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Edited on Mon Jun-23-08 07:34 AM by HamdenRice
I don't blame the original poster, because s/he was merely repeating how hunger and food security issues are framed by our brain dead mainstream media.
But anyone who knows anything about Africa or food security would see this is a dumb idea. (I've lived and traveled extensively in Africa and spent a considerable part of my career working on food security in Asia and Africa.)
Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for economics largely on his break through work on famines and hunger. You could buy his books and go through all his equations, but his basic insight boils down to two sentences that are at the beginning of one of his most famous books: Famine is not the condition of there not being enough food. It is the condition of people being too poor to purchase the food that is available.
So westerners have come up with a product that is a highly concentrated nutritional supplement. Fine.
But if, as the OP states, the people in this part of West Africa are too poor to purchase homegrown milk and other products in local currency, why do you suppose they would be able to purchase a highly concentrated nutritional supplement from overseas in Euros or dolllars?
The only answer is this stuff would have to be given away. Which means that we would be dumping one more product on their agricultural markets driving more farmers out of business, into the slums, where they will be poor and hungry, where we can dump more free "Plumpynut" like stuff on them.
West Africa is perfectly capable of growing all the food that its people need to consume. They have a rich tradition of agricultural techniques and culinary expertise. There are many agricultural products in use that are healthful and delicious -- plantains and banana, sweet potato, brown country rice, pork, beef, goat, chicken and eggs, casava leaf, okra, white potato, manioc, palm oil, coconut oil, mango, and on and on.
And oh yeah, West Africa is one of the largest producers of peanuts in the world, so dumping a western manufactured peanut butter product in West Africa is a bit like bringing coal to Newcastle.
The markets are full of these good things to eat.
There are, however, many people too poor to buy them.
We could significantly reduce poverty in West Africa within a few years. The biggest cause of poverty is war. I used to live in an agricultural village in West Africa a few miles outside a county capital. Both are wiped out and completely destroyed by war, their inhabitants killed or scattered. Stop selling them arms, stop buying blood diamonds, stop supporting corrupt dictators.
The next biggest thing we could do is open our markets to their products. The key to ending poverty isn't dumping more stuff on them (except as short term famine relief, and purchased preferably from local sources), but letting them dump stuff on us. Of course, the poor need assistance so they don't go hungry, but they need assistance in purchasing or being provided locally grown produce. I can't tell you how disgusted farmers I knew were that they grew delicious, healthful, traditional brown country rice, but that the U.S. dumped "Uncle Bens" on them as agricultural surplus, putting them out of business, causing more hunger. They have so many agricultural products that in reverse they could sell us -- green oranges, grapefruit sweet as plums, gigantic prickly fruits. Parts of West Africa also have surprisingly well educated urban populations who could export goods and services.
Third, there is a need for better agricultural extension education and "home economics" education in the rural areas. The biggest challenge faced by tropical farmers is the lack of winter. The absence of winter means that pest populations grow year round. It also means that soils don't get to rest during cold months to rebuild some of their nutrients, which are always in danger of being washed away by tropical rains. West Africans have developed techniques for managing soil fertility and pests, but these techniques need to be modernized to meet the challenges of higher production. Mothers also need education in nutrition, because there is a tendency to feed children low nutrition foods, like casava/manioc, rather than easily grown, more nutritious foods, like plantains. They also need expanding their production of easy to grow animals like chickens and goats.
Lastly, the international community has to work tirelessly to improve the quality of government. There is no excuse for Nigerians to be poor, given the level of their oil exports. We need to enforce our laws against corruption so oil companies that want to do business here can no longer assist corrupt officials in stealing all the oil revenue over there.
The problem of food insecurity in West Africa does not exist because they lack some special food product like "Plumpynut" that only we can provide; it's that there are people too poor to buy the food that is available.
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