How too much agricultural land leads to hunger in Africa (a critique of Malthusianism)

[HamdenRice]

It's somewhat distressing to read the constant malthusian explanations and predictions of hunger and famine. No one who specializes in these areas -- agricultural economists, development analysts, farmers, etc. -- believes this stuff. Malthusianism has all the intellectual respect among the people who study this as creationism has among paleontologists.

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his life's work explaining, among other things, famine and hunger as caused by economic forces rather than by lack of food production.

There are an endless number of diverse reasons why people go hungry in any particular region at any particular time. There is no single reason such as lack of land. The world is not anywhere near running out of land to grow food -- although the environmental cost of growing more food on more land is unacceptable to most reasonable people. But give yourself a reality check: I've read countless times here about Africans starving because of population pressure, but do you ever stop to juxtapose that with the massive amounts of megafauna still existing in Africa or the scale of the wildlife parks of East Africa?

Africa is the "hungriest" continent. It is also the one with the most countries with low population densities, empty lands and Rhode Island sized game parks.

Food production is much more a function of how people are organized to produce food on land, not how much land there is, and on what they bring to the task (capital, technology), and what their incentives are (markets, prices).

Just to show you how counter-intuitive these problems can be, let me summarize the observations of Goran Hyden, who wrote a ground breaking book on Tanzania in the early 1980s. Hyden had lived in East Africa for many years, spoke the local languages fluently and spent many years just talking to African farmers about their problems and perspectives. He was socialist who was originally from Sweden (Norway?). He wrote a book as a result called, "Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania," about that country's development efforts, and it was so influential the Ford Foundation hired him as their official representative to east Africa, specializing in development, for a few years.

Many parts of Tanzania were blessed with abundant land and relatively low population density. Yet food production was low and the government (which was quite benevolent by African standards at the time -- headed by Julius Nyerere) found it very difficult to increase production.

Hyden noted that in many areas, because there is enough land for everyone -- it is generally distributed by local authorities to farm families for free -- every family is a small scale farm family. The average family is quite cash poor, but has land.

The problem with that situation is that everyone is basically doing the same work. No one is landless. That means that all the labor that a family can muster to work its farm has to come from within the family. There are no people to hire as farmworkers if the family wants to expand production. The number of able bodied family members is an absolute limit on production (it's not land because they can get as much land as they can justify asking for), and that limit is usually pretty low. Because production is low, people remain too poor to buy capital goods, such as the simple human powered machines that are so common in poor rural parts of Asia.

Also, because everyone does the same thing, no one is specialized. Because no one specializes, there is no trade between farm families, or between various parts of the country. Because there is no specialization, there are no efficiencies. Everyone is trying to produce the same thing -- a little maize, some vegetables and milk products from animals. While this usually suffices to feed the farm families, the products are too monotonous to interest many urban dwellers, so there is little farm to town trade.

Also, because there is abundant land, people spread out to use it. Because Tanzania is a poor country, there is little money for roads, which means that even if a farmer somehow produces a surplus, there is no way to get it to the market at a decent price. So they don't even bother trying.

Looking back at the political history of these areas, Hyden found that many were stateless -- that is, they were politically organized in small chiefdoms. Because the chiefdoms were small and land was abundant, the "ruling class" of chiefs had no power to extract rent or taxes from the peasants. Hyden called Africa's peasant class "uncaptured" because unlike the peasant classes of Europe and Asia, they did not have to provide anything to their rulers in exchange for land. But that also meant that there was no class accumulating riches in the form of rent and taxes to fund collective projects like irrigation. Perhaps more importantly, there was no collection of rent and taxes to force peasants to produce surpluses. Contrary to local politics in Asia and Europe, political leaders, the chiefs, had to "bribe" peasants to stick around and boost the leaders' prestige by "giving" out land, which the chiefs themselves barely controlled. Some have speculated that Africa's modern states are so corrupt and weak because of the pre-colonial heritage of rulers bribing followers rather than followers paying rent and taxes to leaders; rulers become the centers of enormous informal chaotic flows of bribes rather than rational collectors of surpluses.

I'm not saying that this is why there is hunger in Africa, but it is why there was hunger and low food production in one part of Tanzania in the 70s when Hyden was doing his field research.

You can repeat, however, findings of idiosyncratic causes of poverty and hunger across much of Africa. There are places with serious land shortages -- Ethiopia, Malawi, etc. -- but what you generally find are perplexing complexes of problems that often have nothing to do with absolute resource scarcity.

