The saddest part about this is, Africa could easily be the breadbasket of the world, given enough political stability, education and time.

[www.associatedcontent.com]

You know Annalee, if I didn't know better I'd say you were pretty excited for the Dystopic Apocolypse.

The US supplies roughly half the world's food - 3 billion people eat what we grow - and of course now we're not growing nearly as much food as we used to. We're growing corn to be used for ethanol so that guilty white liberal suburbanites can feel good about themselves for "Giving something back to the earth," and, as usual, these same guilty white liberal suburbanites don't seem to have thought this through at all, and the lack of foresight has already resulted in the confirmed deaths of tens of thousands of people around the world, probably more.

Or so the BBC and National Public Radio and the New York Times have led me to believe.

Remember...Tuesday is Soylent Green day.

all that can be said is:

Global Warming -meet- Food Shortage

((darfur/ethiopia/rwanda - you ain't seen nothing yet))

PS - Dear Quick: How could Africa be the breadbasket of the world? More than half the continent is desert, and half of what remains is steppe and scrub, unsuitable for anything more than subsistence farming.

Georege W Bush, white liberal suburbanite

@Garrison Dean, King Awesome: As opposed to the Utopic Apocalypse?

They're rioting??? We're the one's who have to pay $.00 a gallon for our SUVs!!

All jokes aside, if science wasn't so political, it would be nice to see some salt water purifiers and genetic cattle made available to these nations t ohelp feed the masses.

that should have read " four dollars a gallon"

@CD3s-of-the-future:
You could say the same thing about California, yet they somehow manage :).

With modern farming methods and good soil management (and that means education, not a bunch of brand new farming equipment, though modern equipment becomes necessary at large farms) Africa could be food-sustainable in 5 years, and exporting to the entire world in 10.
[www.unep.org]
Africa has approximately 632 million hectares of arable land. Compare that to only 179,000 hectares of permanantly farmed, arable land in the US. [www.nationmaster.com]
Africa could easily be providing the rest of the world with food. Unfortunately, all the civil wars and backwards thinking have put a clamp on that continent.

A very long time. Civil War and man-made famine have been ravaging Somalia's economy for decades now, and the recent shocks to fuel and staple food prices caused by the oil speculation and the shift in corn use to bio-fuel production have simply been too much for an already shattered system to take.

This seems to be the perfect time to point out that if we hadn't removed our troops from the UN peacekeeping mission in Somalia during the 90s, this likely wouldn't be happening now. When republicans rant and rave about democrats "politicizing" the Iraq debate, remember that it was they who helped damn Somalia to this hell just to score some short-term political victory over Clinton. Actions have consequences, and the bigger the stage for those actions, the more terrible their outcomes. This is a lesson U.S. citizens need to stop forgetting.

@blumnm: Where are you getting gas for free? Some of us are paying upwards of $4.00 a gallon. Please let us in on your source.

OK, Zeframe Cochrane; hurry up and invent that damn warp drive so the Earth can be united and finally work together to fix all these damn resource shortages.

@CD3s-of-the-future:

You have it all figured out. Somalia was always a paradise while we were running our cars on a pure gasoline diet.
I blame my whiteness, liberalism and the fact that I live in the suburbs. Thanks for clearing things up for me, I'm changing my evil ways...

I wonder who will go hungry first? The people with the oil resources or the people with the fertile crop land?
Payback is a real bitch. Take that OPEC.

@Git Em SteveDave: It should have read "four". sorry. Although I am fortunate enough to have a company gas card, and havent bought fuel in over 6 years. Everyday prices go up, it's like I'm getting a raise :)

I would rather see our troops helping these nations out rather than policing the middle east.

So... I should be growing rice in my backyard? How can I capitalize on this?

How could Africa be the breadbasket of the world?

Well, one way is though genetically adapted crops, but there's far too much pig ignorance in this world for that to ever be accepted.

Or you could just introduce the same revolutions in farming and fertilization that the rest of the world has enjoyed for a century.

Did you know elephant meat is pretty good? Instead of declaring elephants protected, and watching them dwindle anyway, they should declare them a food animal and ranch them. You'd have more elephants then you've ever seen before.

[www.congocookbook.com]

But, no, we'll just stick to the same old failed hand-wringing ideologies like a bunch of mental cases.

hmmm...
overpopulation..
food shortage...
unmanageable violence...
negligible opportunities...
limited access to water/sanitation...
ravaged by disease...

what does that leave?

ahhh, yes - locusts. Where are the swarms of locusts - we can't have complete and utter apocalypse without the swarms...

