Reply #32: Very interesting OP -- and very ignorant, inhumane responses -- Pt 2

[HamdenRice]

Once you understand the modern economics of famines, development and demographics, it should become obvious that food aid does not cause population increase which lead to additional famines. This idea is the hard-hearted legacy of the economic philosophy of Thomas Malthus who proposed this over two centuries ago.

Malthus believed that every species produces more offspring than it can support and uses up its resources until its population reaches the limits of those resources.

Every modern economist and every student who has passed econ 101 will tell you that we know now that Malthus was wrong. If Malthus had been correct, England's population would never have exceeded what it was in 1800, but of course it did.

Indeed, any reasonable person who can (and more importantly actually does) read and reason can see that his ideas have no application to economic realities of the developing world. For example, while several African countries are among the few areas of the world that experience famine, Africa in general is the least populated of the world's continents. Africa has the lowest concentration of population per square mile of any continent. Moreover, most of the countries in Africa that are the most densely populated -- Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, for example -- are the ones that never experience famine.

Famines have regularly occurred in the least populated countries of the least populated continent -- Niger, Mali, Somalia, Congo.

The African historian John Ilife in his magisterial work on African poverty from the ground level -- The African Poor -- noted that over the last centuries, the most likely predictor of whether a person in Africa is poor is that he comes from a small family, while the most likely predictor of prosperity is that he comes from a large extended family. This is because Africa -- particularly rural Africa under conditions of little capital -- has a chronic labor shortage, and the best way for anyone to mobilize the labor to create prosperous agricultural enterprises is a big family. This gives lie to the notion that Africans have too many children.

Even an institution as heartless as the World Bank noted in its famous critique of African development -- Sustainable Development in Sub-Saharan Africa -- that one problem that plauges Africa is small populations.

Meanwhile the regions of the world with the highest population density -- Western Europe, Japan, China, India -- are now the least likely to have famines.

Any fourteen year old should be able to conclude that there is little relationship between population density and famine.

Malthus looked at the animal kingdom to draw his conclusions, and of course the reason his work does not apply to people is that people make tools -- which we call capital. So the amount of food that a unit of land produces is related to the labor and capital that is applied to it.

In capital poor Africa, this means that great amounts of labor must be deployed to produce crops. It is the absence of capital and labor, applied to agriculture, that leads to chronic low levels of productivity per acre and resulting rural poverty in Africa.

As I mentioned in post 29, when famine does occur, providing food has only a positive affect on moderating population growth. People in poor regions like Africa produce many children for several reasons. Obvliously, lack of modern birth control is one reason; but as Germaine Greer has pursuasively argued, African women have traditionally deployed a vast array of means of birth control -- although many of these systems have collapsed with urbanization and the loss of traditional medicine. Still, African women have more control over their reproductive lives than we generally credit them.

The main reasons they have many children are: the need for a labor force; old age insurance -- ie someone to take care of them as they age; and most important, insurance against the likelihood that other children will not survive.

One of the surest ways to reduce birth rates in Africa and other developing countries is to make sure that children survive. When mothers and fathers know that there is a near certainty that their infants will survive, they use birth control to prevent further pregnancies. Other ways to reduce population rates is greater authority for womenn and educational opportunities for girls; flexible labor markets that enable farmers to "hire rather than sire" a workforce, and old age pensions.

One way to convince parents in poor developing countries that their children will survive is to give them iron clad entitlements to food aid during economic crises -- the famous Chinese iron rice bowl.

Hence not just food aid, but the widespread knowledge that food aid is forthcoming during tough economic times, is one way to actually reduce population growth.

The purpose of population growth moderation in the low population areas of Africa, it should be remembered, are different from the rationale in crowded countries of Asia -- namely to ensure that the population growth does not outstrip capital formation. But assuming capital formation can be kept in line with population growth, we should expect African country populations to continue growing for some time.

The challenge is not population at all -- it's capital formation.