The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) clearly believes that Africa is incapable of developing a
19th-century market economy in the 21st century. Where’s the
outrage?
In particular, I am referring to the just-released “Policymakers
Summary” of an upcoming UN report on “Climate Change Impacts,
Adaptation and Vulnerability.” It predicts that “agricultural
production, including access to food, in many African countries and
regions is projected to be severely compromised by climate
variability and change….This would further affect food security
and exacerbate malnutrition on the continent.”
With a diversified economy Africa and the world can easily deal
with declines in local food production brought upon by bad weather.
Nations of the world do it all the time, every year. The mechanism
is the global market.
Many nations on earth do not produce, in requisite amounts, all
the raw material required for the diets people desire. Even
vegetarian diets are complicated, requiring a proper balance of
amino acids that can come from mixing legumes (soybeans, lentils,
etc.) with rice and maybe some corn. How many small countries have
sufficient agrodiversity and productivity?
More people like meat. Meat that isn’t grass-fed (i.e. about 99%
of what’s in the store) requires a more complicated production
catena: corn and soybeans, ground into food, are transported to
intensive feeding facilities (quaintly and erroneously called
“family farms”), fed to cattle, pigs, and chickens that are trucked
to slaughter, packaged, chilled, shipped, bought and cooked.
No one person can do all this economically, nor is it likely
that it’s best done even in one county or state. Some large
countries might do it all, but not many others. Instead , the world
relies on markets. People good at producing soybeans and corn (like
the U.S.) may export feed to other countries that don’t have such a
fortunate climate or favorable land (say, Mexico), and eventually
the beef appears on a taco in Toluca, bought by a worker at
Daimler-Chrysler’s billion-dollar plant that produces PT Cruisers
for U.S. consumption.
Sometimes the weather is bad in the U.S., or we might divert a
lot of our corn into politically-correct ethanol, reducing the
supply (and resulting in some grumbling south of the border). The
price will rise, but someone else will produce more, where the
weather or political climate are more favorable, and there will
still be a supply.
In Africa, there’s a tremendous amount of labor available for
manufacturing, and it is in a terrific location to supply Eurasian
markets. Why condemn the continent to low-yielding agriculture and
poverty? If Mexico produces cars now, why can’t Africa
industrialize? A relatively constant stream of capital will
purchase food more reliably than what local weather can
produce.
The UN is also assuming that agricultural technology in Africa
will not change, in this century, in a fashion similar to what
happened in much of the rest of the world in the last century.
Rather, Africa’s food supply, and that of nearly nowhere else on
earth, will be threatened by climate change.
The resilience of modern agricultural technology is obvious.
Consider a climatically diverse state like Virginia. Temperatures
average 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the agriculturally intensive
southeast than they do in the in the Shenandoah Valley to the
northwest. The southeast gets over 25% more rain than the
northwest. But, corn yields are the same.
Operationally, there’s little difference between a farmer moving
to another climate or the climate moving around the farmer. In
resilient economies, both adapt.
Yet the specter of famine is a constant theme. How many American
adults were taught in school that India — now populated with over
a billion people — was on the verge of starvation? Paul Ehrlich’s
1968 book, The Population Bomb, taken as gospel then,
stated “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more
people by 1980,” and “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the
situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by
1971.”
Obviously Ehrlich was wrong. India adopted high-yielding “Green
Revolution” wheat in the early 1970s, followed by similar advances
in rice production, at it became a substantial net exporter of
food, as it is today. And, even if there were widespread crop
failures, the now-diversified Indian economy would have little
problem purchasing food on the international market.
Apparently the UN does not believe Africa is capable of
emulating India. The IPCC believes Africa will remain so
undeveloped that it will be unable to diversify its economy enough
to avoid famines in a world that is awash in food.
In other words, the UN is saying that Africans are incapable of
existing in the modern world for the coming century. One might ask,
on what cynical model of international development is such a
pejorative outlook based? And what gives the UN’s climate
scientists such special knowledge that they predict that Africa
will not enter the world’s market economy?
