Thinking the African Food Crisis - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 782

massive human ecological crisis triggered by the drought-famines that extended across
theSahel.Atbase,thiswasacrisisoftheagrarianandpastoraleconomies—peasants
andherdersforthemostpart—whooccupiedthegreatswathsofthesemiaridsavan-
nas, which is to say the ecological heart of the continent. The great drought-famines
ofthe1970swereframedbytwoimportantevents: theirstwastheUNConferenceon
the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, and the second was the release of
theClubofRome'sreport Limits to Growth (Meadowset al.1972)inthesameyear.Both
were foundational to the rise of a sort of “international environmentalism” addressing
what was later to be understood as the challenges of “sustainable development.” Both
were fundamentally shaped by a robust Malthusianism. For the Club of Rome, founded
asaglobalthinktankin1968byanItalianindustrialistandaScottishinternational
scientiiccivilservant(AurelioPecceiandAlexanderKing,respectively),theoilcrisis
was a harbinger of a larger structural problem of resource scarcity, population pres-
sure, and ecological degradation. Methodologically, the Club outsourced its study to
theMITSystemsDynamicsGroup,ateammadeupofseventeenresearchersfroma
wide range of disciplines and countries, led by Dennis Meadows. They assembled vast
quantities of data from around the world to feed into the model, focusing on five main
variables: investment, population, pollution, natural resources, and food. Calibrated to
examine the interactions among these variables and the trends in the system as a whole
overthenextten,twenty,andityyears,assumingextantgrowthrates,theirscenarios
predicted various sorts of system collapse or system unsustainability.
Peter Taylor (1999) has referred to the prevailing Limits to Growth discourse as
“neo-Malthusian environmentalism,” and he interestingly made use of, as a historian
ofscienceandanecologist,theinluentialstudiesconductedbytheSystemsDynamics
teamatMITonagropastoralsystemsintheWestAfricanSahelconductedinthewakeof
the1970scrisis.By1973thesemiaridSahelregionhadexperiencediveyearsofdrought
anddevelopingcrisis.Manypastoralists(livestockherders)andfarmerswereinrefugee
camps, their herds decimated and their crops having failed again. Prevailing analysis at
the time focused not only on famine relief but on the causes of the crisis and on prospects
fortheregion'sfuture,aviewthatheraldeddroughtandfamineasaforerunneroffuture
demographically driven scarcity and shortage (through human increases and related
settlement into increasingly marginal and overexploited environments, and animal
overstockingonopenranges).MITdevelopedacapaciousmenuoffactorsandmath-
ematical relationships, all converted into a systems analysis anchored in (and confirma-
toryof)the“tragedyofthecommons”(Picardiet al.1974).GarrettHardin(1968),ater
all, had raised the specter of the “lifeboat ethic” as the cost associated with the impla-
cablelogicofoverpopulation,overgrazing,resourcescarcity,andinadequateproperty
rightsdisplayedintheClubofRomereport.Itwas,insum,aMalthusiandystopia.he
commons stood as a metaphor for the old anti-scarcity system, which, as Malthus and
others predicted in the early nineteenth century, would compound the problem of food
security, improvement, and growth. Soil degradation and eventual desertification could
be avoided only if all the pastoralists replaced their individual self-interest (and out-
datedformsofcommunalproperty)with“long-termpreservationoftheresourcebase