[Recursion]

1. Monsanto wants you to think there's not enough food in the world

So that you'll let them do whatever vile crap they have in mind to soybeans and then sell them to you. There's never been a shortage of food, worldwide: we don't have the political will to distribute it to the hungry.

[pocoloco]

2. I suppose large factory corporate farms would remedy this situation?

[tabatha]

4. Nope, because large factory farms tend to be destructive.

[HamdenRice]

5. No. Helping small farmers with farm implements.

Government funding of irrigation and extension services. Encouraging crop diversification. Roads and markets. Etc.

[XemaSab]

19. You can't argue that industrial farming hasn't done a lot of good in this country

My great-grandma grew up taking the family's dairy products into town every morning in a horse-drawn wagon. In Duluth, in the winter. She didn't have a lot of opportunity for economic betterment.

Meanwhile, all of her grandkids and great-grandkids (that I know of) have gone to college, are currently going to college, or will go to college.

I know hippies who seriously espouse that people should grow all their own food, and everyone should be a farmer. I say screw that. Being a subsistence farmer means no leisure time, no vacation, no money to send the kids to college, dropping into bed exhausted every night, and basically returning to the middle ages as far as class divisions. Some people might enjoy that, but it's not my idea of a good time.

[phantom power]

20. +1

[HamdenRice]

22. There are several economic problems with this

Generally, studies by economists across the political spectrum show that small scale farmers are more efficient users of resources than large scale industrial farmers. Africa cannot afford large scale farming on any level -- capital inflows, petroleum, land, etc.

In head on competition, small farmers generally beat large farmers, and large farmers usually resort to rent-seeking behavior by controlling government to "win" the competition. Hence apartheid throughout Africa where white farmers existed (see below).

More importantly, the experience of the US was unique. Big farmers did not win out because they were better; they won out because small farm labor (the kids) could get higher wages in urban employment. It wasn't that large farmers won the competition but that small farm children abandoned the farm for employment elsewhere. The US has had until very recently uniquely high wages and employment demand in urban areas by global standards. Africa doesn't.

In Africa there is very little scope for urban employment elsewhere. There are no factories bidding the children of farmers to the cities, although people go to them hoping for work. A corporate takeover of agriculture in Africa would lead to even more massive unemployment and urban famine.

A better outcome for Africa at this point in its economic and labor structure is to improve conditions for and output of small farmers. It would be better for it to go through a small commercial family farm stage than a big farm stage.

[tabatha]

3. I don't know too much about this.

But I don't think there was hunger before colonization.

I wish that it was not thought that white ideas of forcing rent and taxes applies to all situations in the world. I find that troubling.

[HamdenRice]

6. Hyden was harshly criticized

because people thought he was suggesting African peasants needed to pay rent and taxes. He wasn't. He actually was just observing.

Otoh, the second half of the book shows why Nyerere's development plans failed, which had something to do with government's growing frustration with peasants not "contributing" to their own development, leading to a destructive policy of "villagization."

[RaleighNCDUer]

7. of course there was hunger before colonization - but there was less of it

and then it was directly attributable to drought, not politics.

[HamdenRice]

9. Hunger before colonialism was associated with small families

Against this goes against the grain of malthusianism. A historian named John Ilife wrote a book called, "The African Poor," about the poor before and after colonialism.

One of his conclusions was that people in small families tended to be poor because of factors mentioned in the OP -- lack of workers to increase the scale of production. Ilife agreed with Hyden to the extent that he was trying to explain poverty in a "land-rich economy."

As noted by another poster, drought also caused hunger. In some areas the dry season routinely caused hunger, but hunger for a few weeks a year was considered part of the natural cycle.

[HamdenRice]

8. Thanks for the auto-unrec. Good to see someone hates actual substantive factual posts about Africa.

[Nederland]

10. Interesting

The description of the Tanzanian economy sounds like the one that many environmentalists would call ideal: completely sustainable, no toxic industrial products, no roads and no automobiles. Paradise...except for the fact that their life expectancy was probably around 40 and people had to work 70+ hours a week to survive.

[On the Road]

11. I Did Not Know About Sen's Observations

but they make absolutely perfect sense.

