Poverty in Africa

Because of nonproductive farming, Africa is now the only region on Earth where human poverty and hunger both continue to increase. Over the past fifteen years the number of Africans living on less than one dollar a day has increased 50%. Per capita income growth was negative between 1980 and 2000. The United Nations Development Programme concluded in 2004 that if current trends continue, Africa as a whole won't reach its 2015 Millennium Development Goal for human poverty reduction until the year 2147, more than a century behind schedule. ... Nearly one-third of all men, women and children in sub-Saharan Africa are currently undernourished, compared to just 17% for the developing world as a whole

The sorry truth is that food crop production and export crop production have both faltered badly in Africa in recent decades.

This disastrous performance in Africa reflects, most of all, a failure to increase the productivity of human labor in agriculture. Roughly 70% of all Africans still depend on agriculture for employment and income...

Africa's lagging agricultural performance is commonly attributed to a long list of factors not directly linked to the uptake of science on farms, factors such as landlocked geography, violent conflict, poor governance, HIV/AIDs, distortions in international markets, and climate change. Yet none of these factors can explain the depth, persistence and pervasiveness of rural poverty in Africa.

[A] preponderance of smallholder farmers in Africa... still work their fields with hand hoes or crude wooden plows; they try to get their meat, milk and draft power from animals stunted by poor health; they rely on traditional shifting cultivation practices despite population pressures on the land that shorten fallow times and mine nutrients from the soil; and they save and plant traditional crop seeds not yet significantly improved through scientific plant breeding.

Rural poverty of this kind was once the norm in Europe and North America as well....Their eventual escape from these impoverished rural conditions came when new discoveries in science were applied to farming, giving them steel plows, mechanical reapers, steam, gasoline and electrical power, improved breeds of cattle, better livestock feeds, inexpensive new chemical fertilizers and finally hybrid seeds.

...[I]n Africa... far too little science has been brought to farming. Currently only 4% of Africa's farmland is irrigated, less than 30% is planted to improved seeds, and average fertilizer use is only 9 kg per hectare, compared to 117 kg per hectare in the industrial world. ...

Even as NGOs warn Africa away from western science in the farming sector, they eagerly promote an extension of western regulatory standards into Africa. Importing the latest farming technologies from the West is bad, but importing the latest in highly precautionary biosafety regulation is good. Growing more regulations in Africa now gets higher priority than growing more food. It is not an influx of unregulated technologies that is harming rural Africa today, but instead the almost complete nonavailability of new technology.

[I]n the end it is not the citizens of Africa who are rejecting agricultural biotechnology. The technology is being kept out of Africa by a careless and distracted political leadership class that pays closer attention to urban interests and to inducements from outsiders -- from European donors, UN technical advisors, NGOs, and export market customers - than to the needs of their own rural poor.