Africa and Peak Food

July 23, 2009 · Filed Under Uncategorized 

Yesterday at the Driffield show, I had the good fortune to meet David A. Murden, the founder of And Albert Foundation. Looking at the website,
www.and-albert.com, it appears they are doing a wonderful job with their policy of helping with the sustainable development of village life through projects such as the provision of clean water, the planting of fruit trees, and the ethical trading of craft products.In our conversation, it was clear that David is against aid that just results in the transfer of unsuitable and unsustainable western methods.

In my opinion, it is madness to encourage Africans to adopt our modern farming which is no more than a way to convert cheap fossil energy in to food energy at the rate of about 10 calories of fossil energy to deliver each calorie of food energy. That’s clearly unsustainable for us all and in any case, unaffordable for most Africans,

Instead, it would surely be better to spend money on research in to more efficient methods of collecting abundant solar energy , mainly by photosynthesis, and using it for food , fibre and fuel. Villagers could then be taught about the most suitable crop rotations using legumes to fix nitrogen, the recycling of soil nutrients and the safe storage of harvested crops.

Most of the rest of the world has followed us in the West to become dependent for our food on the undependable and finite resources of oil and gas. When a fuel supply crisis inevitably hits, Africa would then survive better than the rest of us.

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2 Responses to “Africa and Peak Food”

  1. Twitted by Peakfood on July 23rd, 2009 8:02 pm

    [...] This post was Twitted by Peakfood [...]

  2. TopVeg on July 27th, 2009 7:15 am

    Two projects are succesfully using trees to fix nitrogen fro the benefit of African farmers.
    1. Cfu in Zambia is using Conservation Agriculture techniques including restricted tillage, retention of crop residues and the planting of Faidherbia albida trees.

    2.World Agroforestry Centre in Kenya are using fertilizer trees that capture nitrogen from the air and transfer it to the soil, indicating that their use can reduce the need for commercial nitrogen fertilizers by up to 75 per cent while doubling or tripling crop yields.

    The pressing problem is to change agriculture in Africa immediatley. To do this, fossil fuels are needed to create an environment where more environmentally friendly systems can be put into place. We will not get there without using glyphosate in the short term.

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