In the 90's, we had been hearing this daily. But when we started to reap the fruits of the “Green revolution” and “Millennium Development Goals” suddenly this didn’t seem to be the case anymore – Africa is hungry. Does it mean we have succeeded in feeding it? The numbers do not speak that way. In the 90’s it was 1/3 of the population starving and today it is around ¼. However, the number is growing.
My son Jesus sharing with his age mate Helen - they were really born the same day
In the same way, the amount of people who do not have access to clean water is increasing. Not surprisingly conflicts seem to follow closely in places where there is a lack of food. And this is all happening despite, or maybe just because, millions of dollars are being pumped every year into African development, more efficient agriculture, infrastructure, environmental protection , nd humanitarian help. So what are we doing wrong and how can we change it?
There is no doubt the basic principle of well being and peace for people on Earth, is access to good quality food. It would seem, that we should be more than capable of feeding the 7 billion people when we see food production is exceeding around 30% of demand, but apparently, we are not. Some of the countries with the biggest agriculture production are the USA, China and the Netherlands. Of course we can’t expect those countries to feed Africa and more importantly that should not be our goal anymore. We don’t want to feed Africa, but to allow it to feed itself independently.
The "Green revolution" also came up with similar ideas. More freedom and self sustainability for Africa, but as it seem now, this did not happen. Also we are starting to see that the hastened approach and missing educational steps brought us to even bigger issue, that is starving people. A combination of a fast growing population, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, heavy machinery, chainsaws, wildfires and missing education are all leading into a drastic degradation of the original species, biodiversity, degradation of soil and water sources and to massive drying of the land. Africans are now starting to suffer from diseases they did not have before (for example cancer of the digestive tract). Additionally, the way the Green revolution happened has divided the gap between rich and poor even more. This is all leading to a greater food crisis that we have seen before.
So what is the African continent facing today? The fact that most fertile land is used to grow cocoa, bananas, oil palm and other crops to be exported to the West. A huge loss of harvest due to the wrong choice of crops and poor knowledge of it, inefficient technology, no experience with marketing and insufficient storage and production of agricultural products. Africans lose yearly about 200 million tons of food. That is 170kg per person. Only about 5-10kg are actually thrown away by the consumer, compared to for example people in America who throw away approximately 120kg of food per year (EU 80kg/year/person). Another 180kg/person is discarded in the USA after the harvest, through the production process and after the supermarket quota.
Today those issues are being targeted by the African Development Bank mainly by building new roads everywhere without consideration as to whether the place is an important water source, or a biodiverse area; by building storehouses for potatoes and importing genetically modified crops with higher dry resistance, often together with pesticides and fertilizers that have been banned in the EU and USA. We can only hope that this will reduce the losses of the African farmers. But the main issue is not being addressed – fast loss and pollution of the water sources and farming land.
On the other hand, the roads built from international development funds are often speeding up the process of cutting and burning up forests and subsequently reducing the ability of soil to hold water, rather than increasing the efficiency of working with the soil. In reality what happens is that the new road is build, all the remnants of the forest around is cut down, new and “better” potatoes and brought in together with new and “better” pesticides and fertilizers and those are given to the farmers for their first year. They are happy with the first harvest and the next year start to buy expensive fertilizers and ever evolving new seed varieties. The soil unfortunately is much less fertile in the tropical forest regions (still much more than deforested tropical regions), and so the farmers end up with little choice but to increase the amount of fertilizer each year. Many of them are illiterate so they decide how much fertilizer to use by themselves. As farmers were taught that it's easier to work on larger fields of monocultural crops, they now also have big issues with pests. Without the strong fertilizers and pesticides the local farmer have no chance to grow anything. The water reduction is being addresses by a GMO, of which we are still very ignorant and there are major doubts about its impact to nature and to human health.
Of course we all have strong faith that technology will save us, as it always has, at least as we in the West tend to believe. The truth is that more and more it seem technological progress is helping more rich people become richer, while the less fortunate (80% of the population) are kept poor.
There were never as many people on our planet as there are now. We were never so connected as we are now, thanks to the Internet and social networks. Small action can cause a massive snowball as we saw in last few years. Isn’t this the best time and opportunity to change the core principles on which our collapsing society stands? Can we manage in time?
So what can we do that no man has to live in fear that he will be starving tomorrow. What can we do to significantly reduce the risk of migration of millions of Africans to already overfilled cities or to Europe, where they don’t seem to be welcomed with open arms? Lets try to learn from history and not make same mistakes we did in the past, even the unintentional. Lets give more chance to science and research. Lets try to think more about the impact of our actions. Lets open our minds in self reflection to make steps to improve our lives and lives of the other people, both close to us and those far away.
There is not an exact recipe of what and how, but I believe that we are educated and intelligent enough to do more than just watch and do nothing. A good start is awareness. We can be more aware of the food we consume and which is giving us our life energy. Where did it grow? Under which conditions? How far did it have to go to reach your plate? How is the company rewarding its workers for preparing this food for you? Do they use palm oil? Those are just few examples.
Nothing can be more gentle to nature and other people, than to start growing at least a bit of our food ourselves again and to make sure the rest of what we eat has been grown well. The main focus should really be put on education, both ourselves and our children. Of course the implementation of environmental subjects to school would be very helpful, but education within the family still plays a very important role and we should not underestimate it.
Education is also playing a key role in Africa. When you are passing through African villages, it seems that schools are at every step, but the truth is that if you would double that amount and double the amount of employed teachers it would still not be enough. That is not even taking in consideration the methods of teaching and the qualification systems for the teachers. Simply we should start with support for good quality education as much as possible. Education proved itself as the only successful long term weapon in the fight against poverty. The relevant objection is that if the situation in agriculture (not the imagined, but the one really used in Africa) will not change, there may be no space for the new generation to live at. But even if that is the case, we may later prefer to be accept educated African migrants than otherwise. Supporting universities directly in Africa may also help us to speed up positive changes directly at the place where its needed.
Before the current generation grow up, we should focus on new agricultural technologies, which require substantially less water, fertilizing and pesticides. We should also not forget the quality of the storing and producing of food, which adds up to massive losses when neglected. But our main objective should be to immediately stop the deforestation and start reverting the damage as soon as possible. Without its forests Africa will soon be hopeless for any kind of agriculture.
Its been more than obvious that the current structure of the society, where 1 % of people own the same capital as the rest of 99 %, doesn’t seem overall very beneficial. Of course we do not want to deny the right and claim of anyone’s successes, but is this still valid if the success of one is keeping the others in poverty? Our World simply needs more people willing to take it as their success the improvement of the life of others, not to redeem their own sins, but simply to balance the odds with people who do not care. The change may be started with something new and disruptive. Such as a new technology called Blockchain, which have great potential to decentralize power, governance and other structures which are a long time overdue for improvement. Lets not repeatably try the same old dysfunctional solutions and instead put our energy into research and science. The future will not be build on technology which is trying to mine and extract as much as possible from our planet, but on technology which will minimize our ecological impact and also feed us all. Lets work together towards that future!
Data source: FAO
@martin.mikesCo-founder and coordinator of 
Article has been written for Magazine ROOTS in the Czech language to rais awareness about topics which are not discussed in the society enough.
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