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What a vast, complicated question.Africa is of course able to grow food, plenty of it actually (many of the fruits and vegetables I see at my local veggie store here in Paris carry green peas and french beans from Kenya, sweet potatoes and pineapples from Côte d'Ivoire, and the ethnic stores have cassava, yam and plenty of other things exclusively from there!) and the image of the "starving lil' africun" is to a large extent a clichee that is only true in certain areas at certain points in time.But it is true that overall (in very, very broad terms), Africa produces less than you should expect given the size and population of the place. Why is that? (Note that I'll concentrate on the production issue only here - James Crawford has a great answer already explaining the bad distribution of what is already being produced)Small scales. The overwhelming majority of farms in Africa have a size somewhere between 0.5 and 5 hectares. That's really, really small.It means there is no way you can put enough money aside from your operations (or pay back afterwards) to finance mechanisation or any complicated irrigation system to boost your output.It means you will not make a lot of money in any case, so you better grow what you need to feed yourself first, so you won't have a lot of money to buy inputs (fertilisers, pesticides) or better seeds.It's too small to have standing staff, the the farmer and his family needs to work a lot and he has little time to research better farming methods.Insufficient training. Even if you help people get these things, they often know very little as to how to use them and how to square new methods and inputs with their old ways of doing things and their understanding of the local environment. So they either use them badly, or even not at all.Inconsistent support policies. Lots of initiatives have been launched over the years to remediate these problems. Few have ever been consistent enough over the long term to break the pattern and have been too reliant on outside aid - Give a farmer fertilisers and training as to how to use it, and he probably will do a good job. Pull the funding after a while, chances are he will go back to his former methods.Lack of market access. Go to some of the more educated, bigger farmers and you may be surprised - they usually have a remarkable grasp on methods, numbers and their land. Often far more than the city folks in my experience! Tell them you'll increase their yield and they're going to laugh in your face - not because they don't want to earn more (that's a false, western idea), but because in many cases, their problem is the market. Due to lack of safe storage facilities, affordable, efficient logistics (able to collect produce from small farms without real road access), market information, real wholesalers ("real" in the sense that they should have capital) and trust in the different market participants, a lot of what's produced just goes to waste because there is no buyer when the produce is available. So many farmers will produce less than they possibly could even without support, additional inputs etc. , simply because they have nobody to produce for.A few more localised elements:Soil and Water. This one is as obvious as the fact that it isn't applicable everywhere - talking about Africa bunches together super-arable land in tropical areas with lots of rain and hot, dry deserts. In some places, many crops just have trouble growing - but something almost always grows.Bad Land usage. Kenya has wide areas of land that would be great for farming but are used, and fiercely defended, as private safari grounds for British lords that settled there a century ago. In Ghana, the chiefs (that have authority over the land) routinely give out farming concessions to local businessmen to develop plantations on them, but who have no money to do so - resulting in the land being un- or underused for years while those businesspeople look for investors.Overcrowding. A problem only in a few places like Rwanda. It keeps the scale problem durably acute.As James Crawford points out, the absolute quantity isn't actually the main problem in the short term; Getting it to the people is.But increasing production will become necessary with development - and fortunately, all of these obstacles can be overcome.Let's hope they will soon.

There are four main reasons for this. Also, to be clear, the meaningful contrast is between Anglo-America and Latin America, since Mexico and arguably Central America are part of North America, but they had histories similar to those of the South American countries.First, as Robert Chandler correctly points out, Spain and Portugal bestowed feudalistic political economies on their colonies, with a basically parasitic rentier class living off of the labor of peasants. (In some of those colonies, strictly hierarchical societies—such as that of the Aztec—may have preceded the arrival of Europeans.) The colonial and postcolonial rentier class made little investment to boost the productivity of the local economies and blocked the development of liberal economies in their countries. By contrast, in its North American colonies, England settled entrepreneurial, property-owning farmers and merchants, who brought with them liberal political and economic orientations (in the European sense of the word liberal). This was true more of the northern colonies of North America, since the southern colonies were based economically primarily on slave labor. In the English-speaking colonies, especially those in the north, the propertied white population invested heavily in economic development and fostered systems based on democratic elections (though participation was largely restricted until the 20th century to white males). As a result of both this entrepreneurial orientation and the continuing economic and cultural connection to Britain, English-speaking North America was the first region of the Western Hemisphere to industrialize. Partly as a consequence, it developed a powerful financial sector, centered in New York.Second, the Latin American countries, aside from parts of the Southern Cone of South America (Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay), exist in climate zones in which European patterns of agriculture and livestock rearing were not possible. That meant that the agricultural innovations that advanced the economies of Europe and North America and encouraged the development of local commodity markets in the early modern period were not applicable in most of Latin America. Instead, they were largely restricted to cash crops for export and crops for local consumption that were less easy to transport and therefore market.Third, the Latin American countries were separated by a number of physical barriers, both between countries and internally, in many cases. Steep mountains and tropical forests made land transport difficult to impossible. They led to the fragmentation of the Spanish New World empire into many, mostly relatively small countries and hindered the development of trade both between and within countries. This, in turn, hindered the development of internal markets and economies and focused trade on coastal ports aimed at the wealthy European and North American markets, which prolonged the economic dependence of Latin America on those markets for income and capital.In the United States, the Appalachian Mountains are low-lying and crisscrossed by valleys, such that they did not offer a serious barrier to trade. In Canada and the northern United States, the Great Lakes facilitated the development of the interior. By the time US and Canadian expansion had reach the more serious barriers of the western mountain chains, they had already developed robust economies and could both tap deep capital markets and make use of railway technology to overcome those geographic barriers.Fourth, the early industrialization and economic development of the United States (and, to a lesser degree, Canada) allowed it to take a dominant position militarily and, increasingly, economically in the Western Hemisphere. Increasingly, Latin American producers were dependent on US markets for their products and for the capital they needed to maintain production. Repeatedly, from the 19th century on, the United States intervened militarily in Latin America to impose governments supportive of US economic interests. Often, military intervention was not necessary. Latin American elites recognized their economic dependence on US markets and enacted policies favorable to US interests—policies often unfavorable to the development of economic autonomy and the improvement of living standards for the less-advantaged people of their countries.

The normalized difference vegetation index (a.k.a. “NDVI”) is a simple graphical indicator, typically from a satellite. It is probably the most important of the satellite data for agricultural applications. By reading infrared light waves reflected from plants, NDVI can signal stresses to plant health, such as oncoming drought, as much as two weeks before problems are visible to the naked eye. Many agricultural industry participants can benefit from such advance alerts. For example, NDVI is the key input to many machine-learning-based crop yield models. Farmers can also increase irrigation or add crop protection to forestall a pest infestation. And physical traders, processors, and food and beverage companies could seek out alternative supplies, or hedge their positions.NDVI also can reveal positive indications about a crop, providing a heads-up to market participants, logistics companies, and others to prepare for a big harvest. Another type of satellite data, called evapotranspiration (ET), also sends early-warning signals about plants, based on measures of moisture evaporation and transpiration. But ET is available only on a monthly basis, much less frequent than NDVI which is available daily.In the following analysis, we explain the science behind NDVI and the impact it has on remotely sensed yield models. We also examine cases when awareness of NDVI signals could be put to valuable use by industry and government officials.See Gro Intelligence’s full analysis on NDVI here: https://gro-intelligence.com/ins...