Teetering on the brink of collapse: Why Africa must prioritise food security

I do hope that in two decades’ time we will look back at scientist James Lovelock’s prediction that “it’s going to be 20 years before [climate change] hits the fan” as merely another example of bogus prophecy. Right now, we’d be fools to ignore it.

For whether it’s talk of global recession, peak oil, runaway food costs or, indeed, exponential climate change, we cannot but be aware that so many converging trends suggest that we have entered a terminal age.

On Thursday, heads of European Union governments were presented with a report outlying the extensive nature of these “threat multipliers”. The apparatchiks of Europe are expecting destabilisation on a hitherto unprecedented planetary scale. Tellingly, the authors note: “Climate-change impacts will fuel the politics of resentment between those most responsible for climate change [the global North] and those most affected by it [the global South].”

The EU response to that almost biblical Job-like injustice should make it clear, if it isn’t already by now, that globalisation is a ruse. The report’s primary concerns are how to defend “European interests” abroad and how to protect domestically their prosperity from the deluge of environmental migrants (potentially one-fifth of the world’s population) fleeing an increasing number of “failed states”. The report also coincides with arguments mooted for the Nato summit in Bucharest next month to transform that organisation into “an instrument of energy security” or, better put, into a “pipeline police”.

In both instances what the EU is in effect saying — to adapt George Bush Snr’s offhanded remark at the Rio Earth Summit — is that middle-class consumptive lifestyles and the underlying patterns of economic growth are not up for negotiation!

The bourgeois response always parodies (for example, biofuels, carbon trading, fair trade, ethical living and organic goods) the far more foreboding, radical nature of the problem.

According to the Global Footprint Network, we would need 3,1 planets to sustain the whole world at, say, the UK’s level of consumption; or as Professor Roderick Smith of Imperial College has argued, a steady growth rate of 3% and a concomitant doubling of economic activity every 23 years will by 2100 lead to a certifiably mad 1 600% increase in global consumption. By 2115 that figure grows to 3 200% and by 2138 to 6 400%. Admittedly climate change may eventually restrain that growth but it will, again, simultaneously increase problems of shortage.

We are, in fact, at the beginning of a dystopian era of scarcity politics — one that will witness an intensified scramble by the rich for control of the twilight resources of the planet (witness the disturbing new nationalisms of the polar economy) while fortifying exclusion.

What should we as Africans do?

Firstly, we have to see the big picture — we are the most affected by climate change and the least prepared!

Let’s not use euphemisms; even if Lovelock’s claim that about 80% of the world’s population will be wiped out by the end of the century is only fractionally true, the years ahead are going to be cataclysmic. Crop failures, droughts, floods and water shortages are going to multiply a plethora of further degradation, diseases, ethnic-national conflicts and the displacement of people on an unparallelled scale. In this maelstrom, all the received certainties of our world are going to be chronically challenged.

While we must continue to state the case for global equity and critically contribute to some of those above-mentioned piecemeal improvements, we also have to prepare, right now, for our own survival.

It’s going to take courageous leadership, but for starters we have to ensure that land usage is wrested away from cash-crop, export-oriented mono-agriculture to meeting the domestic nutritional needs of the majority. It’s simply indefensible that Ethiopia exports tens of thousands of tonnes of birdseed to the US, or that Kenya wastes land and water growing prepossessing flowers for the aesthetic sensibilities of the rich. Not to mention that — especially in the DRC, which holds, locked up in the planet’s second-biggest rainforest, 8% of the world’s carbon — logging companies in Central Africa are criminally deforesting an area the size of Spain!

We need to accelerate land redistribution; reconsider nationalisation; decommodify food; and develop diverse, drought-resistant crops and better energy- and water-efficient technologies. We should try to see that everyone has three square meals a day, and only then contemplate — as an act of reciprocating solidarity — exporting our surplus.

It’s a matter of survival — although it won’t be enough, for we have woken up too late. It would be better to say that it is a matter of damage limitation.

For those comfortable neo-Malthusians who would arguably welcome the removal of billions of poorer human beings from the “carrying capacity” of the planet, remember that class and ecology are inextricably linked.

According to last year’s UN Human Development Report, Texas in the United States, with a population of 23-million, produces more carbon emissions than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, with 720-million people; and farm animals eat one-third of the world’s grain, take up 70% of agricultural land, and largely land up in the stomachs of the rich.

Lastly, we also, of course, need to nurture (non-state) autonomy, local communities and neighbourhoods because we are going to have to relearn the meaning of mutual aid and self-reliance; but because these cultural shifts will be of a longer term, I consider them to be of ancillary importance.

To adapt Bertolt Brecht’s aphorism: food first, paradigm shifts later!