PRODUCTIVE LABOR

Stop Famine and Increase Africa’s Power To Sustain its Own Existence

by Lyndon LaRouche

[Print version of this article]

We reprint here a short excerpt from Mr. LaRouche’s December 1981 report, “The Economic Need for Increasing the Human Population,” prepared for a Bishops’ Conference in Rome, which offers a succinct summary of the principles which must guide the urgently-needed delivery of massive food aid to famine-stricken regions of Africa. The argument is a brief section situated within his larger elaboration of the rigorous scientific proof that an increasing human population is required to maintain the human species. The full report is available in EIR, Vol. 47, No. 8, February 21, 2020, pp. 7-30.

During the period beginning August 1980, the author and his collaborators attempted to mobilize needed U.S. governmental action for aid of starving populations in Africa—over the wicked opposition of the Carter Administration. Assembling a task-force of experienced leading U.S. farmers and with counsel from logistical specialists, we proposed the following approach.

We proposed that the logistical methods which would be recommended by the U.S. Corps of Engineers under war-time conditions be deployed to effect both delivery and means of distribution of food into regions of Africa in which the imperiled portions of the population are located. If we commit our will to such emergency undertakings, we can make a peaceful use of the logistical policy employed for warfare to construct simultaneously ports, airfields, rail systems, highway systems and functioning transportation networks, through which to deliver food-supplies and other aid needed directly to or close to the areas in which the needy population resides.

The transportation network established for the efficient initial distribution of aid becomes the network through which basic development aid, to aid the populations in increasing their self-sustaining powers for the next year’s crops, is also delivered. This same transportation network permits agriculture to begin efficient specialization in production of an above-subsistence surplus for urban markets. If the development of water-management systems, and supplies of pesticides, soil-treatment materials, and fertilizers is introduced by way of the transportation network, a modest but marginally decisive improvement in the self-sustaining capacities of populations can be affected.

If food aid is distributed, instead, to relief camps, and the population invited to move toward those relief-camps in search of food, a hideous destruction of the society results. The villages and households are destroyed, the affected population reduced to an utterly helpless state of dependency upon aid, promoting vagabondage among males, and rendering the relief-camps virtual death-camps and the trek to the camps a gruesome death-march. Under such circumstances, food aid, whether intended to have such effects or not, becomes an instrument for promoting genocide.

To repeat the important point: Assistance must be directed to increasing the potential relative population-density of the population, to increasing the population’s power to sustain its own existence by means of its own productive labor.

Continuing beyond emergency measures of the kinds we have indicated to be needed, we must aid the nations affected in producing themselves the most crucial among the agricultural capital-goods initially supplied from abroad. In general, such investments will not mature to become financially self-sustaining during a period of less than seven to fifteen years. Low-cost, long-term credit amortized after an initial period of grace over a total span of fifteen to twenty-five years, is the general policy required to supply nations of the most-afflicted categories with the transformations by which they will become truly self-sustaining.