Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

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reply to post by ketsuko


It's a compounding factor that has periodically arisen in areas of Africa and not just because of one guy. You have warlord types in Ethiopia, Somalia, and so on. Don't cherry pick on warlords or factors. The warlord component is just one issue in the complex problem called starvation in Africa.

In terms of crop decline, that's more likely due to the carrying capacity of the land being exceeded (as I also mentioned in my original post) for prolonged periods of time coupled with periodic droughts. The end result of these two tends to be what is called desertification, which basically renders agricultural lands non-viable.

Africa has been significantly impacted by desertification. Almost three quarters of Africa's agricultural drylands are already degraded to some degree.

www4.uwsp.edu...

reply to post by WhiteAlice


Desertification is not solely caused by natural factors. Improper farming and grazing techniques also causes it. The Dust Bowl '30s were in part caused by improper farming practices.

Desertification in Africa can be partially traced to overgrazing and improper farming practices. The article I linked to mentions that the farmlands that used to be productive were handed over to cronies who had no farming knowledge or ability.

So in other words, Africa's inability to sustain the people there is to some degree a self-inflicted prophecy, and not self-inflicted in the sense of too many people.

reply to post by ketsuko


Did you even read the links that I provided? Doing this one time is fine but twice, especially when I provided plenty of reference material that identifies what desertification is and what induces it, is getting kind of ridiculous, ketsuko.

From the links that I provided:

The carrying capacity of a biological species in an environment is the maximum population size of the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment. In population biology, carrying capacity is defined as the environment's maximal load,[1] which is different from the concept of population equilibrium.

en.wikipedia.org...

Causes of desertification:

Overgrazing is the major cause of desertification worldwide.

Cultivation of marginal lands, i.e lands on which there is a high risk of crop failure and a very low economic return, for example, some parts of South Africa where maize is grown.

www.botany.uwc.ac.za...

Both the push to increasing herd sizes and to cultivate lands that cannot sustain it are the direct result of increased population. This isn't rocket science (technically, it's the integration of physical and cultural geography). The more people you have, the more mouths that are going to need to be fed. In the case of Africa, it actually has a fairly low carrying capacity due to water and availability of food. Because the continent of Africa is what it is, the carrying capacity per acre for the land is actually much smaller than other parts of the world. Once we start pushing past that carrying capacity through increased population and increased cultivation, it generates soil depletion, soil erosion and eventually, desertification.

That is not to say that there are not any other factors involved. There are and some of them are really grim. Africa has been confronted with severe and repeated droughts, which induced a good deal of starvation and/or malnutrition. Nutritional diseases such as kwashiorkor and pellagra, both of which affect cognitive function and development, which, in turn, can affect the individual's productivity and may actually cause parents to have more children. It has some contributing factor towards this kind of cycle that exists in some parts of Africa (not in all--some countries there are fine and don't have these issues. For example, you're not going to find cases of kwashiorkor in the Masai but you're going to find it in Ethiopia). These things actually increase the susceptibility to infections such as HIV. These things also combine to increase poverty levels and inequity. Africa is super complex and we've pulled a lot of dumb dumb moves historically.

One of my cultural geography professors shocked us a long time ago with the statement that we should all stop supplying aid to Africa and said that Sally Struthers did an inordinate amount of damage to the development, population, overall health and more to the continent. That was really shocking at the time but today, it's even coming from Africans themselves stating that the continent must correct through the establishment of economic development that counters the crises that erupt during phases where that carrying capacity is tipped:
www.spiegel.de...

Here's an interesting article from NIH on the subject that I'm guessing you won't read either: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...