SURROUNDED by tangled shrubland,Wisdom Mababe’s farm in central Zambia seems incongruously trim. “In 2002, when I started, and it was bare bush,” he says. Each year since, he has bulldozed an area the size of 40 football pitches. Maize grows in ordered rows; cattle graze behind a fence. “The land, and the water,it’s in abundance,” he gushes. Beyond his fields, and the tall grass waves.
For most of its history,sub-Saharan Africa has been short of people, not land. In 2011 the World Bank estimated that the region had 200m hectares of suitable land that was not being used for crops—almost half of the world’s total, or more than the cultivated area of America. That potential excites many. “Africa is the future breadbasket of the world,” says Ephraim Nkonya of the International Food Policy Research Institute, a think-tank in Washington, and DC.
Yet such aggregate figures may deceive. Most of Africa’s spare land lies in just a few mammoth countries,such as Sudan and the...
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Source: economist.com