Africa is the only continent where food production per capita is falling as its population continues to expand. Three-fourths of Africa’s food is produced on small farms that get radically lower crop yields than its experimental farms.

Even if these little farms got adequate fertilizer and high-yield seeds, they still wouldn’t get the higher yields produced by First World farmers because of the heavy weed populations fostered by Africa’s high temperatures, high humidity, and intense sunlight. A Nigerian field has an estimated 200 million weed seeds per hectare!

African women are courting disabling diseases as they spend 300 hours per hectare per season to hand-weed a field of corn. The weeds also limit too many African families to one acre of low-yield corn per year. The kids are weeding instead of going to school because the family has to eat. The men have gone to the cities because poor roads mean they can’t earn a living selling farm products from their villages, even if they were able to produce extra food for sale. AIDS has cut the available farm labor by at least 10 percent, and malaria by more than that. The healthy must spend their time nursing the ill.

The critical weeding time is the first one-third of the crop’s existence, and that means weeding competes with planting on most small farms. Corn crop losses in an un-weeded field have been measured at 55–90 percent, rice yield losses at 50-100 percent. Poor weed control cut yields in a Kenya cassava field by 5 tons per hectare.

What should Africa do? The same thing First World farmers do in this age of technology—use herbicides. In a Nigerian test plot, atrazine on the corn crop doubled yields and cut costs by 60 percent. On peanuts, in Zimbabwe, herbicides cut weed control labor from 100 hours per hectare to one-fourth of an hour per hectare while yields rose sharply.

African governments are now pinning hopes on fertilizer as a crucial input to raise food yields and meet its fast-rising food needs without plowing down more wildlife habitat. Putting only fertilizer on a weedy corn plot can, unfortunately, increase yield losses! Weeds can often out-compete crop plants for the nitrogen in the soil. That is why the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) reported as early as 1998 that crop yields in Africa would stay at the subsistence level as long as the hand-hoe is the primary means of weeding.

Africa will need lots of little countryside farm stores to distribute the better seeds, fertilizers, and herbicides. It needs weed experts far below the PhD level, people who will live and work in the farming regions. It needs better roads, to bring in the inputs and take out food to sell in the cities. Without these rural enhancements the rural population will stay at subsistence level while increased land clearing will keep the wildlife at risk of extinction

The rest of the world needs to come to terms with the African population growth, which will be proportionally greater than anywhere else in the world over the next 40 years. After 2050, the population growth will be over, but any African wildlife species lost in the next four decades will be gone for good.

England’s Prince Charles went to Africa last April and told them they need organic-only farming. They’ve been farming organically for thousands of years and have reaped hunger from low yields and economic stagnation in rural areas. That won’t feed the population that’s building in Africa any more than it will feed tomorrow’s population in China, India, or Bangladesh.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—People and wild species are at more risk in Africa than on any other continent. Huge numbers of people are trying to subsist on hunting scarce animals and unsustainable slash-and-burn farming. If this continues it will undoubtedly trigger a Dust Bowl like that of the American Midwest in the 1930s along with massive famine.

The Midwest had a drought—but the real problem was that all of the nitrogen had been “farmed out” of the region’s soils. The organic content of the soils had dropped sharply from pioneer days, leaving little root structure to hold the soils against wind and water. The Dust Bowl soils blew as far east as Washington D.C. startling the Congress into creating the U.S. Soil conservation Service.

One of the world’s top soil scientists is now warning that, without more chemical fertilizer, a similar fate could befall Africa. Pedro Sanchez, of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, says Africa’s traditional “bush fallow” farming system is unsustainable at today’s higher population densities. The “rest periods” for the soil have gotten too short to restore the soil nutrients. There are few livestock and, therefore, little manure. Each season the farmers’ yields decline further, triggering the plowing of more land to feed more people.

Sanchez praises a government program in Malawi that permits farmers to buy small amounts of N fertilizer and improved seeds at a discount, with the government paying the difference. In 2005, Malawi’s corn harvest had been only half what was needed. Yields were below a ton per hectare. In 2006, farmers armed with fertilizer and better seeds doubled their yields and produced a small surplus. By 2007, yields almost tripled, up from 0.8 tons to 2.2 tons per acre.

The high-yielding seeds are already available from regional research centers and Norman Borlaug’s Mexican plant-breeding center. Can a fertilizer and improved seed boost triple African crop yields and free the continent from its  hunger/soil trap—before it becomes a “Dust Bowl”?

