Africa in 2040: The Darkened Continent

[GliderGuider]

I 've just completed an analysis of the food and energy (in)security situation in Africa, and I thought I'd give all my friends here at DU the first look at it.

I'm posting the introduction, and the entire article is at Africa in 2040: the Darkened Continent.

There is a darkness moving on the face of the land. We catch glimpses of it in newscasts from far-off places that few of us have ever seen. We hear hints of it on the radio, read snippets about it in newspapers and magazines. The stories are always fragmentary, without context or connection. They speak of things like inflation in Zimbabwe, war in Chad, electricity problems in Johannesburg, famine in Malawi, pipeline fires that burn hundreds in Nigeria, political violence in Kenya, cholera in Congo. Each of these snapshots of grief heaves briefly into view, then fades back into obscurity. With every fresh story we are left asking ourselves, "Is there something bigger going on here, some unseen thread connecting these dots? Or is this just more of the same from a continent that has known more than its share of misery?"

This paper is my attempt to connect those dots, to tease some order out of the chaos of the news reports. I will use some very simple numerical techniques to fill in the missing lines, and in the end a picture will emerge. I can tell you in advance that the picture is fearsome beyond imagining, and you may well be tempted to avert your gaze. I would advise you instead to screw up your courage and take a good look. It is crucial to our future as a civilized race.

Until we get to that point, however, some of the things I'm going to tell you may seem a little dry. There are a number of graphs in this article, and if you're like most people you may be tempted to skip over them and get on with the story. Again, I'd advise against that. The true story of what's going on is in those numbers. It's very difficult to tell a tale this big with individual anecdotes, as compelling as they may be. While personal stories do bring the situation to life, they cannot effectively convey the scope and scale of something as large as we'll be investigating. I've tried my best to make the graphs readable, to keep the critical information unobscured. Each of the graphs has a crucial tale to tell. I hope you spend some time with each one, thinking about what those bloodless numbers mean in terms of human lives.

At the end we will discuss what the world is, isn't and should be doing to change the picture. There is much to discuss and ponder, much outrage to express, and perhaps even some fears to deal with. But there is also the promise of hope, of challenges to meet, perhaps even redemption of a sort. Until we meet there, lets get busy filling in those missing lines.

[mike_c]

1. this looks like very good reading-- bookmarked and recommended....

I'll have to come back and read it later, but it certainly looks like it should stay available for a while!

[bananas]

2. Thanks - k&r nt

[pitohui]

3. well it's a difficult situation but i don't think the whole continent will go dark

but remember years or decades ago when we thought latin america was an impossible situation and, although the future is uneven, we see changes such that people from usa and canada are now seeking to relocate in some latin american enclaves, and people from usa are frequently seeking medical or dental care there or even eye surgery -- we do see that progress is possible but much of it has to come from the local people and it's often better if the usa just stands out of the way and stops
"helping" (how much of the war and harm in latin america came from our "help"?) -- one of the reasons people got disgusted with usa giving aid to foreign countries is because the latin american "aid" invariably wound up in the pockets of military or dictators and actually ended up harming the "real" people -- "honey, we don't see that, the military keeps that money," as a lady from honduras told me in the 70s, "that's why people are so mad when they hear the usa claiming that they sent all this aid"

there are some other nitpicks i could offer, but i don't want to be throwing darts at the "small stuff" when you've obviously put a lot of work into this

one thing i feel you should fix at the end of your piece, you say: Every African birth that is not prevented from now on will become a child or young adult who will die an agonizing death with a swollen, empty belly. i don't believe EVERY birth could possibly have an outcome that terrible, and while i firmly believe in the widespread availability of condoms, birth control, abortion on demand, ob/gyn care, etc. then i think a statement that "every" birth in africa is a bad idea is the kind of thing that people will misinterpret -- that's one sentence i would definitely re-cast to be sure it's clear that you are supporting the woman's ability to plan her family, not trying to stop folks from having families altogether

[GliderGuider]

4. Thanks for the suggestion.

On reflection, I agree about the wording. I've changed the offending paragraph to read as follows:

Now is not the time to stand on ideological or religious principles against contraception. From this point on, more and more of the babies that are conceived stand a chance of becoming early victims of starvation or disease. Such a ghastly torment must surely be an affront to both Man and God.

