The population of Africa will more than triple by the end of this century | Hacker News Reader

The population of Africa will more than triple by the end of this century

economist.com

37 pointsbookofjoe23 comments

According to OECD DAC statistics, since aid began in the 1960s donors have given a grand total of $502 billion to sub-Saharan Africa, which is worth about $866 billion in today's prices.

Aid has only made things worse for Africa and the world as a whole.

“The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.” – FDR

I would say that FDR's observation applies as much to Africa or any other country as it does to America.

Not to say all aid it bad, but the world has been pretty indiscriminate in how it doles out aid to Africa and done a terrible job of observing second and third order effects and consequences that undermine the benefits of aid.

The irony of FDR saying that, while having been responsible for creating an American welfare state that suffers from precisely the same pathology.

This is one of the reasons I like to share this quote. Even the godfather of the welfare state was aware of the negative consequences of sustained welfare. That's an order of magnitude greater awareness of the unintended consequences of these policies that people pushing these policies today understand. It's good to show them that even their welfare state idol was aware that welfare is not some unassailable panacea.

As with the significant downsides accompanying most welfare programs, their proponents tend to operate on the kind of knee jerk, surface level compassion that mostly serves to their own benefit. Aid that doesn't serve to primarily "help those to help themselves" tends to rob populations of agency, purpose, and competency.

That is why ive always been an advocate for tools as aid. Give someone a shirt, the local tailor loses out and the people become reliant on free shirts. Give them food, local farmers suffer and grow less food. But if you give them a loom? They produce and sell more shirts and fabric than ever before for cheap. Give a farmer a tractor, he farms more and produces more food and prospers from it. And there are so many other tools that could do so much. Send a lathe and a mill, now you can make your own machine parts, you can even make another lathe and mill, and perhaps a tool and die industry starts out giving jobs and produces all the other tools the locals need to survive. Need power? Well tools can build a windmill, or a generator. Need water? Tools can build you a well pump, or repair the old broken pump. Need transportation? Tools maintain your old modes of transport and builds new forms of transport. Low on materials for your tool projects? You can build mining drills, rails, mine carts, rock crushers, ore separators, ect.

Without tools, you can't build but the most basic shit out of scavenged trash. With tools, you can make scavenged trash into a goldmine of necessary materials. Industrialization is a story of building out a catalog of tools from your previous generation of tools, over and over and over again until you have every tool that everybody else has.

Hans Rosling rebuts this, especially in Factfulness.*

If you look at population trends in countries worldwide, populations routinely level out only after improving underlying economic and health conditions.

When infant mortality is high and children are an economic necessity, parents compensate by having many kids. When a country gets better healthcare and better economic opportunities, there's an initial generation of population explosion as more kids suddenly survive childhood, but then the population immediately plateaus and begins to recede.

The epidemiological studies and population data is overwhelming that the simple model Malthus used fails to explain human behavior.

* Also in some videos online:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnexjTCBksw

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI

But to put in a closing plug for Factfulness, it's one of the best simple and accessible primers how to avoid major cognitive biases, and also teaches a lot about the current state of the world.

Well if France for example start stoping their illegal exploitation of natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa it would be great and no need for aids.

AREVA is milking Niger for years to power their Nuclear infrastructure, manipulating their corrupted government and leaving their people to absolute poverty is sickening, not speaking about Mali and their illegal gold mines.

https://www.outline.com/3S8f9v Note: scroll to see the graph up top in its entirety, which illustrates the fact in the headline.

Can Africa produce enough calories of food to sustain a tripled population?

Should not be too hard. Mostly Africa still has a lot of catching up to do in terms of modern farming practices. They could easily make huge improvements simply by doing what the rest of the world has done for decades. And that's before you consider sustainable practices that are currently revolutionizing agriculture which improve productivity by using resources like water and nutrients more optimally which is of course super relevant in places where these things are scarce.

African economies are growing rapidly and as a result they are getting a lot smarter about how they use their resources. Also, there are a lot of African entrepreneurs getting into farming.

Yes, if you develop it.Angola, Zambia, Tanzania , Uganda, Kenia has more than enough water and arable land to accomplish this. But the development part is a big if.

How much of that land would require them to increasingly displace the megafauna?

If they can't then they won't triple their population.

I suspect they can, Africa is urbanising quite quickly at the moment. I'm sure you will see improvements in food production.

The real question is will climate change overwhelm any gains they make.

Do they need to? If they make enough money they can just buy the food they need - and more stuff besides.

Net food exporters are typically countries with a lot of arable land or with relatively low populations. This includes the US, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Ukraine, and a few others.

However, they have a lot of existing customers in Europe and Asia who appear to have better prospects for generating foreign exchange to buy food than does Africa. Africa generates foreign exchange mainly by selling raw materials, such as metals, petroleum, etc. Labor, per se, appears to have declining value as population increases and as AI automates more and more work. The incremental value of another billion workers is very low.

But that food has to come from somewhere, and the scale at which we do farming currently is already taking its toll on the environment.

If the scale at which we do farming is taking its toll on the environment at our level of productivity and knowledge, I can only imagine that less productive and less knowledgeable countries will have a much larger negative impact on the environment.

The countries they would buy food from are probably in a much better position to mitigate the harmful effects of industrialized farming. The question is whether this can be done at a price point that is affordable for Africa.

no.

why?

It's a continent with very fragile states arranged around colonial boundaries that make no sense in a post-colonial order, without enough water resources to actually sustain their projected population growth. Carrying capacity is a real thing, and the global population is already almost 8 billion people.

Climate change is going to wreck food supply chains across the globe, since the current food production and distribution has much less excess capacity than it did before.

I mean, gee.

What can one say? Be afraid, be very afraid? Is this supposed to be alarming?

Look at it from this perspective. The high school principal walks into your math class, and points out six or seven students, and says "These students will all produce 15 children a piece!"

Okay, fortune teller. I guess I have to do something about that? Maybe... tell them to wear condoms? Yeah, that works. Oh, right. Abstinence only birth control. Even better.

Or... Is it not bout the procreation, and the abortion, and the safe sex, and the birth control? What is this about?

Is it about the single child policies that China implemented? Is about the male baby bias that produced skewed demographics in China, decades later?

Maybe, it's that the jungle and the endangered species are all doomed, and that one giant continent may support all those people, but only through horrendous pollution and environmental damage. Or maybe advanced technology will enable new scales of population growth.

What should one say to this? Not everyone is going to be a millionaire? Famine might stifle the whole thing, producing horrible realities on the ground?

It may very well be that live births will produce an effective explosion of recorded names, brith certificates might triple count of the the standing population, but how long they last might produce similarly grim statistics to match, and like Rwanda, grim might be something of an understatement.

I mean, the report might be right. Things may happen on that continent, and it may be a train wreck. But for all the predictions, no suggested intervention. We're just going to watch it happen, so I guess someone deserves a pat on the back for calling it now, but it's useless information until events transpire, and even then, all we get is an "I told you so."

Yipee!

Environmental impact of population is determined by per capital resource use.

What is most dangerous about the future isn't population size, itstge three billion Indians and Chinese approaching United States resource use per capital.

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