Checking in on an African country after 50 years of foreign aid

by philg

Lesotho starting getting foreign aid at least 50 years ago (see “Aid, Development and Democracy in Lesotho, 1966-1996” by Khabele Matlosa). “Remember the Population Bomb? It’s Still Ticking” is a recent nytimes article by an expert who has been tracking the country for most of that time:

In tiny Lesotho, a landlocked kingdom in southern Africa, about one-third of its estimated two million people spent much of the past two years in danger of starving because of the lingering effects of a drought.

More than 40 years ago, I made Lesotho the centerpiece of a book, “The Alms Race,” that explored why so many development projects kept failing. I chose it because in 1974 it received more development aid per capita than any other nation.

It could also have been voted most likely to vindicate Thomas Malthus’s warning in 1798 that human numbers would inevitably outrun the resources on which our lives depend. Today, Lesotho’s experience since the 1970s is an even stronger case study of what happens when development plans ignore the reality that such efforts can be a recipe for exploding human numbers.

Even with only 1.2 million inhabitants in 1974, Lesotho’s leaders saw the country was overpopulated. A 1966 British Colonial Office study estimated that the land could support 400,000 people at best — a number Lesotho had reached by 1911.

It has been a bad situation for these past 50 years, but fortunately the New York Times has identified the villain primarily responsible:

Unfortunately, the Trump administration seems bent on exacerbating the problem. Apart from cutting aid for family planning, it has now backed out of the global Paris agreements that seek to avert the most devastating impacts of climate change, even as rising sea levels and drought-related famines threaten to create tens of millions of new migrants.

 

13 thoughts on “Checking in on an African country after 50 years of foreign aid”

  1. I wonder what the British colonial office thinks the number of people the U.S. could sustain is?

  2. wow, NYT resurrects Malthusianism.
    What’s next? Do they at all mention South Korea and island of Taiwan economic results in their articles? Do they consider them under-populated? Lesoto clearly has disadvantage of arid climate and no major water sources, but that does not describe most of the planet which is 70% water. Only renaissance men such as @philg can read NYT without lasting harmful effects.

  4. Anyonymous, you might want to rethink your snark. Here is the UN’s revised population projections for 2100, from 2012.

    http://bit.ly/2tsplXd

    If Africa were similar to the industrious Koreans and Chinese, then maybe that popluation explosion would be manageable. Unfortunately, as it stands, the African population explosion over the next few generations threatens to be a catastrophe that will make global warming look like a minor engineering problem.

  5. bjdubbs, nay
    Not even exponential. No Fibonnaci either. Goes below straight line even later. Some African lands are prime, easy to seed them with GM crops. Maybe UN employees need to get real jobs and real families instead of charting ridiculous lines at best and worsening world problems at worst. That could help alleviate the problems.

  6. >It has been a bad situation for these
    >past 50 years, but fortunately the
    >New York Times has identified the
    >villain primarily responsible

    This misrepresents what was stated in the quote given in the posting. The quote given in the posting does not claim that the Trump Administration is the “villain primarily responsible”. It makes a substantially different claim: that the proposed policies will make an already bad situation worse. Substituting a different (and ridiculous) argument for the argument actually made in the quote and then knocking it down is a straw man fallacy.

  7. While NYT may not claim Trump is the primary person responsible for the mess, when quickly identifying the troubles of this african country there should be more relevant problems than Trump.

    Not to mention the other questions of- why are we responsible for paying for their family planning? And is climate change really going to cause a wave of new migrants compared with how many would want to go to Europe if Trump stayed in the paris agreement?

  9. >more relevant problems than Trump

    The policy of a major power going forward is very relevant.

  10. Neal: We’re a “major power” in determine other people’s fertility? Without data I would have said that it is crazy to assume that some do-gooders with a bit of money on the other side of the planet can determine how many children a woman will have. But… as noted in http://realworlddivorce.com/EconomicsLecture we’ve used economic incentives to move the U.S. from monogamy to polygamy. And http://tinyurl.com/ParentalResponses ( “Parental Responses to Child Support Obligations: Causal Evidence from Administrative Data” (Rossin-Slater and Wust)) looked at Danish women and found that if they got paid an extra $141/year in child support from Father #1 they were more likely to have a child with Father #2. So maybe you’re right!

  11. @philg: I didn’t say anything about the U.S. ability to “determine” other people’s fertility so I don’t see how I could possibly be “right” on that issue one way or the other.

  12. Neal: The article talks about “cutting aid for family planning” as the Trumpenfuhrer’s principal crime against Lesotho. I thought that “family planning” was related to “fertility,” no?

    [Separately, can King Donald I actually change the way tax dollars are spent? I thought that was Congress’s job.]

  13. @philg: I haven’t made any comments on the NYT article. I made two comments: (1) I pointed out a logical fallacy in the original posting, and (2) when (apparently in response to my comment) @MVI5 raised four additional objections to the article, I criticized one of those objections.

    I would love to indulge in a discussion of the original article and the issue you raise “separately” (they are interesting topics), but I would need to do some research in order to make an informed contribution, and I don’t have time to do that now.

    Do I think that the government should by policy help make the technology needed for individuals to control their fertility more available to poor people (in the U.S. and elsewhere)? Yes.

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