In a way, they are a complement to Fernand Braudel's observations of Europe before the Revolution. Braudel described how the concentration of wealth led in investment in agriculture before the industrial revolution. Being a leftist, he bemoaned the human cost but could not doubt that it resulted in development of a modern economy.

[TreasonousBastard]

12. I'm a Malthusian of a sort, but not about food, and...

Africa is not the place to discuss Malthus and population pressure.

Drought, lack of infrastructure, corruption, war and revolution, and just plain stupidity have led to the present hunger in Africa. A good dose of racism hasn't helped.

Seems to me the slave trade and Colonialism removed much of what had historically worked and replaced it with pretty much nothing-- an attempt at a market economy with no infrastructure and few native people trained to run things. "Aid" has largely been a hodgepodge of donated food, military hardware and training, and loan for huge projects benefitting few. (Cash money aid has tended to disappear, along with much of the food and munitions.)

Check back in with Malthus if and when Africa ever gets close to European or North American standards of living-- and competes with us not only for food, but for oil, molybdenum, and all sorts of other stuff.

[phantom power]

13. It seems to me...

that Hyden's observations don't disprove Malthus, they actually appear to argue that an industrial revolution increases food extraction rates:

increased infrastructure (roads)
increased energy (farm equipment)
increased specialization
increased economic activity


Getting even a bit darker, the use of the phrase "uncaptured peasant class" has some disturbing implications.

[HamdenRice]

15. Let's say they are inconsistent with modern malthusian thinking

The debate I've seen here, as recently as yesterday, is based on an malthusian fallacy as an assumption, one that has been stated pretty explicitly -- and it is that food production bears an inelastic relationship to land availability. I'm not saying you said this but others have, and your lines:

increased infrastructure (roads)
increased energy (farm equipment)
increased specialization
increased economic activity

are inconsistent with malthusian arguments. In the "population bomb" thread there are assertions that we are running out of farm land. But you are saying that infrastructure, farm equipment, specialization, etc., can increase output without using more land. I've been told pretty explicitly by some people that they don't believe that output is elastic with respect to land.

As for "uncaptured" being disturbing, he says that right up front in the first chapter of his book. He is describing, not prescribing. Yet I saw him give a lecture once around 1985 and a political scientist excoriated him for suggesting Africa's peasants need to be captured. The confusion of describing as prescribing is common and is endemic on DU.

[phantom power]

17. The history of human agriculture certainly demonstrates yield elasticity, however...

somewhere there is always a limit to how much agriculture you can extract from a given acre of land in a sustainable and healthy manner. So in that sense, Malthus is always right in the end. If it were up to me (and it isn't) people should avoid the temptation to say "Malthus was wrong." That is a bit like claiming that a finite system places no finite limit on population at a nonzero standard of living.

I do agree that if you look at a particular system (say, the system of Tanzania), and observe that "hey, you know these people could get more food from their land, and do it sustainably" then you might be right, and it might be incorrect to say "there is nothing we can do, they are at their Malthusian limit."

[GliderGuider]

29. Can you point to that "pretty explicit" assumption?

I've never read anyone who thought that "food production bears an inelastic relationship to land availability." That's trivial to refute just using North American corn yield statistics. Yield depends on land, land management practices, water availability, use of fertilizer, use of equipment etc. No "malthusian" would make the straw-man assumption you are projecting onto them. Even they aren't that stupid.

I would say that Leibig's Law of the Minimum would apply instead -- after all, it was formulated for agricultural systems. Food production is limited by the scarcest resource, whether it's land, water, fertilizer, infrastructure, the political environment or some other variable.

Edited to add:

Food production will encounter different Liebig minima in different regions of the globe. The fact that aggregated global per capita grain production appears to be declining implies that various minima are now being encountered and not overcome.

[phantom power]

14. Also...

The megafauna I'm aware of in Africa are mostly endangered. Even with those "massive wildlife parks." And I don't see as how that juxtaposes very well with claims about there being plenty of land for agriculture. Are we going to take it from the wildlife parks?

[HamdenRice]

16. The point is politically, if agricultural land were running out...

do you think any government would say, we have to save the wildebeest and let people starve? No, any government that had a serious enough land shortage that people were starving from it would say, screw the wildlife, let's expand farmland. They don't. They are evidence that the malthusian description of what is happening is wrong. African governments can set aside these areas because there is abundant land. Their hunger and food production problems generally are problems other than land shortage.