(((pardon my evil thoughts - I will go and sit in the corner and think about what i have done...)))

CD3s-of-the-future: Its forgivable that you'd have such an understanding of Africa's potential for agricultural production, given that all we ever hear about the continent is starvation and all we ever talk about geographically is the Sahara. However, most of Africa is quite lush and productive and, during bouts of effective management, most African nations not only feed themselves but provide a surplus. That's one of the sadder aspects of both Somalia and Zimbabwe currently; both are facing terribly famines and both, at one time or another, net exporters of foodstuffs.

Other examples can be found in far South Africa, and historically, the areas bordering the Sahara have supported large populations through agriculture and herding. If anything, subsistence agriculture isn't the only viable choice, but the cause of most of the problems for the region agriculturally. Subsistence agriculture typically relies on methods like slash-and-burn that, in the end, sap the soil and increase desertification.

At the moment though, the main problem for most of Africa is instability. Farmers can't plant crops when soldiers are killing each other in their fields.

@GiltProto:
yeah - i would to hate to be living in a third-world country right about now - or for the foreseeable future...

((let's just hope that they don't get nukes - *wink*wink* -> i am looking at you, iran))

@designguybrown: you forgot incompetent governments and commodities speculators.

@RAHfanboy: Fair enough. But I guess I'm reffereing to one where some semblance of society exists as opposed to full on Thunderdome. More Children Of Men.

This is not a just world, it's just a world. And although we would love to be the Saviors, we can not save people from themselves. Starvation seems like a very bad way to die. People have to stop breeding like rats.

I personally like the taste of fresh burning tire, so I am fine with the whole situation.

@Priam:

That's good.

I just set your car on fire.

As far as the ethanol, it is a quick fix. Stop driving all together. Use the bus, bike, or at least start carpooling. Also, a great way to fight food shortages is , if you can, tear out your lawn, usually an invasive species, and grow food.

They've also attributed the increase in biofuel consumption to the current food shortages. My farmers are growing crops that they can sell to biofuel producers.

Kinison said it best...

YOU LIVE IN A DESERT! YOU LIVE IN A FU@KING DESERT! NOTHING GROWS OUT HERE!
YOU SEE THIS? HUH? THIS IS SAND.
KNOW WHAT IT'S GONNA BE A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW? IT'S GONNA BE SAND!

Pull it up on google maps, nothing but beige and gray for miles. [maps.google.com]

@Jeff-Minor: Education would be a great way to try, first on the use of contraceptives then on farming techniques.

@Jeff-Minor: Ron Paul and the other Libertarians must be looking at Somalia and thinking, "That is so awesome! A society without any government or taxes or viable paper currency, I wish I was there!"

The most productive agricultural lands are in countries with massive public works projects (e.g. dams, irrigation districts, railroads and highways across America).

@RAHfanboy: Grant Morrison's The INVISIBLES is an example of a Utopic Apocalypse.

@AngryLagomorph: I agree with you about the problem being political instability in Africa. That's why the Green Revolution never hit there; the ginormous monocultures and need for regular shipments of inorganic fertilizer and "improved" seed don't work when everyone's killing each other.

BUT soils in sub-Saharan Africa are inherently poor, because they're so old that most of the nutrients have leached away anyway, plus subsistence agriculture has "mined" away most of the remaining nutrients. So African farmers face the problem of rebuilding fertility basically from scratch, which is much harder than maintaining existing fertility. Then add in the fact that it is super fossil-fuel-intensive to make inorganic fertilizer, plus it's incredibly expensive to transport anything because roads suck and population density is so low, and the government is usually corrupt and/or killing people.

(I just finished a term paper on this very topic. I'm an environmental science and public policy major... I have strong feelings about it.)

I love how George W handing out subsidies to his agro-business buddies to grow inedible corn for biofuel is a result of liberal white gilt.

I also hear that Al Gore Invented Global Warming so he could have something to talk about in his power point presentations.

@Gann:

Unfortunately, that fails the 'real people' test:

People are generally greedy, lazy, and stupid.

@Jeff-Minor: Wow, yet another idiot sounding off about 'overpopulation'. The problem isn't overpopulation, genius, it's the lifestyle of those already living. Get a clue, man, and read the article next time.

@mikecap: So is the Book of Revelation--the original apocalypse.

@Bob_of_Mars:

of course it's over-population...

if we just removed every person from the world except for the inhabitants of America - there would be enough Cheetos, Esplanades, Riding Mowers, Disney products, and Swimming Pool toys for Everyone.

