A democratic Africa could feed world
Wednesday July 30 2008
ON the back of Kevin Myers' provocative opinion piece on Africa (Irish Independent, July 10) many letter writers have made wild and completely unsubstantiated claims about "reckless population increases in Africa'' and the link between the population of Ethiopia and that country's precarious food security.
Dr Jacquline Kasun, in her book 'The War against Population', states that "population estimates in Africa are highly unreliable''. For example, the most carefully planned and executed census ever in Nigeria, in 1991, found fewer than 90 million people compared to the previous estimate by "Western experts" of 122 million. Wild overestimates of populations in Africa are encouraged by the environmental and population control fundamentalists. Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics, argues that famines are not caused by actual food shortages but by institutional failure.
The merciless policies of Ethiopia's leftist dictatorship caused the tragedy, not its population.
Africa needs democracy and development not polemic lectures from armchair experts. The fact is, Africa has only one-fifth the population density of Europe and has an unexploited food-raising potential that could feed twice the present population of the world, according to Roger Revelle of Harvard.
On a recent visit to Nigeria to build a new school, I learned that with the year-round growing conditions, the fertile soil and the abundant rainfall, any sort of basic agricultural development could result in up to four crops per year.
The problem of African food security is not one of the "population and scarce resources" myth concocted by pseudo-experts in the West, rather it is one of the lack of democracy, development and education combined with economic inequality and perennial war waged by greedy dictatorial regimes.
Kevin Myers is no racist, even if his article was polemic, blunt and failed to take the true facts into account. However, some of the subsequent letter writers have displayed truly nasty and ignorant sentiments.
Ray McIntyre
Mullingar
Co Westmeath
- Mullingar, Co Westmeath
