Is America the new begging bowl?

A sucker for a good cause - when a new appeal dropped into my mailbox yesterday, I sat up soberly and leaned into my screen:

"1 in 8 Americans is struggling with hunger" it said.

The very notion of 'America' and 'hunger' in the same sentence seems unthinkable when you're an African. In our minds, America is the fat, healthy, gluttonous success of capitalism. America's afflictions are consumerism, paternalism, heart attacks and obesity - not hunger.

But there it was, 33 million Americans starving. That's the equivalent of the entire population of Tanzania, or just 10 million shy of the entire population of South Africa.

The appeal also seems incongruous in light of President Obama's recent pledge of $73 million in donor aid to help rebuild Zimbabwe. (See my next blog called 'Obama's strings' blog for commentary on this).

If the plight of the American people is as dire as the appeal suggests, then this hardly seems the time to be spreading philanthropic cheer and deepening American debt.

At any rate, I digress. The point is that if it is possible that Americans cannot afford to feed themselves, it is equally possible that Africa could become the new breadbasket of the world.

Impossible you say? Consider this fresh perspective: Virtually all of the world's developed nations or most industrious nations actually fit inside Africa. All of these nations are self-sufficient in terms of food production, yet with the exception of China, all have far less arable land available to them for growing crops.

According to an FAO Survey in 2006, if different regions across Africa raised their food growing potential by between 150 and 700%, the continent that we have stigmitised with famine and poverty for as long as I've been alive, could actually feed the world. Now try this on for a new headline: "Africa saves the world from poverty"













Map source:
Hugo Ahlenius, UNEP/GRID-Arendal