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I think you overestimate the influence of green activists in African policy making. Your model of the world assumes Africans have no agency over their own lives. It's not like these green activists managed to stop Asian manufacturing powers from being more accepting of carbon emissions and environmental degradation. It's ultimately up to Africans to sort out their agricultural problem by themselves. They can't wait around for foreigners to solve all their problems. Imo their system of communal land ownership is the primary reason behind weak land productivity. Ethiopia and Rwanda managed to break free from this system and have managed to make impressive gains.

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Feb 21·edited Feb 21Author

Thanks for the comment.

You are correct about the influence of Greens on African policy-making, but that is not really my point. Their influence is over NGOs, wealthy donors, and policy-makers in wealthy Western nations.

I do not see African nations having the funding or the scientific expertise to launch a second Green Revolution on their own.

You are absolutely correct that Africans cannot wait for foreigners to solve their problems. This post is part of an extended series of posts on developing nations. Most of the rest will be focused on what developing nations can do to help themselves.

You may be correct on the communal land ownership. Do you have any data or studies on that? I would be interested in following up.

Even if it is a major problem, however, dramatic increases in productivity per acre of land are possible and will likely be very cost-effective.

And thanks for reposting my article!

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As I mentioned Ethiopia and Rwanda made good progress in agriculture in the past twenty years. Ethiopia was a communist country and government owns all the land. Like China they leased out the land to individual farmers and replicated the incentives of a small holder agriculture. Rwanda has something similar. I'll look if they are any official papers on the subject.

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> While getting enough food to survive is easy in modern societies, it was an epic task for our ancestors. For the overwhelming majority of our ancestors, the quest to acquire enough food to survive took up the majority of their waking hours. It was an obsession, and all of society was organized around the most effective means to do so within the local environment.

This wasn't the problem in most of Africa or the tropics generally. There acquiring enough food was so easy that there wasn't much need to innovate, meanwhile population density was kept in check by tropical diseases and megafauna that had co-evolved with humans.

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Feb 22·edited Feb 22Author

I will have to see actual time-use data on those regions before I can agree that they spent less time in the tropics to acquire food. I know that most subsistence in the tropics was based on root vegetables (except maize in Mesoamerica). They do require less work, but they also give fewer calories and nutrients, so I am not sure how that balances out.

If it was so easy to create a food surplus, I would have expected widespread urbanization, which is clearly not the case. I would think that at least one African society would have figured out the benefits of urbanization. And you would also expect huge empires, which was rare in Africa.

You are correct about tropical diseases keeping population low density in Africa. I am not sure that was a global phenomenon in the tropics. Malaria and other tropical diseases did not come to the New World until after European colonialism. Not sure about Southeast Asia.

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> If it was so easy to create a food surplus, I would have expected widespread urbanization, which is clearly not the case. I would think that at least one African society would have figured out the benefits of urbanization.

Not unless they could do something about the tropical diseases.

> Malaria and other tropical diseases did not come to the New World until after European colonialism.

And the New World had urbanization in the tropics, e.g., in Mesoamerica and the Andes, there were also apparently urban centers in the Amazon which are only now starting to be investigated.

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Yes, you are correct that tropical diseases would have stopped urbanization in Africa. I withdraw my point.

And, yes, there was urbanization in what is now Latin America.

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