I could not have wished for a better reason to point to Fred Pearce’s article over at Yale Environment 360 than Gary’s comment on my post about bride prices in Tanzania. He pointed out that “It is an article of faith among many development thinkers that the path to development runs away from the land to the cities” because that’s where the opportunities are. And that do do that, “farming must be automated to substitute mechanical energy for human energy”. And he picked up my challenge by pointing out that “Improved farming is in the eye of the beholder to some extent, depending on how ‘improved’ is defined”. All of which leads inexorably to Pearce on how human ingenuity and energy have improved farming and life for people in Machakos, Kenya, and elsewhere.
Pearce visited places that had been written off as beyond help because their population so far exceeded their carrying capacity.
Since independence in 1963, the Akamba’s population has more than doubled. Meanwhile, farm output has risen tenfold. Yet there are also more trees, and soil erosion is much reduced. The Akamba still use simple farming techniques on their small family plots. But today they are producing so much food that when I visited, they were selling vegetables and milk in Nairobi, mangoes and oranges to the Middle East, avocadoes to France, and green beans to Britain.
What made the difference? People. They made this transformation by utilizing their growing population to dig terraces, capture rainwater, plant trees, raise animals that provide manure, and introduce more labor-intensive but higher-value crops like vegetables.
This is not an isolated example, Pearce says.
In the highlands of western Kenya, the Luo people showed me how they were replacing their fields of maize with a landscape richer both commercially and ecologically. They had planted woodlands that produced timber, honey, and medicinal trees. I saw napier grass, once regarded as a roadside weed, sold as feed for cattle kept to provide milk and manure.
Much of Pearce’s article is devoted to bolstering the “Malthus-was-wrong-human-ingenuity-will-save-the-day” line of reasoning that says humankind need have no fear of the (grim) reaper. At least, I think that’s what he’s saying, although he does seem to accept some limits to population. That’s not my point here. My point here is that the examples Pearce gives are precisely what I mean by improved agriculture, and any woman who could bring experience of that sort of diversified, problem-solving, optimizing approach to providing for her future family would be worth her weight in rubies. The big problem remains the “development thinkers” and their clients.