The Republic of Niger fascinates me. It's a country of 20 million people, with desert covering almost the entire country. Like, 95% of it. It's has one of the lowest HDIs in the world today, but what could be done with a POD of its independence day (3rd of August 1960) to give it a high HDI - or at least a HDI at the same level as Botswana?
AHC: Niger with high HDI
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Burton K Wheeler
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Well, to get it it to Botswanan levels of prosperity you'd need to fill it with diamonds and reduce the population by about 90%.
To be fair, Niger has something even more important to the Great Powers - uranium.
Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
What's the De Beers of uranium? How does that translate into prosperity the way a diamond monopoly owned by the country's government does?
Fair point. It doesn't help that the other major exporter for most of the Cold War was East Germany.
Not necessarily. The reason Botswana became a success story was because of excellent leadership. Tons of African countries have plentiful natural resources that were squandered by corrupt regimes. Botswana, which was dirt-poor not just by world standards but even by Sub-Saharan African standards upon independence, had the good fortune to be led by Seretse Khama, who used the resources wisely in building up infrastructure, creating other sources of economic growth, and investing in education.
Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
Sure, natural wealth isn't a guarantee of HDI (look at Equatorial Guinea), but where would Botswana be with a large population or with no diamonds?
Niger has had to my understanding significant recent success concerning its ecological policy, or more precisely ecological developments in lacking one. They had had a rather bad policy inherited from colonial days, (and hardly unique to them, plenty of other states had equally bad policies) which effectively encouraged chopping down trees, placed forests as state property that nobody was interested in maintaining, and encouraged mono-culture. It was only recently that this shifted to farmer-managed natural regeneration where farmers don't plant trees themselves but instead focused on preserving and cultivating trees that were themselves growing naturally, and didn't clear their fields to destroy them. This has been of great help in enabling a much large number of trees to be cultivated and most of all maintained since a critical difference was that previously huge number of trees were planted but nobody bothered to take care of them, so they all died. There has been a resultant huge increase in the number of trees, many millions of hectares, and these trees are much more effective in weathering climatic problems and countering them, than previously. If this change could be implemented earlier, then it could do much to help confront the tremendous drought and ecological problems of the 1980s.
Now how to achieve that? That is the hard part. There has to be an awareness that the different method of tree planting, and it has to be effectively spread. I don't think Western NGOs are a good agent to do this, and nor is the government. Instead, when this starts developing in from what I understand was the early 1970s, it has to capture the attention of somebody with important status in the civil sector, maybe a religious leader, and be more widely adopted. That would help to avoid the drought and ecological catastrophe of the 1980s. It would not make Niger into a developed nation, but it would leave it with a more vibrant and protected agricultural sector and less scars from environmental catastrophe.
The other thing is that preferably the population would not grow as much. The number of children per women has been falling, but the population has exploded by a vast number. For a Sahel country, with an inherently ecologically fragile zone, going from 2 million people to 17 million is taxing. An industrial economy can absorb that, but if your population is inherently living off of the primary sector of the economy... well, that's not good at all. But getting an effective family planning program early on in Niger seems even harder to me.
Those borders were certainly not drawn up by idealist Westerners. They were drawn up by Westerners who were creating their colonial administrations and territories, not out of any sense of "idealism". There were a variety of ideas provided in Afrique occidentale française concerning redrawing the borders to fit ethnic and religious realities (which probably would not have worked very well because the French administration naturally had problems with getting good ethnographic information, and the actual situation on the ground in Africa is very complex and diverse). As far as changing those around post-WW2, well in my opinion as far as continental wide redrawing, that's even worse. People focus on the destruction of tribal and traditional identities, and to some extent that's true, but that's what any nation-state should be doing in the long run. The nations which emerged were fragile but they nevertheless did have a national identity, and tearing that, at any time post WW2, is going to be incredibly destructive and take a very lengthy time to be able to put Pandora's box back together, because it sabotages and underlines the national identity and nation-state process. I've argued in other threads that Africa would be better off without colonialism, but once the colonial structures are in place, the sunk cost in them means that changing them around is prohibitively damaging.
Now how to achieve that? That is the hard part. There has to be an awareness that the different method of tree planting, and it has to be effectively spread. I don't think Western NGOs are a good agent to do this, and nor is the government. Instead, when this starts developing in from what I understand was the early 1970s, it has to capture the attention of somebody with important status in the civil sector, maybe a religious leader, and be more widely adopted. That would help to avoid the drought and ecological catastrophe of the 1980s. It would not make Niger into a developed nation, but it would leave it with a more vibrant and protected agricultural sector and less scars from environmental catastrophe.
