MEDIA HEAD FAKE
Recently there have been a flurry of articles about farming and “returning to the land” in various Western magazines and newspapers. This headline in the most recent Monocle is typical of the trend – a few city-dwelling Japanese are considering a return to farming given recent economic events and also the fact that farming seems more eco-friendly and popular nowadays.
While returning to organic farming in the West on a modest scale or hobby farm is more of a “personal growth” type activity, the farms in the West are of course extremely productive, using intensive agriculture, fertilizer and optimized seeds, as well as mechanization. The small organic farmer movement is more for media show than a viable long term strategy for feeding Earth’s billions, although certainly it has its place as long as people want to pay the requisite higher prices it entails.
AGRICULTURE & INDUSTRY IN AFRICA
In Africa, the population is exploding – from what I have been able to gather it is north of 880 million and probably closing in on a billion soon – and most of Africa is importing critical foodstuffs. African “governments”, which are mostly a collection of individuals who achieve power and utilize it to enrich themselves and their cronies, do not focus on agricultural needs since most of the population has migrated to vast cities and shanty-towns and their power base moved with them (they DO focus on mineral rights and oil, of course).
This article from the Economist called “Outsourcing’s Third Wave” is eye-opening – it describes how foreign governments are negotiating with African leaders to buy / rent / run large tracts of land for the purpose of growing food in Africa for importation back to THEIR home countries. From the article:
The Saudi programme is an example of a powerful but contentious trend sweeping the poor world: countries that export capital but import food are outsourcing farm production to countries that need capital but have land to spare. Instead of buying food on world markets, governments and politically influential companies buy or lease farmland abroad, grow the crops there and ship them back.