And most of that wildlife is not endangered. There are a few well known species that are endangered throughout their range, like rhinos, some are endangered in specific areas but healthy in others, like elephants, but wildebeest, springbok and many other ungulates, lions, crocs and many other species are not endangered.

[happyslug]

18. One of the problems with Africa is food is to cheap

I remember reading during the Somalia famine of the 1990s the the cheapest food in the world was in Somalia, do to American and European dumping of excess food production in Africa. The local farmers can NOT compete with those prices and this do not. Thus almost every African County imports foods for its Urban Population. Several observer mentioned that this had to change, the Rural Farmers need a place they can sell their food at a profit. The urban areas is where the food is needed but into these urban areas Europeans and America dump their surplus food. Thus the Rural farmers can NOT earn any profit to buy equipment with to improve their own productivity. In Asia, most Countries only import food when a shortage of domestic production occurs, other wise America and European surplus are kept out so NOT to reduce food prices excessively (Mexico had a similar policy prior to NAFTA, but NAFTA ended that policy and the US dumped a lot of Corn into Mexico, dropping the price of Corn and forcing poor Mexican Farmers to move to the US to look for work to pay for things they use to pay for from the surplus of their own corn production).

At the time I read the Article (the early 1990s) the chief complaint of observers in Somalia was that the Food was so cheap the local farmers could NOT compete and with that withdraw of food production sooner or later another famine would occur do to the lack of development of domestic Food Production. The Observers wanted the imports to end the Famine, but also wanted it STOPPED whenever the crisis ended so that Somalia Food Production and distribution would resume. One of the problems with Somalia to this day is that the food surpluses are still being dumped in Somalia so that domestic production can NOT resume do to the high cost of production and distribution compared to the Dumping of Surplus food by Western Countries (Europe, US, Canada, Australia and Argentina are your major grain producers and the countries that try to keep their farmers happy with price supports, including buying surplus grains and dumping them in Africa).

Something has to be done in Africa, but the main issue should be to get the price of food UP so the local farmers can sell their produce at a surplus. The surplus can then be used to buy equipment to help increase production, thus bring in more money to the rural farmers. Today most of Africa suffers from a disconnect, the urban areas are feed by food imported from Western Nations, while the Rural Areas feed themselves but have no market for their product do to the low price of the imported grain. Most Africa Nations need to STOP permitting Western Nations to dump their surplus into their countries, so the local price will go up and provide income to the Rural areas so their can specialize by buying modern equipment.

[HamdenRice]

21. Well put. When countries had white farmers, the market was protected.

When you get into the nitty gritty details of the economics of African farming it is truly disgusting.

For example, when Kenya was under white rule, and white farmers had seized and farmed the best farmland, the colonial government had in place "crop marketing boards." It was basically socialism for the rich farmers. They had to sell their entire crops to the crop marketing board, which set an artificially high price in order to "promote development" of the white farms. The board then sold the food to black urban workers at inflated prices. The same was true for milk and other farm products, and this system existed everywhere in British Africa that had white farmers -- Rhodesia, South Africa, etc. Black farmers were strictly excluded from selling to the crop marketing boards.

After majority rule and after structural adjustment, these countries were forced to dismantle crop boards and accept imports as part of "free trade" despite the fact that American and European food production is heavily subsidized.

One fortunate trend in food aid is that when a country has a food crisis it is urged with some success (especially European aid agencies) that they send money, not food, and that the money be used to buy food from African farmers in the region.

But food dumping has done untold damage to agriculture.

[hunter]

23. Well that's exactly how agriculture works in the United States too...

Socialism for "white" farmers, and non-white labor.

[tabatha]

24. I read something different in a book called

"After Apartheid the Solution for South Africa."

Before whites arrived, South African blacks were VERY successful farmers.

I think you should also read the book "Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People" by Noel Mostert.

Not only were southern African blacks successful farmers - they were healthy, the environment was healthy --- almost pristine.

[happyslug]

31. From what I have read that is not QUITE right

The Natives of Africa farmed a lot of Tropical plants. Corn was a good retrofit (Being originally from Mexico and Central America and thus more a tropical grain then a Temperate grain). The problem is once the Native started to hit what is now South Africa they entered into a Temperate Climate where their native crops did NOT do well. Thus when the Dutch first settled South Africa the only natives in their area of South Africa were hunter-gathers NOT farmers. The Dutch brought with them Temperate Zone crops, wheat etc., and planted those crops. Thus in the tip of South Africa the Afrikaners are correct, they were no native farmers and the Afrikaners were the first farms IN THAT AREA.