The other thing is that preferably the population would not grow as much. The number of children per women has been falling, but the population has exploded by a vast number. For a Sahel country, with an inherently ecologically fragile zone, going from 2 million people to 17 million is taxing. An industrial economy can absorb that, but if your population is inherently living off of the primary sector of the economy... well, that's not good at all. But getting an effective family planning program early on in Niger seems even harder to me.
Those borders were certainly not drawn up by idealist Westerners. They were drawn up by Westerners who were creating their colonial administrations and territories, not out of any sense of "idealism". There were a variety of ideas provided in Afrique occidentale française concerning redrawing the borders to fit ethnic and religious realities (which probably would not have worked very well because the French administration naturally had problems with getting good ethnographic information, and the actual situation on the ground in Africa is very complex and diverse). As far as changing those around post-WW2, well in my opinion as far as continental wide redrawing, that's even worse. People focus on the destruction of tribal and traditional identities, and to some extent that's true, but that's what any nation-state should be doing in the long run. The nations which emerged were fragile but they nevertheless did have a national identity, and tearing that, at any time post WW2, is going to be incredibly destructive and take a very lengthy time to be able to put Pandora's box back together, because it sabotages and underlines the national identity and nation-state process. I've argued in other threads that Africa would be better off without colonialism, but once the colonial structures are in place, the sunk cost in them means that changing them around is prohibitively damaging.
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And that's a good thing, unless if you want every country from Mauritania to the Cape entangled in scores of bush wars against an increasingly lengthy list of nationalities who want their own state and their state border to be modified, as all regional cooperation breaks down, countries splinter, millions die in wars, Rwanda's genocides become common across the continent, and fragile national identity collapses. I can't think of a better way to destroy the progress that Africa has had than that. There might be some regions where in exceptional cases you could get away with territorial modification, but once territorial borders in general become up for redrawing, you're going to get a very lengthy list of problems indeed....
First of all, thank you for a very informative and well put together post.
So essentially, Niger's life standards could be increased by implementing a sustainable forestry policy and wise spending by the government? Thus increasing life standards and decreasing the necessity of getting more children than the country can handle?
My only question is how that kind of sustainable forestry can be turned into an economy - like Burton pointed out, Botswana was lucky to sit on diamonds, and could use the money for long-term investments. But where does that sort of money come from in Niger's case?
With the same GDP you can increase the HDI with a nomenklatura ("Communist" as in Moscow or Beijing) government. A short sharp coup would best. A guerrilla war would of course not be. Nomenclature states have a tendency to have better HDI type results for GDP/capita due to ideology leading social investments; and, due to the greater emphasis on Fordist types of labour discipline. There are of course negatives to these states from liberal-democratic or libertarian measures of human freedom. But the challenge was HDI not civil freedom.
Maybe a uranium Laos as an equivalent.
Doesn't get the challenge but gets you 40ish places in HDI?
Yours,
Sam R.
Maybe a uranium Laos as an equivalent.
Doesn't get the challenge but gets you 40ish places in HDI?
Yours,
Sam R.
Deleted member 109224
A trans-saharan railroad being built by the French in the colonial period might be beneficial. It'd link the country more to international trade.
More emigrants sending home remittances would be a plus too.
More emigrants sending home remittances would be a plus too.
Glad to be of use!First of all, thank you for a very informative and well put together post.
So essentially, Niger's life standards could be increased by implementing a sustainable forestry policy and wise spending by the government? Thus increasing life standards and decreasing the necessity of getting more children than the country can handle?
My only question is how that kind of sustainable forestry can be turned into an economy - like Burton pointed out, Botswana was lucky to sit on diamonds, and could use the money for long-term investments. But where does that sort of money come from in Niger's case?