Har-har *giggle* - har --- burn
(we first-worlders suck)

@Bob_of_Mars: Exactly! The problems we face aren't insurmountable, they're just hamstrung by social/political conflicts, the lack of lateral applications of various technologies, etc...

Although I'm just as in love with dystopian nightmares as Annalee might appear to be, I still believe that tech will eventually overcome this challenge.

Remember...the Soylent Red should always have that hoof-like after taste.

@tamoko: Or is it "hoof-lite"? Who knows... just eat your Soylent and ignore the CCTV's that keep mpnitoring you.

@braak: Braak, you started using the Chilean volcano, electrical discharge picture as your image, awesome!

I think you may be overstating the lushness and verdancy of Africa a bit, folks. Firstly, the Sahara is more than 3 million square miles, secondly the Kalahari desert in the south is also massively huge, and, as global warming buffs are fond of telling us for the last 30 years, both deserts are expanding wildly. Granted, the Congo is very lush and green, but it's a tropical rain forest, and if the Amazon has taught us anything, it's that cutting down rain forests to build farms is a bad thing. A very bad thing.

I note that everyone is talking about political instability and economic problems and saying "Gee, wouldn't it be great if these things didn't exist? Then we wouldn't have these problems!" Swell, but that's not really the situation in other parts of the world that are starving, and pointing out that an entire continent has been shafted by history isn't actually going to fix the problem.

Bottom line, as I see it: Africa, The Philipines, Southeast Asia, et al, were able to survive - not flourish, but at least survive - when we were giving them our spare food at a discount. Now that we have no spare fuel, people are starving.

Yes, centuries of British and French colonial policies may have loaded the gun, but it was trendy US Biofuels that pulled the trigger.

Comment on The Food Riots Are Getting Worse The Economist had a great feature on this a week or two ago. Some highlights: -There already have been riots and protests in many cities all over the world, There was a list of them in the article, I think there were 7 or 8 listed and this was as of a week or two ago. -An estimated 20% of the current problem can be attributed to grains being diverted to biofuels. -Causes also include: --Growing middle class in China and India (all of a sudden many many people are above the poverty line and can actually buy food, increasing demand and driving prices up) --Supply increases in farming always lag due to the long lead-time of growing crops --We're about 15 years behind the technology advancement curve for farming since the US and other first-world countries have been subsidising farmers and dumping excess supply on world markets for that time period, driving down int'l prices and making it counterproductive for anyone to invest in better farming technology (that includes machinery, irrigation, bio-engineering seeds, etc). --Protectionist policies are further wreaking havoc with natural supply and demand (Phillipines and Vietnam, both major suppliers of rice to the world markets, have recently institued export restrictions because they're worried about not having enough for their own people... of course, this causes an unnatural shortage of rice on the world markets). From other sources (NPR and I forget where else I've seen/heard it reported), poverty-stricken areas are resorting to desparate measures. Haiti, for example, has had a recent phenomenon where street vendors are selling mud patties laced with a bit of sugar and oil for flavor, since people cannot afford actual food.

@Gann: I'm all for the utopian salvation that advanced technolgoy might provide. But I think we're going to have to give up some of our tribal behavior: religion and culture if we want to improve our nature. Education, the kind that a harsh reality provides, seems of little use. I'm not sure what good books will do, or medicine, or food, if the warlord over the hill is going to murder you when he damn well feels like it. So then you have to police the area in order to help, and then it makes us a target...No good deed goes unpunished.

@Jeff-Minor: "I'll keep it short and sweet -- Family. Religion. Friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business." I guess that Jeff-Minor's philosophy on humanity succeeding too?

Gonna take too long to read all these comments. Who won?

The problem is "globalization" i.e. the process of putting poor countries to work to make products and food for the West, while leaving the people poor in the countries poor.

Despite the obtuseness of the global conglomerates, this only works until the people are unable to work and eat, and then riot. You can then support military dictatorships (we do that already) to keep the people in check, but they haven't figure out a way to do that in the West (not completely), where they have also taken advantage of the most of the populace, a populace that can no longer afford to buy the products being made by the poor countries.

What happens then?

It would be so lovely to be able to dig up Milton Friedman and ask him, but you know people like this... they're theories ostensibly amount to "fuck you, fuck a million people, if it helps me."

@twophrasebark: Uh, do ever go into stores and buy things? Pay a mechanic to work on your car? Eat at a restaurant?

All those things are called "trade," wherein money is exchanged for goods and services. Everyone benefits from trade because it allows people to specialize in things they are good at (even if only marginally) and earn more money that way.

