14 Jun 2006
African leaders pledge farming 'Green Revolution'

A laudable goal, no doubt. Or is it?

"Population pressure now compels farmers to grow crop after crop thereby mining the soil of nutrients," Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo told heads of state and farming ministers from across Africa at a summit to address the crisis.

And why are there such population pressures? Because food has become incredibly cheap in Africa over the past few decades, thanks in large part to Western aid. This has actually discouraged local farmers to use efficient production methods - how can they compete with "free"? At the same time Western medical technology (vaccines, etc.) have increased the life expectancy - and the end result of all these factors is a population explosion.

The AIDS crisis on the continent is coming under some small measure of control, and once it is controlled will only add to the population pressures. And when those pressures get high enough, no amount of tax reduction of fertilizers and pesticides will be enough to keep up - and incrementally increasing agricultural production might actually lead to exponentially increasing populations.

Animals can be driven insane by placing too many of them into too small a space. Man is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself.
    -- Robert A. Heinlein

Nobody wants to see starving babies, nobody wants to see AIDS patients dying in droves, nobody wants death and destruction. But unless we can manage to keep our population at a sustainable level, that's exactly what we're going to see, in proportions that make todays crisis' look like kindergarten picnics.

If this sounds somewhat "Malthusian", then so be it. Most folks who criticize the population theories of Thomas Malthus have never bothered to actually read his works, and many of them cite the "Green Revolution" of the Fifties and Sixties as justification for the relegation of his ideas to the ash heap of history, ignoring the fact that Malthus himself recognized the potential for increases in production and took them into account. I'd like to suggest they investigate his thoughts a bit more closely: no, I'm not suggesting that he was entirely correct in his assumptions, but I am suggesting that at the root his ideas were interesting and raise fundamental questions about the human condition.

And we ignore them at our own risk.

African leaders recommended on Tuesday scrapping taxes on fertilizers as one of 12 key measures to foster a "Green Revolution" in farming and reduce hunger in the poorest continent.

(link) [CNN]

08:17 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Four out of five head lice resistant to common treatment

Humans have a remarkable tendency to over use the tools they develop - "when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail". While this may lead to some laughable inefficiencies when building a shed, trying to use a screwdriver as a drill has the potential to destroy only the single tool so misused: it cannot destroy "the screwdriver" as a tool per se.

This is not so when dealing with living organism: Malathion was once the most common insecticide, but it's rapidly becoming completely impotent in dealing with several major varieties of pests. And it's happening because of our constant use for so many decades, and the theory of a gentleman you may have heard of: a chap named Charles Darwin.

There have been concerns for some time now about these practices, and not just with insecticides. We need to learn to walk a bit more softly, and not be so ready to use our big sticks at the drop of a nit.

Four out of five head lice are resistant to a common treatment used to eradicate them, finds a study of Welsh schoolchildren, published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. The most common types of treatment for head lice in the UK are organophosphates (malathion) and pyrethroids (permethrin and phenothrin), which act directly on the insect's nervous system.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

06:42 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link