Country Life's Aslet weighs in on Attenborough debate

Broadcaster David Attenborough is wrong to say repeated famines in East Africa are caused by high birth rates, wrote Clive Aslet in Britain’s Daily Telegraph today.

The Country Life editor-at-large argued that the problem is not of the world failing to produce enough food, but “the absence of it in the right places”.

Admitting in his column that Attenborough’s concerns are shared by many experts, Aslet was emphatic that the challenge of feeding nine billion people by the middle of the century could be met by scientists, industry and farmers, and even drive world economic growth.

The advances in mechanization and information technology now common in British farms, not to mention developments in GM crops, ‘would fill the breadbaskets of the world to overflowing’ if exported to India, Africa and South America. Aslet went on to quote a 2011 Oxfam report arguing that a wholesale rejection of technological improvements in favour of small-scale “peasant” agriculture could “lock farmers into poverty”.

He ended with a note of warning to British readers. The UK is not isolated from worldwide migration, and populations suffering from food shortages “will come knocking at our door”.  

While The Global Miller prefers to strike a less parochial tone, we share Aslet’s feeling that agricultural science and technology can and must prove David Attenborough’s concerns to be unfounded. 

Children have walked for weeks across the desert to get to Dadaab, and many perish on the way. Others have died shortly after arrival. On the edge of the camp, a young girl stands amid the freshly made graves of 70 children, many of whom died of malnutrition. Photo: Andy Hall/Oxfam (Photo credit: Wikipedia)