Now, black farmers had reached as far south as the middle of what is now South Africa. The Zulus were a farming tribe, but of native crops and corn NOT wheat. While corn can grow in South Africa, the further south you go the less native African crops can be grown. Thus the Zulus were the furtherest south they could go and use traditional African crops.

This is further complicated by the fact that the Afrikaners only valued crops they could sell to ships that stopped over in South Africa (i.e. Wheat and other European crops), the native african crops were devalued and viewed as wasting good land.

Thus the problem is two fold, one is a prejudice FOR European traditional crops (Corn, or Maize as the Europeans call what we Americans call Corn) and the fact that as you go north the Native Crops start to not only compete with wheat, outperform wheat as a source of food. Thus most of South Africa (Excluding the Deserts off both Coasts, near and approximate close to what is now Namibia and Mozambique, is NOT conductive to traditional African Farming and thus was unsettled by the Bantu and their African farming culture. This provides the Afrikaner their claim that they introduced modern farming techniques to South Africa, they introduced European Crops to the one area of Africa where such crops could flourish, but this ignores the Bantu farming crops, that meet the Afrikaners in the middle of present day South Africa.

Just to point out there is some truth to the claims that the Native in South Africa proper had no knowledge of farming. The natives of South Africa proper were to south to crop traditional Bantu Crops and thus were hunters and gatherers. The problem with this that the Afrikaners try to expand that claim to include ALL of South Africa and that is contrary to the fact that the Bantu were very successful farmers with Native African Crops. Where the Bantu lives, their farmed, if the area was unfit for their farming crops, the Bantu did NOT enter that area (Thus the tip of South Africa was unsettled by the Bantu).

Thus why both side are correct, the problem is both sides are talking PASS each other NOT to each other. The facts say BOTH were good farmers when both sides meet in the 1800s. In the tip of South Africa, where traditional African crops could be be grown, no farming occurred. The problem for the Afrikaners were that as the Bantu learned about European crops (And corn) they started to enter areas that they had not previously farmed do to lack of an adequate crop for those areas (The European Crops ended that problem). This transformation lead to the wars of the late 1800s and the start of Apartheid in the early 20th Century as pointed out by others on this thread.

The Bantu Expansion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_expansion

[tabatha]

33. Location

I was going to quote this from "Frontiers": in my last e-mail, but now I have to because you are arguing that I said something I did not.

Excerpted from the book "Frontiers" by Noel Mostert, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992
"What is interesting about the Chalumna river site, as the South African archaelogist Tim Maggs has pointed out, is that it corresponds to the limits of summer rainfall adequate to grow the tropical cereals, sorghum in particular that accompanied the later Bantu movement from the Cameroons all the way down Africa. This was the line beyond which the traditional crops of the early Bantu speakers could not successfully be grown."

I did not state where they were successful farmers. The mediterranean area of South Africa is a small portion of Southern Africa. There are vast stretches of arable land in the eastern Cape, Kwa-Zul Natal, the (old)Free State, and (old) Transvaal, Mozambique, Zimbabwe - these are far, far greater than the small area in the Western Cape where nomadic people lived. By the way, they were also successful - they knew where to get water and food in an environment where white men failed.

The "Frontiers" is all about the frontier wars between the Xhosa living in the western Cape and the early settlers. The Zulu lived in Kwa-Zulu Natal and were also successful, and other tribes all the way up to the Cameroons.

But the multiple frontier wars would not have happened if there were not Xhosa settlements in the Eastern Cape.

It is a worthwhile book to read.

[HamdenRice]

34. Unfortunately, you came across some apartheid era propoganda that's mostly not correct.

And I'm not suggesting any fault of yours. The apartheid era government spewed out a lot of propaganda about these issues, which continues to find its way into unsuspecting non-specialist literature and historiography.

Apartheid era South Africa was ideologically somewhat like the Soviet Union, in the sense that they had some core ideas in their ideology, and they had to then make other "facts" fit that ideology. One core idea was that the country (or important parts of it) was empty when whites arrived, so that Africans had no moral claim to it or to majority rule. They used the "Bantu expansion" (a real phenomenon) to make this claim. But they redated the arrival of Bantu speakers from around 400AD to around 1600. This was obviously false. Their commitment to this idea was so deep that for many years radio carbon dating was banned in South Africa.

