Dieoff starting in Africa

[Totally_Baffled]

Biff,

Reference your point regarding the dumping of subsidised western food surpluses onto the global market (which in turn stuffs up African farmers because of the artificially low price).

Is this now less of an issue given that food prices are now at record highs? Is there any sign of improvement in agriculture in Africa now that this barrier is no longer there?

Just interested.

[biffvernon]

No, I think it is very much an issue, never more so. Some 80% of the world grain trade is controlled by just four companies. They act effectively in collusion with the policies of the USA government and the EU. High food prices kill people without the money to pay and don't help ex-peasants who have been pushed to the cities. There will be some winners amongst the small farmers but vast areas of land have been and are being bought up by corporates, and recently by China, so the money generated by high food prices is being sucked straight out of the Third World countries.

It's all terribly complicated but I don't think there's ever been a time when wealth has been shifting from the already poor to the already rich as swiftly it is today.

[JavaScriptDonkey]

No, I think it is very much an issue, never more so. Some 80% of the world grain trade is controlled by just four companies. They act effectively in collusion with the policies of the USA government and the EU. High food prices kill people without the money to pay and don't help ex-peasants who have been pushed to the cities. There will be some winners amongst the small farmers but vast areas of land have been and are being bought up by corporates, and recently by China, so the money generated by high food prices is being sucked straight out of the Third World countries.

It's all terribly complicated but I don't think there's ever been a time when wealth has been shifting from the already poor to the already rich as swiftly it is today.

What also kills people is starvation when their crops fail due to drought, disease and pests. The big 4 control the market on bio-engineered crops, ensuring timely rotation and continued development to avoid the possibility of sudden mass failure.

I don't recall anyone passing a law saying that they have to sell land or buy Monsanto or BASF's products.

[DominicJ]

JSD
Have you not read tales of an economic hitman?

They do, The CIA secretly makes every farmer in africa buy his crops from Monstanto.

And all their governments didnt want to borrow loads of money and spend it on guns to kill each other, the Americans forced them too.....

[biffvernon]

What also kills people is starvation when their crops fail due to drought, disease and pests.

That's kind of obvious at first glance. At second glance one starts wondering why the current drought in the south-west of USA will not result in starvation. Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Texas, Ethiopia, Somalia, Western Australia, all pretty similar climates.

Blaming the weather is too easy.

[Ludwig]

What also kills people is starvation when their crops fail due to drought, disease and pests.

That's kind of obvious at first glance. At second glance one starts wondering why the current drought in the south-west of USA will not result in starvation.

That's obvious too. They're rich enough to import food from elsewhere.

[Ludwig]

JSD
Have you not read tales of an economic hitman?

They do, The CIA secretly makes every farmer in africa buy his crops from Monstanto.

And presumably this means they're forced to buy sterile seeds, to keep them in thrall to Monsanto indefinitely.

Of course much of Africa is a political basket case, but the West has exploited this fact rather than tried to do anything to rectify it.

[Ludwig]

Why the big difference, Biff? Why is everywhere that is ruled by black people a hell-hole of corruption, violence and poverty? Why does the same not apply to non-black countries which were once colonies?

I'll say this for you UE, you're not scared of subverting some stereotypes of hippies :\

Well, I look like a hippy, smoke like a hippy, have the metaphysical beliefs of a hippy and a hippy's love of the natural world. But I'm also a realist, and the hippy revolution failed the year I was born.

Yes, but to be honest your argument that "Africa gets what Africa deserves" leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. The people suffering are not the corrupt politicians, and as for the sin of having too many children, well these are uneducated people who've had it drilled into them that their children are their livelihood.

I agree that not much can be done by giving aid to Africa, but I don't think that means one should treat its suffering flippantly.

Your statements about "black people" are clearly meant to be provocative, and I'm not sure what to make of them.

[biffvernon]

What also kills people is starvation when their crops fail due to drought, disease and pests.

That's kind of obvious at first glance. At second glance one starts wondering why the current drought in the south-west of USA will not result in starvation.

That's obvious too. They're rich enough to import food from elsewhere.

Ah-ha! So it's not drought that causes starvation but poverty. I suspected as much.

[JavaScriptDonkey]

What also kills people is starvation when their crops fail due to drought, disease and pests.

That's kind of obvious at first glance. At second glance one starts wondering why the current drought in the south-west of USA will not result in starvation. Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Texas, Ethiopia, Somalia, Western Australia, all pretty similar climates.

Blaming the weather is too easy.

I think the climates are only similar on the surface. Isn't the US grain belt sitting on a massive (and rapidly depleting) aquifer than places like Western Australia and Somalia lack?

I think the problem with Africa is the limiting scope of the often tribal outlook of its leaders. Whether that culture has been supported beyond its due date by Western corporations funding different groups by following a divide and conquer strategy I'll leave to others to speculate about.

[Totally_Baffled]

No, I think it is very much an issue, never more so. Some 80% of the world grain trade is controlled by just four companies. They act effectively in collusion with the policies of the USA government and the EU. High food prices kill people without the money to pay and don't help ex-peasants who have been pushed to the cities. There will be some winners amongst the small farmers but vast areas of land have been and are being bought up by corporates, and recently by China, so the money generated by high food prices is being sucked straight out of the Third World countries.