Globalization removes trade barriers, which allows everyone to benefit from this "trade." So the poor gain in wealth and are able to buy things like shampoo and more food (hundreds of millions have been lifted out of grinding poverty in the past decade).

Food shortages have triggered riots. These shortages can almost always be traced back trade barriers. There's food in Haiti, but it's rotting on the docks because Western governments want to stop drug shipments. There's rice in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, but those governments are imposing export limits to keep rice prices artificially low at home (which reduces food supplies in the long run).

You want to help millions of people? Push for freer trade.

I think it is a mistake to generalize from what is happening in one African country to the whole of Africa, let alone the whole world.

Africans can feed themselves and it doesn't require gee whiz GMO crops or other science fictional whiz bang. All they need is some f***ing stability and some debt relief.

And perhaps some redrawn borders. The borders the colonial powers left behind make no ethnic, linguistic or cultural sense. No wonder stability and nation building are so stymied in this continent. If they ask for help, we should give it but, always, they get to be in charge.

Then again, the naive idealist inside me keeps pulling for Africa. They'll work out somehow. Despite the seemingly insurmountable odds stacked against Africa. Africa never stands still!

Anyway, I'm steering off the point of this post. It's not really food riots in developing countries that I'm worried about. Wake me when there are food riots in downtown Seattle.

"@Sihanouk-s-Poodle:

Globalization removes trade barriers, which allows everyone to benefit from this "trade." So the poor gain in wealth and are able to buy things like shampoo and more food (hundreds of millions have been lifted out of grinding poverty in the past decade)

This is completely wrong, but I suspect you believe this is true. It is not. Everyone does not benefit from the "free trade." The West does. The poor countries remained mired in relative poverty.

I'd encourage you to watch the film Darwin's Nightmare to see "free trade" in action in Tanzania. The planes bring in arms and take out millions of tons of food, while the people are starving to death.

We bring in the same system into these countries that we have here - one of abject dispartity between classes and benefit for the few. The system is designed to benefit the conglomerates, not the people.

I don't know you, so I'm not sure if you're of an open mind. But I can assure you while free trade sounds like a great idea, it's about as much like true free trade as the Soviet Union was communist. The reality is nothing even remotely resembling free trade.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the process for converting this corn to bio-diesel CONSUME FOSSIL FUELS ANYWAY? So essentially we're earmarking vast swaths of crops as inedible, and letting tons of people die, for an 'environmental' initiative that isn't actually going to help our environmental situation?

Looks like we're gearing up to have our apocalypse right on time. 2012 here we come!

@Sihanouk-s-Poodle: BWAHAHA! Thanks for the laugh.

@AngryLagomorph: It is important to note that the subsistence agricultural methods described did not have this overall effect on the region during the centuries of use prior to most of recorded history. Subsistence farming methods native to particular areas are not likely to be the primary causes of environmental problems in the area. There may be additional pressures on subsistence farmers which encourage them to overuse the land- for example, the amount of land available for cultivation may be shrunk if someone else buys up land traditionally used by the public, if another group of people begins farming the land, if farmers are displaced from their original land and sent to farm land not suited to their agricultural practices, etc.
@Jeff-Minor: When you say we're going to have to give up our religion and culture, who did you mean by we? It is frankly impossible to have human society without a culture of some sort, so it sort of feels like you're suggesting that some groups of people give up their culture and adopt someone else culture. Given that Western nations have a long history of attempting to replace existing cultures with Western culture, I'm a little concerned by this statement.@

href="#c5605939">Sihanouk-s-Poodle: Okay, your swipe at Libertarians made me laugh, but I gotta point out that twophrasebark's not knocking the concept of trade itself. But the only reason the current economic and political system is messed up is NOT because trade isn't free enough. If all the trade barriers in the world got knocked down, there would still be food riots and starvation because there would still be people who don't have the money to purchase food. This is a result of globalization as it is practiced (not thought of) because many corporations exploit large populations of unemployed and/or landless people in order to get an easily manipulatable, cheap workforce. If there are problems, these corporations threaten to move and/or involve the government in coercing the population to remain compliant. Free trade and globalization advocates often dismiss or ignore these critiques in order to push for politcal measures that usually amount to "free trade when it benefits the people who hired me to lobby for them, closed trade when it hurts their profits."

@napthia9: I should have said We will have to give up aspects of our culture, just to make it a more general statement. For instance, we might want to give up the idea that infidels need to be killed, or that our way is the only way.

@