The wiki article is partly accurate but dead wrong about South Africa,in suggesting that the Xhosa were just arriving in the southeast when they contacted the Dutch. I have sitting on my desk a huge research volume by SA's leading archaeologist, Revil Mason, entitled, "Origins of the Black People of Johannesburg and the Southern Western Central Transvaal, AD 350-1880". Bantu speakers' settlements in the Eastern Cape (Xhosa) are radio carbon dated by 400 AD.

To recap, sub-Saharan Africa was populated by hunter gatherers until around 3000BC. Some culture around present day Cameroon or Nigeria began to cultivate crops and make iron tools around that time. This caused their population to expand dramatically compared to hunter gatherers, and they expanded east to around Kenya and then south all the way to South Africa. There is no ethnic group called "Bantu." It's an anthropological and linguistic term that describes the many ethnic groups that seem to be a result of that primeval expansion. It's analogous to "Indo-European" or "Germanic." The reason linguists coined the "ethnic" term "Bantu" is because the word for "people" in almost all these languages is "Bantu."

The idea that they were somehow dependent on more "tropical" crops is simply wrong. The expansion took many millenia during which they adapted crops and livestock to each environment. It is true that their main grain was sorghum and millet in the east and south before the arrival of maize, but the crops they brought to South Africa were well suited to the region. The reason maize replaced sorghum wasn't because of white farmers. In fact, there is no consensus on who brought maize to South Africa -- the slave trade, the Portuguese in Mozambique or the Dutch. But the reason it replaced sorghum wasn't because it was better suited to the climate. The reason is that in an environment bursting with wildlife, especially birds, maize with its protective husk, was less susceptible to being eaten by birds than sorghum. (When you read accounts of early European contact with Bantu speakers by people like Livingstone, they frequently note that the women had to spend every day in the fields scaring away birds before the adoption of maize, which freed up a huge amount of labor.) Also, maize porridge swells in the stomach more than sorghum and people reported having a more satisfying sense of a full stomach after eating maize compared to eating sorghum. It spread to African farmers independently of white farmers. When black farmers consistently outproduced white farmers in the 1800s, they were already growing maize.

It's important to point out that at this point in the development of the historiography, there is no support in the historical literature for the idea that white farmers were superior to black farmers. In fact, white farming in much of the country from the mid 1800s to the early 20th century was quite deplorable -- so much so that successive South African governments spent millions of pounds over many decades to bring it up to the level of native farmers, and passed a welter of laws to try to give white farmers competitive advantages over black farmers.

White farmers were not so much farmers, as landlords and plantation masters. The goal of the typical white farmer in the interior after the Great Trek, wasn't to do agricultural work, but to capture or purchase native farmers (there were slave markets in the frontier interior of the Transvaal) and make them farm for him. This went by various names, such as "kaffir farming," "labour tenancy," "share cropping" and "farming on the halves." In the early 20th century, the Union government launched program after program to end these practices which they considered shameful because once again it was turning possession of the country over to blacks.

You are correct that Bantu speakers did not reach the southwestern tip of South Africa, the area around Cape Town called the Western Cape. But it is false to say they only came to the middle of the country. By 400 AD they occupied the entire country down to the Fish River in the East and the Orange River in the center.

They did not reach the Western Cape because the semi-dessert area called the Karoo separated the farming areas of the Xhosa and southern Sotho from the small arable enclave around Cape Town, which you are correct was occupied by Khoisan hunter gathers and cattle keepers. The reason official apartheid ideology accepts these people as exceptions to the idea that the country was empty is that the Khoisan eventually turned into the Dutch speaking, Afrikaner-cultured Cape Coloured people who were considered "inside" apartheid South Africa and not part of the African demand for majority rule.

So basically what you read about native crops simply is wrong. The Zulu weren't prevented from moving south because of their crops. In fact the Zulu were indistinguishable from the Xhosa who lived much further to the south, in terms of crops, language or culture, until Dingiswayo and Shaka "invented" the Zulu kingdom and culture. The idea of "Zulu" didn't exist until the late 1700s.