It's all terribly complicated but I don't think there's ever been a time when wealth has been shifting from the already poor to the already rich as swiftly it is today.

Wow, I didn't know that - thanks Biff.

What a mess!

[UndercoverElephant]

I'll say this for you UE, you're not scared of subverting some stereotypes of hippies :\

Well, I look like a hippy, smoke like a hippy, have the metaphysical beliefs of a hippy and a hippy's love of the natural world. But I'm also a realist, and the hippy revolution failed the year I was born.

Yes, but to be honest your argument that "Africa gets what Africa deserves" leaves a very sour taste in my mouth.

Well, that's not quite what I said.

The people suffering are not the corrupt politicians, and as for the sin of having too many children, well these are uneducated people who've had it drilled into them that their children are their livelihood.

I agree that not much can be done by giving aid to Africa, but I don't think that means one should treat its suffering flippantly.

Your statements about "black people" are clearly meant to be provocative, and I'm not sure what to make of them.

They are supposed to be statements of fact. I am merely pointing out what I see happening in the world. I am not trying to be flippant or underplay the relevance of any individual human suffering. But I think Biff's outright refusal to lay any of the blame on the people of Africa for the suffering of Africans is not realistic.

[UndercoverElephant]

Ludwig,

I don't like political correctness much. It's just another sort of lying as far as I'm concerned, and the claim that all humans are born equal is about as true as "size doesn't matter." Size does matter, even though this will make many of us feel uncomfortable.

This is not a claim about ethics or rights: I believe that we must treat all humans as equals under the law, and under God. I believe this because I don't think there is any acceptable or workable alternative. Each individual human, at least in an ideal world, deserves an equal chance in life as any other. In the real world this isn't possible, but it remains as an ideal.

This does not mean that all humans are born equal. Another widely-repeated myth is "all humans are so closely related, in terms of genetics, that there is no significant differences between them" i.e. there is really only one sort of human - modern human. This is political-correctness gone mad, not least because people were saying this long before most of the relevant scientific evidence was available - i.e. before the human genome project, and whilst we still had only a vague idea about human evolution and the history of human species on Earth. It is a claim motivated by dislike of racism, embarrassment about the history of slavery and an attempt to provide what looks like a firm scientific basis for the ethical stance I outlined in the previous paragraph, but it never had much to do with any actual science.

The reality is this:

The scientifically-described species Homo sapiens has included a wide variety of sub-species, almost all of which no longer exist because they were out-evolved by our own ancestors. The most well-known example of these were the neanderthals, which were once considered to be a seperate species but are now recognised having been able to interbreed with our direct ancestors and are now classed as a subspecies of H. sapiens. There were many other subspecies, and for most of human history there were several in existence at any one time.

So "all members of the same species" doesn't actually add up to much. If there were still neanderthals alive today, there is little doubt that the politically-correct people would say the same thing about them, and I would be making the same ethical claim about them.

But it is the human genome project which really should have blown the mythology away. It turns out that there really are several "races" of humans in existence, but that the traditional division into white, mongoloid and black is deeply misleading. Firstly there is relatively little in the way of genetic differences between all of the non-black people on the planet - white and mongoloid are two closely-related sub-branches. Aboriginal Australians fall into a slightly different category because they were isolated for such a long time (>50,000 years). All of the other "races" of humans exist in sub-saharan Africa. There is not just one "black" race; there are several. Most of these are genetically older than the white/mongoloid races. They are subspecies of humans which evolved in Africa, never left Africa, and in most cases have not interbred with the white/mongoloid races which left their ancestral home. All of this is supported by the conclusions of the HGP, which proved that the genetic diversity of humans in sub-saharan Africa was five times that of the genetic diversity elsewhere on the planet.

It is not safe to leap to any hasty conclusions from the above data. The way humans behave is at least as dependent on cultural heritage (nurture) as it is on genes (nature.) There are also ecosystem-related reasons why civilisation did not arise first in sub-saharan Africa (e.g. problems associated with tropical diseases/parasites and the non-domesticability of animals which evolved to fear humans). It is also not safe to leap to the conclusion that the problems which are endemic not only in sub-saharan Africa but wherever there is a significant population of "black" people have nothing to do with genetic dispositions. Maybe genetics does matter, even though this will make many of us feel uncomfortable. All things considered, I think the problems we are talking about are at least partly caused by a genetic disposition to be less able to adapt to the modern world. It's nurture and nature.

[Ludwig]

I think the climates are only similar on the surface. Isn't the US grain belt sitting on a massive (and rapidly depleting) aquifer than places like Western Australia and Somalia lack?

The US grain belt is to the east of the Rockies, not in the South-West. The South-West is mostly very poor agricultural land, most of it being desert and mountains. The Central Valley of California is the only significant tract of agricultural land in SW America. It has good soil, but is dependent on massive, and energy-intensive, irrigation infrastructure.

[Ludwig]

That's obvious too. They're rich enough to import food from elsewhere.

Ah-ha! So it's not drought that causes starvation but poverty. I suspected as much.

It's both. Why does it have to be a simple either/or? There are poor nations that don't starve.