Word: africa
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...Virtually all food in rural Africa today is de facto organic, because small farmers there cannot afford to purchase any nitrogen fertilizer. Fertilizer use per hectare in Africa is only 1/10 as high as in Europe or North America, causing crop yields per hectare to be only 1/5 as high as their Northern counterparts. Total production level has been declining on a per capita basis for the past three decades...
...Food systems in rural Africa are also painfully slow, especially for the women who prepare the meals. In order to serve a meal of nsima (maize), African women must first spend a season planting, weeding, harvesting, and storing their corn, then they must strip it, then winnow it, then soak it, then lay it out to dry, then carry it to a grinder or pound it by hand, then dry it again, and then finally—after walking to gather fuel wood and water—build a fire and cook...
...grow more food to keep pace with an increasing population, Africa’s farmers have shortened their fallow times, which exhausts soil nutrients. They also expand cropping and grazing onto more erodible lands, cutting more trees and destroying more wildlife habitat. Roughly 70 percent of all deforestation in Africa comes from this expansion of low-yield farming. It would be better if these farmers increased crop yields on land already cleared by applying some nitrogen fertilizer, but that would violate the mystical organic taboo...
...fashionable new choice. The non-academic purveyors of fashion seldom do. Robert Paarlberg is Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College and a Visiting Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of “Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa...
...changing nature of kinship networks, such as the growth in blended families – whether due to changing divorce patterns in the developed world or AIDS killing off parents in Africa – also has implications for the network of obligations and entitlements within families. Changing kinship systems in modern American society (with complex mixtures of remarried and cohabiting couples, half-siblings, step-siblings, and so on) are having profound implications for care giving, retirement, and bequests. Who cares for Grandma? Who gets her money when she dies...