vegetables and milk products from animals. While this usually suffices to feed the farm families, the products are too monotonous to interest many urban dwellers, so there is little farm to town trade.
Also, because there is abundant land, people spread out to use it. Because Tanzania is a poor country, there is little money for roads, which means that even if a farmer somehow produces a surplus, there is no way to get it to the market at a decent price. So they don't even bother trying.
Looking back at the political history of these areas, Hyden found that many were stateless -- that is, they were politically organized in small chiefdoms. Because the chiefdoms were small and land was abundant, the "ruling class" of chiefs had no power to extract rent or taxes from the peasants. Hyden called Africa's peasant class "uncaptured" because unlike the peasant classes of Europe and Asia, they did not have to provide anything to their rulers in exchange for land. But that also meant that there was no class accumulating riches in the form of rent and taxes to fund collective projects like irrigation. Perhaps more importantly, there was no collection of rent and taxes to force peasants to produce surpluses. Contrary to local politics in Asia and Europe, political leaders, the chiefs, had to "bribe" peasants to stick around and boost the leaders' prestige by "giving" out land, which the chiefs themselves barely controlled. Some have speculated that Africa's modern states are so corrupt and weak because of the pre-colonial heritage of rulers bribing followers rather than followers paying rent and taxes to leaders; rulers become the centers of enormous informal chaotic flows of bribes rather than rational collectors of surpluses.
I'm not saying that this is why there is hunger in Africa, but it is why there was hunger and low food production in one part of Tanzania in the 70s when Hyden was doing his field research.
You can repeat, however, findings of idiosyncratic causes of poverty and hunger across much of Africa. There are places with serious land shortages -- Ethiopia, Malawi, etc. -- but what you generally find are perplexing complexes of problems that often have nothing to do with absolute resource scarcity.
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