Most of the world's food seems to come from North America, Brazil, East, South and Southeast Asia and Europe. Your task is to be able to see if more regions (non-Brazil South America, Central America, Caribbean, tropical regions in general, East Africa, West Africa, etc.) can produce as much food as the top agriculture producers. Also state the effects and plausibility as well.
AHC/PC/WI: More Major Food Producing Areas
- Thread starter TickTock The Witch's Dead
- Start date
Getting rid of western farm subsidies would be a start. Also less widespread communism.
Anything else more than that? That's too simplistic of an answer.
Zimbabwe has some real, serious potential if it can ever break out of Mugabe induced kleptocracy/insanity it's stuck in. As Rhodesia it was a major agricultural producer, despite all of the domestic insanit, and it's ag economy was oddly skewed toward export cash crops like tobacco and cotton to further enrich it's white elites... Get those cotton and tobacco acres growing wheat, corn and soy etc, in some sort of economic/social model that allows for basic justice and human rights and you'll have a breadbasket. I think Angola is on it's way to developing a potent ag sector as well, this might indicate more of South-Central Africa has a fair bit of potential as well.
On a final note: As a farmer, I can tell you the thing you need for farming is stability... This is the big problem in lots of Africa and some parts of South/Latin America, if you want more food in a given region, just add stable government (easier said than done of course).
On a final note: As a farmer, I can tell you the thing you need for farming is stability... This is the big problem in lots of Africa and some parts of South/Latin America, if you want more food in a given region, just add stable government (easier said than done of course).
Would earlier, greater advances in agriculture help? I know that the tropics aren't very ideal for a variety of reasons.
As I generally understand it, the highlands of Angola and much of Africa South of the Zambezi (excluding the terribly dry parts like Namibia) aren't terribly "tropical" and are more temperate/Mediterranean in terms of climate. I don't know if the stars just didn't align properly for the natives to experiment with agriculture (it seems to have been a rare occurrence OTL) or if the area is just completely devoid of proper "founder" crops. I know very little of the plants, though the area has at least one really promising potential animal domesticate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_eland#Husbandry . If you were looking at some sort of timeline where agriculture is developed there earlier. Otherwise, the area will need to import a "package" of domesticates at some point, getting the Mediterranean package there seems as though it would be ASB-ish much before colonial times, but what about a PoD that introduced Indian crops somewhere between 0-500 A.D.?
I'm talking in a more modern sense in which the countries can well utilize agricultural technology and see if they can seek what they make to the world market.
In that case. How about some sort of PoD, probably in the early '60's (before the situation becomes too radicalized), where the UK solves the Rhodesia problem with some sort of deal (likely involving Nkomo) where the whites feel secure (thus keeping their capital and skills in country for at least 1 more generation) and the native population has political power and opportunity?
Whoever strikes that deal probably deserves a dozen or so Nobel Prizes of course (I have zero clues as to how to strike that balance), but if you could manage that, it would likely set an example for Angola and Mozambique to follow in the early 70's. With a vibrant ag sector shipping through Mozambique, Zimbabwe is competitively positioned to reach markets in South East Asia and the Middle East.
One thought I had on how to equitably resolve the issue of whites owning ~90% of Rhodesia's farmland during this hypothetical "velvet decolonization" would be swapping ownership stakes in new Government sponsored industries (almost surely financed by American or British loans/guarantees) for land. Say this made ~40% of farmland available to black ownership (obviously imperfect, but compromises seldom are) and developed industries that refined the ag commodities into value added products (beer instead of barley, cloth/clothing instead of cotton, etc,etc). I have no idea if this could work as my Zimbabwe knowledge is limited to a book by Peter Godwin and a couple of hours on google/this site
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Really, production ag is full of virtuous cycles once it gets rolling, it just really needs that political stability to ever get past subsistence for survival in the first place.
Whoever strikes that deal probably deserves a dozen or so Nobel Prizes of course (I have zero clues as to how to strike that balance), but if you could manage that, it would likely set an example for Angola and Mozambique to follow in the early 70's. With a vibrant ag sector shipping through Mozambique, Zimbabwe is competitively positioned to reach markets in South East Asia and the Middle East.
One thought I had on how to equitably resolve the issue of whites owning ~90% of Rhodesia's farmland during this hypothetical "velvet decolonization" would be swapping ownership stakes in new Government sponsored industries (almost surely financed by American or British loans/guarantees) for land. Say this made ~40% of farmland available to black ownership (obviously imperfect, but compromises seldom are) and developed industries that refined the ag commodities into value added products (beer instead of barley, cloth/clothing instead of cotton, etc,etc). I have no idea if this could work as my Zimbabwe knowledge is limited to a book by Peter Godwin and a couple of hours on google/this site
.Really, production ag is full of virtuous cycles once it gets rolling, it just really needs that political stability to ever get past subsistence for survival in the first place.
Africa is by far the 'oldest' continent in that it has been in a non-tectonic part of the world for the longest time. This means that the soil never had much tectonic movement and is very old and lacking in nutrients. If you go there, the soil is famously red and dry in your hand. The yields are are very low, although it does have the advantage that the place is big meaning more land area for planting. Other than a few good areas, it would take a lot of fertilizer to make it work, or also Brazillian-style nutrient spreading and crop breeding techniques over 30 to 40 years.
Large wide-scale dropping of calcium ocide to regulate the soil's pH and other fertilizers.
Take in mind it only happenned because soy-bean is extremely profitable and would eventually cover the cost (as it did).
Nope, that usually leads to massive changes in the surviving flora and deflorestation to expand the farmlands.
Agriculture is usually never good for the environment in the density and intensiveness needed to compete with modern developed countries.
With enough water and fertilizer there aren't many places can't grow food. If you get rid of agriculture subsidies in the west you'll see a lot more food from all the globe because it actually makes sense to grow.