The Dutch did, indeed, grow wheat in the small enclave of the western Cape to sell to passing ships, but when they expanded out of the Western Cape, they were less oriented to the export wheat trade. They were cattle ranchers. In fact, the first Afrikaners to expand out of the Western Cape were called "trek boers" or "traveling farmers," who were looking for pasture. The Karoo, which was useless for crops was great for grazing, and it served as a bridge for them to move east until they came in contact with the Xhosa at the Fish River and the Sotho at the Orange River. But the trek boers weren't crop farming at all. They were herding, like the Khoi Khoi they displaced. In fact one of the most salient features of the Afrikaners is that wherever they went, the adopted the crops and techniques of the people they encountered -- not visa versa. All of South Africa was conducive to native farming methods, which is why the Afrikaners copied them.

It wasn't native Africans who entered areas settled by Afrikaners, it was Afrikaners who entered areas settled for over 1,000 years by Bantu speakers.

[happyslug]

35. Thanks for the Details, but my point was there is SOME truth to the Afrikaner side

And the problem is the Afrikaners then took that little bit of truth and expanded on it so to justify their taking of most of the land of South Africa. I was trying to avoid some of the details (Which you provided) but my point was the Afrikaner's side did HAVE some facts straight, then took those truths to extremes the facts did not and could not support. Your post shows in more details what I was trying to point out (and I admit you did a better job then I did in that regard).

As to my use of Wheat, Cape Town was a favorite stopping point for almost all shipping go around the Cape of Good Hope (And that was ALL European to Asiatic trade until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869). Those ship's captains would pay a premium for Wheat based flour, a flour they crew knew from Europe. Thus Wheat was preferred in that area and for that reason alone.

As to actual farming techniques, all sides seems to be good farmers, the real dispute seem to be who was to control the "Surplus" production of such farmers. As you point out the Afrikaners wanted to control such "surplus" while the British and the Native Chieftains also wanted to control that "Surplus". That dispute lead to the wars of the late 1800s, not only the ones against the Blacks but the First and Second Boar Wars. At the end, the Boars and the British worked out a Compromise that lead to Apartheid, the Boars had been defeated in the Second Boar war, but the British preferred to deal with them then the Black leadership. Thus the Union of South Africa was founded and became, for all practical purposes, a white only country (Blacks existed but had little or no rights).

[tabatha]

25. See post 21.

Disgusting after colonization - the latter having f'ed up Africa beyond belief. (I was born there.)

Before colonization a different story.

[HamdenRice]

26. Where were you born?

Also, I don't think we are disagreeing about South Africa. When the interior was conquered between 1830 and 1890s, the whites took most of the best land, especially in the Boer republics.

But for very complicated political reasons, the British insisted that blacks be allowed to buy land. They began buying back the land that was taken by conquest because they were still more efficient farmers, and were able to pay higher prices per acre because they produced more per acre.

By 1911 or so, this buying back of the land had reached "crisis" proportions from the perspective of whites. I've read many of the government commissions of enquiry from this period that took testimony around the country, and everywhere the government went, whites were complaining that the blacks would buy back the whole country at this rate -- sort of we stole it fair and square and now they are buying it back.

To prevent blacks from buying back the whole country, the government passed the Natives Land Act, the first major piece of segregation legislation of the Union of South Africa, and it prevented blacks from buying land in "white areas." So apartheid really arose because whites were afraid of losing the country to more efficient black farmers.

[tabatha]

30. I am glad you have explained that.

Durban.

[GliderGuider]

32. That's a fascinating bit of history.

I wasn't aware of that part of South African history -- thanks.

[Terry in Austin]

27. Start grindstone. Apply ax.

It's somewhat distressing to read the constant malthusian explanations and predictions of hunger and famine.

Maybe you should start by defining what you think "Malthusianism" is before getting all ideologically stressed out about it.

Hey, famine is distressing.

Then maybe back up these windy assertions about who is "studying this stuff" and where their "intellectual respect" lies. Who has the "correct" explanation isn't more than academically interesting.

Whether famine is "because of" economics or lack of production, you still have to ask "so what?" Does that mean we can find a cure for famine? More broadly, how would that affect overpopulation?

I don't think there's much disagreement here about the fundamental fact of overpopulation. It's just when it moves into the dicey area of predicting the future that we start getting the pet dogmas, wishful thinking and dueling "isms."

One thing seems like a safe bet, however. There are going to be, minimum, ten billion mouths to feed on this planet within the lifetime of some who are already born.

Problem: where do they all get three squares a day? Solution: who the heck really knows? Fallback: people with opinions about it annoy each other for some time to come. Game on.

[GliderGuider]

28. What you said

:thumbsup: