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Feeding Africa: A Dissent from Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Hoyt Alverson
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Extract

The population of Africa is roughly estimated to be 300,000,000 and believed to be growing at a very high rate, perhaps as much as 3 percent per annum. If these figures are accurate, Africa will have a population of over one-half billion by the year 2000. In light of this prospect, a question asked more from desperation than curiosity is whether these millions can all be fed, at least enough to avert mass starvation and pandemic malnutrition. Paul Ehrlich and others have argued it is not possible. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famine, hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

Type
Research Article
Information
African Issues , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , Winter 1978 , pp. 20 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1978 

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References

NOTES

1. Erlich, Paul, The Population Bomb (New York: Bailamme Books, 1968)Google Scholar, quoted in Bodley, John H., Anthropology and Contemporary Human Problems (Menlo Park: Cummings, 1976), p. 83 Google Scholar.

2. McLoughlin, Peter F. M., ed., African Food Production Systems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), pp. 3–4 Google Scholar.

3. Hance, William A., The Geography of Modern Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quoted in Gann, Lewis H. and Duignan, Peter, Africa: The Lend and the People (San Francisco: Chandler, 1972), p. 51 Google Scholar.

4. Uchendu, Victor C., “Anthropology and Agricultural Development in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in David Brokensha and Marion Pearsall, The Anthropology of Development in Sub-Saharan Africa (Society for Applied Anthropology, Monograph No. 10, 1969), p. 5 Google Scholar.

5. McLoughlin, African Food Production Systems, p. 25.

6. Uchendu, “Anthropology and Agricultural Development,” quoted in McLoughlin, p. 25.

7. See for example Southworth, Herman M. and Johnston, Bruce F., eds., Agricultural Development and Economic Growth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; de Wilde, John C., Experiences with Agricultural Development in Tropical Africa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Johnston, Bruce F. and Kilby, Peter, Agriculture and Structural Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

8. The figures are taken from Bodley, Anthropology and Contemporary Human Problems, p. 119.

9. These points are elaborated compellingly in Odum, Howard T., Environment, Power, and Society (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inter-Science, 1971)Google Scholar, and John, S. and Steinhart, Carol E., “Energy Use in the U. S. Food System,” Science, 184 (1974), 307–316 Google Scholar.

10. Bodley, Anthropology and Contemporary Human Problems, pp. 120–121.

11. Bodley, p. 121.

12. Bodley, pp. 122-123.