On your other point, I don't agree that there are any serious parallels to be drawn between the current situation in Africa and the state of Latin America in the '60s. That situation was essentially political. While the politics certainly don't help the horror story in Africa, their trap is much more fundamental.

If you have nitpicks you'd like me to consider, please shoot me a message. You can do it wither through DU or you can find my email address at my web site.

[motocicleta]

5. Great work, Paul, as usual.

I am not the one to analyze your analysis, but my seat of the pants reading says you're onto something here - especially with your conclusions and action plan.

Unfortunately, I have very little hope left that humans can overcome their "ideological or religious principles against contraception". As people live in a world that presents them with a lower and lower per capita energy diet, they seem to increasingly need more external guidance, and the desiccated corpse of religion fills that role. I fear we will see more, not less, adherence to these types of amoral and illogical belief systems in the coming decades, which will translate into doing less and less of the work you prescribe.

Perhaps your writing can be an antidote for that. My fingers are crossed.

[Riktor]

6. My two cents (a cultural commentary)

It is not coincidence developing and undeveloped countries all have high rates of population growth. Couples reproduce far more often than "western" couples due to, as you mentioned, high infant mortality rates, and because they need children. In undeveloped and developing countries, children work and, if they are lucky, fetch dowries. Children are not simply the next generation, they are a financial investment. Thus, while it seems noble t spread awareness of contraceptives in places like Africa, it is going to be an uphill battle simply trying to convince Africans to stop having children and, in effective, take large financial or material risks.

With that in mind, shouldn't we also work to develop Africa to the point where children are no longer a financial commodity?

[GliderGuider]

7. You're talking about Phase III of the Demographic Transition Model

Unfortunately, developing a continent that already has a billion people to the level you envisage requires too many resources and too much time. I did an analysis (published here) that used energy consumption as a proxy for the industrial development assumed by the DTM. I figured out that it would take five times the world's energy to industrialize the poor half of the world enough to stabilize their population. Put in terms of Africa alone, we would need to double the world's energy production and somehow reserve all that additional supply for Africa's use.

The resources required go far beyond energy, though. Development also requires water, infrastructure and capital - all of which are in desperately short supply on the Darkening Continent.

So, they won't be able to develop themselves into stability, even with our help, and certainly not within the next 20 years. As far as I can tell, that leaves condoms or tragedy as their only options.

[motocicleta]

8. kick

[GliderGuider]

9. Publish in haste, repent in leisure...

I've already started to regret soft-pedaling the message of what I've discovered about the true state of Africa. I will probably re-write or expand parts of the article to give a more frank appraisal of what we're looking at here. My numbers show that Africa has less than a decade before the continent starts to dissolve undeniably before our eyes. In fact, as the numbers show, it's dissolving already but people are simply unwilling to face up to that fact. I'm unsure what is to be accomplished in the face of this unpleasant reality by brave talk of promoting condoms and meeting the Millennium Development Goals.

Tonight my girlfriend compared my projections to those of the IPCC. We all know the IPCC started with good data but then published sanitized projections to enhance their acceptability to both TPTB and the general public. In the scant year since the initial publications of the IPCC AR4 we have all started to realize just how far their conclusions have fallen short of the true situation. My projections in this initial version of the article suffer from exactly the same problem, but I don't have the excuse of having to please political masters to ensure their publication. I ran away from the data, and in doing so I have traded honesty for acceptability. In the process much of the impact of the message has been lost, perhaps eroding much of its value.

This may seem like an astonishing thing to say, as I suspect that to many of you the conclusions I published appeared overwhelmingly bleak as it is. I assure you, that no matter how dire you thought my tale was, the numbers hint at a story that is several times worse. The facts of the case are sound, but I definitely need to re-write the discussion. There less pusillanimous conclusions to be drawn.