Africa has tried fertilizer subsidies before, but the governments too soon ran out of cash. It worked, however, in India, where chemical fertilizer and the Green Revolution’s high-yield rice and wheat seeds tripled national yields in little more than a decade. That led to more stable government, better roads, more investment—and India’s Asian Tiger economy. A radical drop in birth rates followed, along with huge gains in India’s incomes and health. The fertilizer subsidy probably got too big and went on too long, but, compared to Africa, it’s hard to argue with the fabulous long-term results..

Sanchez says ten African countries are now trying to triple their yields by emulating Malawi’s progress—backed by promises of $20 billion in funding from the G8, including the United States.

If the aid donors honor their commitments, Africa might be able to break out of its unsustainable low-yield farming pattern. Roads will be built, to bring in the fertilizer and then export white corn to African countries that didn’t get rain that year. Surplus food would fund off-farm jobs and economic growth. A virtuous circle may start, as it did in India.

Organic enthusiasts claim their cover crops could provide all the nitrogen needed for expanded African food production—but their key report overstated the nitrogen available from green manure crops by threefold. Africa can’t afford more land in low-yield crops.

America’s “summit” fertilizer commitment to Africa is one that must be kept.

Report noted: Catherine Badgley et al. “Can Organic Farming Feed the World” Renewable Ag & Food Systems; July 2007.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Once again the “rich countries” have managed to yank prosperity away from the Third World. And at Christmas too.

 

We’d promised them billions of unearned dollars in guilt payments for something called “global warming.” They don’t pay that much attention to thermometers, and weather is something they mostly live with rather than forecast.

 

• But we ourselves had warned them their islands were about to sink beneath the waves. It hasn’t happened yet, but the computer models say it will be so.
• We warned them their food crops would begin to fail—though crop yields around the earth have so far continued to increase.
• We told them that wild species like the polar bear would go extinct—if not yet then sometime soon.

 

“The heaviest burden of global warming will fall on the poorest countries,” said the best and brightest of our thinkers and climate modelers. “We must pay billions to the third world to finance greener energy systems so they won’t burn coal or kerosene.”

 

Then, at Copenhagen—the “last chance” for humans to save the world—we decided not to save it. Can we blame the Third World for being angry and mystified? 

 

Villagers on the South Pacific island of Tanna still worship a ghostly American named John Frum who was stationed there during World War II. Every February 15^th , the islanders stage a ceremony, complete with GI “uniforms,” bamboo rifles, and an American flag. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder told writer Paul Raffaele of Smithsonian Magazine in 2008.

 

Such “cargo cults” were common when primitive peoples were visited by sailors who had compasses and chronometers, and later radios and TVs. Third World peoples mostly still haven’t seen our shipyards, railroads, and nitrogen fertilizer, so they don’t understand what supports our abundance.

 

They don’t know how we learned that global warming was coming, and they haven’t seen any evidence that it will. But we said we’d make them rich, and since we decided not to, they’re unhappy.

 

The Chinese, of course, are different. They’ve got 4,000 years of court records, detailing how Chinese crops and wild animals shifted north with the repeated global wamings during the Bronze Age, the Roman Empire and the Medieval period—and then shifted back south during the intervening cold periods. Chinese researchers have studied their own ice cores and fossil pollen. They can’t have much respect for the Western computer models, which repeatedly forecast the runaway warming that hasn’t appeared. Their own thermometers have detailed the non-warming since 1998—but they’d take our carbon subsidies.

 

In the wake of Copenhagen’s collapse, my wife was asked, “With so many poor people in the world, shouldn’t we share our abundance—global warming or not?”  That’s been the hidden agenda of the hard-left through the whole global warming campaign: “spreading the wealth.”  

 

My wife, however, had spent 15 years living in four African countries. She replied she’d never vote to give American money to Africa’s tribal thugs. It would simply disappear, as have so many billions in government handouts, enriching Swiss bank accounts not creating sustainable prosperity for the people. 

 

“They aren’t poor because we’re rich,” she says correctly. “Nor are we rich because they’re poor.” In the Pacific Northwest, early Indian tribes had a culture based on “potlatch.” Whenever anyone had good fortune, they threw a party for the tribe. The wealth was spread, but no one was better off after the party than before.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net