Conversation with Mother
(Page 3 of 11)
September/October 1986
By Lester Brown
Naturally, the lack of soil nutrients leads to the deterioration of the soil structure. Without the organic matter to hold the soil particles together, the thin layer of topsoil needed to produce food erodes much more rapidly. Eventually, it disappears entirely. At this point, agriculture is abandoned.
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Probably the most dramatic example of this can be seen in two provinces of northern Ethiopia; villagers are being forced to leave because there's not enough topsoil left to support even subsistence farming, much less a market-oriented agriculture.
This, in turn, affects yet another cycle, which is the hydrological cycle. With the vegetation largely gone and very little organic matter in the soil to absorb rainwater, the amount of water that would percolate downward and recharge the underground aquifers is reduced. Therefore, water tables begin to fall, and wells go dry. The increase in runof also reduces the amount of moisture that's evaporated. A fertile soil with heavy vegetation evaporates a great deal of moisture into the air. A barren, degraded piece of land evaporates very little. A reduction in the amount of moisture being evaporated to recharge the clouds leads, in turn, to a decline in rainfall — in other words, to a climate change, and that appears to be what's happening in much of Africa today.
MOTHER: If recent events in Ethiopia are harbingers of things to come, the scenario looks grim.
BROWN: And Ethopia is not alone. West Africa's Mauritania, which shares a border with Morocco, Senegal, and Mali, could be the first modern society to disappear — to be swallowed up by environmental deterioration. This country is situated largely in the Sahara, and the degradation of the landscape is such that there's just no way that it can produce anywhere near enough food. My guess is that it may not be too many years before it will be abandoned, and Mauritania as a country will virtually disappear.
MOTHER: So environmental degradation inevitably leads to social consequences, the least of which may well be food riots.
BROWN: Of course. Because of environmental degradation, there are 14 countries in the world that have lower grain yields now than they had in 1950. Topsoil loss has occurred on a scale sufficient to override modern inputs such as fertilizer.
On the African continent, grain production per person has declined by more than a fifth since 1967. But more serious than the decline itself is the fact that there isn't anything being done, in the form of either family planning or food production, to indicate that the decline is going to be reversed in the foreseeable future. In 1985, out of some 545 million Africans, 170 million were fed entirely on grain from abroad.
MOTHER: That is a number not much smaller than the entire U.S. population!
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