PBS's POV documentary featuring Dominion Farms

Earlier this past week I caught a documentary on PBS, part of their POV series, about development in Kenya. Basically the documentary was decrying the loss of traditional culture in Kenya through development, much of it fostered by companies and organizations outside of Kenya.

Featured prominently in the documentary was a company called Dominion Farms. The CEO of Dominion Farms is Calvin Burgess, a man from Guthrie, here in Oklahoma. I know, or knew, Mr. Burgess, though I doubt he'd remember me. My first job in aviation was at the Guthrie airport, and I towed, fueled, and prepped Mr. Burgess' airplanes as part of my duties. He owned the largest airplanes on the field at that time, a Cessna 421 and later a Piper Cheyenne turboprop, the first turbine-engined airplane based in Guthrie, as well as a WACO classic biplane. His biplane was more than a toy; it was fitted out for full IFR instrument flight in bad weather, though why someone would want to fly an open-cockpit biplane through the rain at 80 mph is beyond me. It would be nice for flying at night, if you had to, I suppose.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that as unfortunate as losing the old ways, the old culture, in Africa is, it is nevertheless necessary, at least in the ways that hinder progress. The old ways include valuing and establishing one's status in society by the number of cattle one possesses. These are herded around from pasture to pasture as the inhabitants of the region have done for millennia. Crops are grown in a similar ancient, labor-intensive, manner. In fact, if one happens to revisit American history, things are pretty much there (with a distinctive local flavor, of course) as they were here 200 years ago.

However, we realized long ago that the most efficient use of our arable land is not the classic '40 acres and a mule' style of small family farms. Part of the upheaval of the Great Depression was the consolidation of the last of the classic small family farms (most of which were already marginal by that time) into much larger family farms, fewer in number, and worked exclusively by mechanical means, rather than by farmers walking behind their animals. This not only reduced the labor cost of production, it increased production dramatically. This continued throughout the 20th century here in the U.S., with large corporate farms predominating in large parts of the country today, and nowadays a single American farmer produces enough food to feed well over a hundred people, enough of a surplus to not only feed our own people but a significant number outside our own borders.

If we, as a species, not just as Americans, or as citizens of 'donor nations', but as the human race, are ever going to solve the recurring problems of hunger, malnutrition, and poverty, it's going to require choosing one of three options. First, we can accept the necessity of changing the old order of things and implement modern agricultural methods worldwide, and accept the attendant upheavals in the social order in developing countries. The old ways are incapable of meeting the current need, much less the needs of the future. Secondly, we can drastically, and in a heartless and draconian manner, reduce the population of those developing countries to the point that they can feed themselves using their ancient and traditional methods of agriculture. This of course flies in the face of every civilized notion of proper moral conduct, and so is not an option for serious consideration. The third option is to continue to allow famines and droughts to take their toll, to continually have 'Feed The World' campaigns in the developed world for centuries to come, to continue to lose millions of our fellow men, women, and children to hunger every year, and to never solve the underlying problems that result in those famines and starvation.

There is simply no way for the people in undeveloped and relatively overpopulated regions (not necessarily individual countries, but geographic regions) that have historically been unable to feed themselves and have had to repeatedly rely on international aid to rise up out of the poverty and desperation without having to give up some of their traditional culture. What might have worked well when the population density was lower is now insufficient; it is a simple matter of mathematics and logic, nothing more. It's not the 'white man' coming in and 'recolonizing' the area, though perhaps given the history of the area (those who have seen the series may have noted that many of the locals could speak English quite well, which is an after-effect of British colonization that ended decades ago) it might seem so to local sensibilities.

It is far more logical to grow the needed food in the region (again, geographic region, not tied to political boundaries) than to ship it halfway around the world in response to a crisis. It's better to have the means of production within a few hundred miles of the need than several thousand miles away across oceans. Not only are transportation costs lower, but the response time is lower as well.

All of which does not necessarily mean the end of the local culture; we have, in a few limited (too limited, in my opinion) places preserved elements of our earlier culture (such as Colonial Williamsburg, Silver Dollar City, and the Cherokee Nation's Ancient Village, here in Oklahoma). Their old ways, that still predominate, are no less valid than our old ways, and just as worthy of being preserved. But the time has come where their old ways are standing in the way of progress, and if we are getting tired of starving children and abject poverty in so many places around the world, and if we are finally going to get serious about solving these problems and not just slapping a band-aid on them, then those old ways are going to have to go.

(As an aside, one of the things that we here in America have a problem with is with all those 'starving children' fund-raising programs. Yes, there are starving children in Africa; there are starving children in Kenya. However, Kenya, from what I've learned from the Kenyans I've met over the years, does have a fully modern side as well. There are modern cities, schools, government (a pretty good government, more or less--the same that could be said for our own; certainly we have our own problems with corruption), churches, universities, art museums--you name it. Despite what all those infomercials, commercials, articles, documentaries, and fund-raisers would have you believe, not all those countries are full of slums packed with starving children. They may have those, but they have very much more than just those slums.)