Africa To Feed The World?

According to recent reports, Africa and Latin America have enough land mass to feed the world and its growing population. The irony of this is overwhelmingly obvious, but the news is being heralded as a stoic two fingers up to doom-mongers who believe that the planet is over-populated and that resources are rapidly running out. The reports come from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, just one year after the food crisis that saw prices of basic foodstuffs soar worldwide.

The report states that worldwide “Some 1.6 billion hectares could be added to the current 1.4 billion hectares of crop land… and over half of the additionally available land is found in Africa and Latin America,” The international reports are projecting ten years into the future and concludes that 400 million acres of fertile unused land will be available across 25 African countries for farming.

The agricultural model that provided the statistics is based on successes that have already been achieved in Thailand, where improved irrigation practices and effective fertilization transformed infertile land into productive smallholdings. It is hoped that once African smallholder farmers are given rights to land, they will be able to find success with the same process and finally be able to free themselves from poverty.

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