Africa

If there is any part of the
world where environmentalist doomsayers can point to with genuine pessimism,
it would be Africa. Whether measuring GDP, total fertility rates, infant
mortality or just about any other statistical indicator, Africa generally
ends up dead last in the world. But though the situation in Africa is
bleak compared to even much of the developing world, there are good reasons
to be optimistic about Africa’s future.

First, although compared to
other areas of the world Africa’s situation is bleak, the continent’s
situation improved slightly during the last 40 years. While per capita
food production decreased by about 10 percent from 1978 to 1992, total
food output increased by 20 percent, belying the notion that Africa cannot
increase its food production (Bailey
1995, p.57).

Per capita GDP in Africa is
also estimated to have increased from $580 in 1960 to $1,060 in 1989,
though this was distributed disproportionately on the continent and in
some nations, such as Ghana, GDP is believed to have experienced declines
in that period [CITE].
Obviously to meet the needs
of its people, Africa will need much larger improvements than these. Is
there reason for even a guarded optimism on this count? Absolutely.

One of the most wrong headed
fallacies about Africa is that the continent is forever doomed by a lack
of natural resources to intense poverty.

It is widely assumed, for
example, that Africa cannot support much beyond subsistence-level agriculture
for very small populations. A study conducted by the Food and Agricultural
Organization, United Nations and International Institute Applied Systems
Analysis in the early 1980s demonstrated this was simply not true. A nation
such as Sudan could by itself feed the entire population of Africa if
it utilized modern high yield agriculture. Yet Sudan regularly suffers
from famine (in the summer of 1996, for example, the United States had
to airlift food supplies to prevent starvation in southern Sudan). Other
nations don’t quite have the agriculture potential Sudan has, but
continent could easily support even the much larger populations projected
for its future (Food
and Agricultural Organization 1984).

Why then does Africa suffer
from food shortages? Because Africa’s main problem is its particular
mix of authoritarianism and Marxism, seemingly nonstop wars, civil and
otherwise, and government corruption, which have plunged much of the continent
since it emerged from colonialism. Whether African rulers adopted Marxist
states to distinguish themselves as much as possible from the European
colonial states or merely as a form of home grown opportunistic exploitation
by a few elites, much of Africa succumbed to governments unable and usually
unwilling to provide an economic climate beneficial to agriculture.

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