Land degradation

Even in Africa, the problem is bad luck, bad weather, and bad planning. Traditionally, African villagers held land in common, with access regulated by unwritten cultural rules. In those circumstances the people responsible for the management of the land take overuse into account, so they enforce rules of access that limit the use of the land. When modern crops and agricultural techniques appear, the system comes apart, because yields shoot high enough to give people a greater incentive to cheat. Population pressures exacerbate the problem by shrinking everyone's share of the common land. Add drought or ethnic conflict and the result is disaster. But African nations without drought or conflict have done increasingly well. The 1992 harvest in Nigeria was the biggest in twenty years. Given half a chance, people in Africa seem to make their own way.

As for other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, no one denies the famine there. Yet recent independent studies have found no long-term environmental consequences of the recent and devastating drought; the southern border of the desert, one study shows, is in about the same place it was eighty years ago, suggesting that the desert expands and contracts with little regard for its human inhabitants. The drought may have led to temporary overuse of common property, but the proper response would be to adjust land-use rules -- change the zoning, so to speak -- as societies did in other parts of Africa. That this has failed to occur in sub-Saharan Africa says more about the pervasive corruption, inefficiency, and civil turmoil there than about the inherent evils of breeding.