Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should not model our food supply chain on Africa. In fact, it is beyond absurd to suggest it. African small holders run very unproductive farms, with horrible yields despite high labor intensive practices. Most countries have been on the brink of starvation up until very recently (some still are), and this only improved via adoption of modern farming practices.
This is ignorance at its worst. Smallholder farms across Africa are quite productive if you measure inputs (labor, energy, capital, fertilizer, water, land use) against outputs (calories, nutrition). They are certainly comparable with industrialized agriculture (large-scale monoculture) that is often incredibly wasteful (except when it comes to paying their laborers a living wage). "Modern farming practices" mostly t…
This sounds intelligent, but is extremely wrong perspective.
For example, most of these farms are well known to underuse fertilizer. There is no good reason for it, except in some relatively snall amount of cases where extreme poverty doesn’t leave farmers with enough capital to buy fertilizer (even though ROI is ridiculously high). This severe under capitalization is already a reason why we shouldn’t imitate their example. Anyway, all the development agencies run very active program to promote use of fertilizer, with very limited effect.
If you consider insufficient fertilizer use, then yeah, maybe they get good yields in the context. But that’s like saying “sure I got very meager crop because I didn’t water my crops in the drought even though I could, but if you consider my inputs (very little water and energy spent on watering), I actually did pretty well”, which is ridiculous: we shouldn’t imitate that.
> They are certainly comparable with industrialized agriculture (large-scale monoculture)
No. Their yields are horrible, and in no way comparable to modern industrialized agriculture.
> And for the last 150 years or so no "starvation" anywhere in the world has been due to a lack of calories that could have reasonably been made available for the people starving.
This is true if you define “starvation” as “literal famine involving mass death”, but if you are trying to say that there has been no severe, persistent, widespread malnutrition due to insufficient caloric intake, then you are extremely wrong. Up until last couple of decades, overwhelming majority of Africans have been seriously malnourished, and this was caused by the inefficiency of their agricultural sector. It was only alleviated (and only in some places) by modern, western style development.