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small farmers in Africa, relying on their own land and family labor and using few costly inputs such as chemical fertilizers, are more efficient producers than plantations.
This is the key to local development, not the endless attempts to persuade us that we need to encourage plantation culture (in favour of top-end interests). It's to be hoped small farmers with know-how won't all be driven by often impossible market conditions to leave the land and congregate hopelessly in megapolises. Current high food prices may have the right effect on that -- but policy and investment decisions are needed too.
Its not universal ... again as partly recounted in the article. Some nations, like Mali, are so densely populated that substantial increases in agricultural productivity will still leave them in a near-Malthusian state.
And roving bands of soldiers financed by alluvial diamonds, as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are worse than plagues of locusts for agricultural development. And no story about an "agricultural revolution" in Africa can ever be a complete success story unless the breadbasket of Central Africa is one of the success stories.
I'd say the core anchors for political stability in sub-Saharan Africa are South Africa, the DRC, and Nigeria. One way to understand the strong "project" focus among economics working in economic development in the continent in the 80's and 90's is in terms of the elephant in the room ... given that all three anchors were instead spreading instability, the only solace was to try to get some project up and running and providing some marginal benefit as things fell apart.
So until the DRC gets on track with agricultural development, all of the good news is provisional. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Incidentally, I may be getting involved in a conservation planning exercise in the Congo Basin, but sometimes it as myself "why bother". I mean, I am pretty sure we can adapt our boreal-based method produce some interesting results that could be the starting point for a systematic implementation by a regional authority. But then it occurs to me that any given effort in Africa can be undone by 500 guys with automatic rifles, of which no shortage, as you point out.
In that case, "why bother" is because if it gets rolling, then individual instances can get knocked out, but not each seed that has been planted.
And if it is the classical USAID model where its a one-off, non-reproducing, dependent-on-imported inputs project, then in that case, not bothering would be the ideal approach. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
I'll write something up about this project if and when, and would value any remarks you have at that time. It'll be a completely new thing for me, working in (or at least, on) Africa.
Singing: look, look, look to the rainbow...
<Prepares Garlic, religious siverware and sharpened sticks> ;-) Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
In practice, as with the boreal, we'd probably want to divide up the region into ecologically meaning chunks...I have no idea how to approach that for the Congo, which is what the grad project will mostly be about...that and determining the appropriate ecological representation criteria. In the boreal, we use a number of remote/sensed attributes (categorical land cover glasses from GLC 2000, and some continuous measures of productivity, soil moisture deficits, and riparianicity). Some of these may make no sense in the region, but I am no Tropical Ecologist. I guess my interest in this project is to see if the components of the abstract system we have developed for northern forests can be shown to have functional analogues in a completely different system.
There will be a lot to learn. I am leaning to the north and west, as I find The Gabon really intriguing...the Land that People Forget (To Screw Up)? And if this gets off the ground, I promise to put up a short diary about the problem.
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