How to Feed the African Poor

The G8, apparently meeting rather fruitlessly in L’Aquila, Italy, in July, unexpectedly addressed the issue of poor African people feeding themselves. They promised US$20 billion over three years, and said they “wanted to focus less on sending food to the poor and more on helping small farmers … produce more and better crops”.

The difficulty of reducing starvation and improving human dignity in rural Africa has deeply troubled good people in affluent countries for many decades. Unlike most of the rest of the world, in much of Africa crop yields have not increased significantly over the last century. In recent decades between $8 billion and $10 billion worth of food has been imported annually into the continent. Thus massive amounts of aid money have simply gone into feeding people rather than to programs of health and education and development. (At the same time, there is a conundrum: is provision of food aid necessary because local production is tenuous, or has the incentive to…