(^500) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
possible. The lack of historical consciousness of their people gives the
African leaders a great advantage in moving rapidly toward this goal of
modernization.^12
And yet. .. Basil Davidson, Africanist of unquestioned sympathy and
bona fides, writes sadly of the moment of disillusion—that point when
the Africans of one or another place realized that freedom was not an
automatic gateway to happiness and prosperity.^13
Specialists in these matters distinguish between food security and
food self-sufficiency; Africa is wanting on both scores. A large and in
creasing number of people—and that means women and children es
pecially—are hungry and malnourished, whether for want of
purchasing power or for bad distribution. Recalling the anarchy of the
late Roman empire, city and country are at war with each other. The
new bureaucrats try to squeeze the land and pay less than market value.
The farmers hold back or give up. The rootiess urbanités have learned
tastes that cannot be satisfied locally. So, even in the best of circum
stances, the land produces too litde food or the wrong kind of food,
and must bring it in from outside, at a growing cost to earnings and
balance of payments. No other part of the globe is so much prisoner
to survival.^14
Unlike other poor regions, moreover, Africa's shortfalls in food sup
ply afflict, not the food buyers in the cities, but the small farmers who
scratch the soil and raise the livestock.* Here nature—material im
pediments and climatic variations—plays a nasty role, not only swing
ing widely from fat years to lean, but cumulating trends over longer
periods. In the quarter century from 1960 to 1984, food output did
not keep up with population, and only a rapid increase in imports kept
nourishment up to inadequate (as against catastrophic) levels. Market
forces encouraged the trend: food grains from the United States, for
example, could be had in Lagos in 1983 at a quarter of the locally
grown price.^15 Import dependency (6 percent of caloric intake in
1969-71,13 percent in 1979-81) switched tastes from old, boring sta-
- Typically the farmers will get enough to eat (will feed themselves first) if the gov
ernment does not expropriate food supplies for distribution in cities or for sale abroad.
So in Europe during World War II. But in the Soviet Union, seizure of farm crops in
the 1930s in the Ukraine led to a ghastiy famine that killed millions. But then, this was
the intent. These were nationalists and kulaks, marked as enemies of the Revolution.
For a brief, vivid description of this atrocious crime, see Moynahan, The Russian Cen
tury, pp. 114-22. To know this is to understand the eventual collapse of a rotten
regime.