I wouldn't classify either problem as being one of money. The forest changes recently have happened almost despite of, not because of, government action. Its great genius is that the Nigerois farmers did it themselves, for essentially no cost. There's nothing which prevents it from being implemented earlier and having positive effects, except realizing that that model exists and spreading it to farmers in general. Which is a hazy subject, can't just be done with a bureaucrat snapping their fingers (the bureaucrat has to know about it in the first case too) but I don't think is impossible. Reducing the population explosion is harder: family planning only started to become a serious thing in the 1970s, and it took a long time to start to get its act together. Initially developed nations were in fond of invasive measures to limit fertility, like sterilizations, while the poorer countries were favorable towards economic development, and it wasn't until the 1980s that that flipped. A lot of Africans are suspicious that family planning is part of an imperialist plot to suppress their population too. Presuming that one decides to implement it, it it shouldn't be that hard, NGOs could cover the cost of education and dispersing condoms, the problem is getting the government to actually accept that since they would have qualms about those programs, and its a conservative Muslim country so that adds onto that feature...
As for your hopes about this being a serious economic improvement for the country... well, a more productive agricultural sector should theoretically at least enable less imports or more exports. It should also enable more timber. But neither of those are particularly high value commodities, and Niger's infrastructure is frankly pretty terrible, there's no rail line to export bulk goods out of the country, there are some roads at most (many of which are not paved), and I don't even know what the infrastructure situation was in the 1960s when the country became independent. Probably much worse roads, although even then there were no railroad lines (which is a bit odd, generally the colonial powers loved their railroads and built a fair number of them, a lot of which have fallen into decay following independence - maybe due to mismanagement, but I suspect that the problem is truck competition which hardly existed in the colonial era), and railroads are much cheaper than trucks for transporting goods. To get to international customers you have to move a very significant distance through at least Benin or Nigeria and probably a lot of ways through Niger itself, and if you're only using trucks then the costs go up. There aren't many modern countries which can say that they're rich off of a subsistence agricultural economy and timber exports, add in the terrible infrastructure problems, and it won't be of much help in the economic sense.
But HDI takes into account income, life expectancy, and education. Income will be somewhat raised by this since the agricultural sector, which produces 50% of the GDP, will be more productive. A smaller population helps for a country reliant on primary resources because those are essentially fixed, so if you have a population surplus that's going to be diminishing returns and reduced productivity. So farmers will produce more and will be more productive, and thus bigger food surpluses. Life expectancy and education will be much better off since the farmers will be less destitute. Maybe if the programs were done well I would dare to hope for an HDI equivalent to Senegal. Which still leaves a way to go before Botswana, but one has to start somewhere. You would need something bigger to get to Botswana's level, that this would have to be combined with.
Those trees could be used to produce charcoal which is good for local farmers and also makes a nice export. Recently in Ethiopia, Namibia, and other African countries, there's been an interesting phenomena where invasive mesquite trees (IIRC a similar phenomena occurs with acacia trees) have become established, which impacts farmers and pastoralists. Their large thorns are a huge pain (literally), and they spread very easily. On the other hand, these trees can supply charcoal production, are good for food security, and can be processed into animal feed.
OTL it was introduced to parts of Africa by various local governments, but they failed to fully consider how to utilise the plant and the negative effects from it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080820090228/http://www.dankalia.com/ethiopia/tree.htm
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479715304084
OTL it was introduced to parts of Africa by various local governments, but they failed to fully consider how to utilise the plant and the negative effects from it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080820090228/http://www.dankalia.com/ethiopia/tree.htm
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479715304084
I have my doubts. Kerala already had the highest levels of literacy at the time of Indian independence, and has very substantial amounts of money sent back to it by emigrants overseas, such as those sent to the Gulf states. It hasn't been as effective in building up its productive base, instead relying on those remittances. Literacy growth has been slower than other states, it simply already had a very high level already so there isn't much ability to further improve that. Kerala's economic growth has stagnated in a number of sectors: despite that Kerala has achieved very high HDI, but I'm doubtful that even with better distributed resources, that Niger's much lower economic productivity will be able to achieve the same results. Is that to say that everything about the Keralan model is bad and can't be applied to Niger? No, more that it is a cosmopolitan coastal territory which was already socially advanced at the time of Indian independence and which belongs to a nation where the cold-war struggle is somewhat held at abeyance being compared to a landlocked, isolated, provincial, and backwards nation where conflict between Communist and non-Communist groups is much more deadly (if a communist country did win like in Kerala in 1957, then the result would probably not be conciliatory negotiation, but rather French paratroopers landing to back a Western-supported coup attempt by the military) can yield some differences for what can be implemented in the former as compared to the latter.
The Avenger
Banned
Would giving people in Niger the same living standard as African-Americans work for this? After all, African-Americans live worse than White Americans do but much better than Africans do.