Hi CM,

The key to lowering the birth-rate across Africa may be female education: educated women have more leeway in when and who to marry, and more access to birth control. But cultural prejudices, religion and corruption in government are holding all that back.

Of course, Africans have been agriculturalists for thousands of years, perhaps contemporaneous with the First Farmers in what are now Kurdish areas of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. But it's usually been done with manual labour alone, given the lack of domesticable draught animals in Africa until more recently, so land has been cultivated by hoe, and more likely by women. Machine-based technology probably frees up women more than men, so a focus on education for girls should go hand in hand with mechanisation.

Yes, much of Africa is dry, but its rivers are the biggest in the world taken together, after all, so there is enormous potential to develop irrigation systems across much of Africa over this next century. Climate change seems to be helping to extend the greening of the Sahel into the Sahara, a few miles each year. So, while China's population will start to decline after 2050, to be a fraction of Africa's after 2100, perhaps unintentionally, Chinese investment in African infrastructure may help to lift Africa's commercial potential enormously.

Joe

America has heard 7.000 boy scott leaders have sexualy asualted boys in their care
Roman Catholics, include other Churches including the one of my birth C o E have, we have seen, been doing the same for at least a hundred years
What are we to make of the millions mudered by Muslim terrorists, those dead being Muslim too
Do we dare say all, in all those groups are bad, unfit to live with us
Some reality is called for here
Some thing that just may be acheived to end terrorism, and blind hate
One world, even with the loss of some freedom, may, in 200 years after its formation, bring about a better humanity

Belly if Africas population can grow from 229 million to 1.2 billion in 70 years, I doubt you could say they lack the ability to feed themselves.

Like Oz, Africa is a sunburnt country, & will always have droughts. This is not the problem, but the but the people out breeding their areas ability to support the numbers.

Famine has always been natures way of controlling population, be it kangaroos, pelicans or people. It is a real problem when the west leap in & feed the millions when droughts occur. This does not help in the long run, simply keeping more alive to overbreed further in the next good time. This support simply allows even greater misery on more people in the next drought.

When one of our do-gooder charities goes in with an expensive boring rig, & sets up a bore with a hand pump to supply hundreds it simply proves the people don't deserve help. If a hand pump works it proves the water is only about 20 Ft, & no more than 26Ft down. If a village of a thousand people are too damn lazy to dig themselves a well by hand, they deserve to have no water.

I would guess that like me, you were digging wells before you were a teenager. I fitted down the hole better than dad, so I did the digging, & dad pulled up the buckets of dirt. At Bathurst we struck water at 8Ft, but in a dry summer had to get down to 25Ft for a permanent supply.

This is what you did, if the council or government did not do it for you with reticulated water. I see no reason that Africans should not do it for themselves.

Belly,

"One world, even with the loss of some freedom, may, in 200 years after its formation, bring about a better humanity .... "

What ?! So we're supposed to work towards something, in the hope that, once that system has been put in place, our descendants will wait for 200 years, and lose a bit of freedom, before this Glorious Utopia arrives ?

Was it Barnum or Mark Twain or Lenin who said that there's one born every minute ? No, that you can fool some of the people all of the time, etc. ?

Can we get something straight, Belly ? Utopias inevitably degenerate into fascist Dystopias, usually within months. Lenin was signing off on mass executions, even of the workers and sailors at Kronstadt, within months of the 1917 revolution. Mao was ordering executions of potential rivals well before their revolution. Pol Pot started his ghastly 'revolution' with mass executions. [Mass executions seem to get earlier and more frequent, don't they ?] I don't think our descendants will need 200 years to find all that out.

No, there will never be a Perfect Society, not even one which - regrettably - has to 're-educate' or 'extract' some dissidents and malcontents in vast numbers. The Perfect Blueprint seems to immediately come up against the irritating wrinkles of the Real World. But whoever points that out is, of course, an enemy and must be 're-educated', and their body parts sold off.

Look at Pol Pot's Cambodia, Belly: there's your Perfect Society, with its 'loss of some freedoms'.

Joe

Thanks guys, you've made my points for me, or at least strengthened my argument.
I am reminded of an old saying; give a man a fish and he and his family will eat for a day.
Teach the man how to fish, and he and his family will never go hungry again.
This is precisely one of the points I was making.
From what little I know of Africa, I feel that with focus and will, it can become self sustaining, and not have to rely on charity.
Unfortunately as someone has already said, it is possible that this is natures way of curbing or culling populations to allow them to survive.
It sounds cruel, but no-one said nature was benevolent.
Belly, if you did not get what I was saying, albeit flippant, I hope these last postings will help clear it up for you.

Posted by Belly, Thursday, 25 April 2019 11:53:48 AM

Some thing that just may be acheived to end terrorism, and blind hate
One world, even with the loss of some freedom, may, in 200 years after its formation, bring about a better humanity

Answer- Some see world equality as fairness. Sadly when we see fairness many see weakness and seek to take advantage. But there are many other levels to this discussion. You might call it hate I would call it something else- wisdom is one word that comes to mind.

Any sufficiently advanced technology will be seen as magic- Arthur C Clarke

A possible corrollary- any sufficiently advanced vision will be seen as blindness.