Joe Studwell

And then you have the problem that you've got to have infrastructure to have a modern economy.

And you look at infrastructure cost per capita, and Africa in 1960 can't afford anything.

Can't afford roads, can't afford power networks, can't afford irrigation systems, any of the things.

There are things that get built usually with sort of foreign aid, but nothing is affordable within the internal capability of African governments.

So you're just totally constrained.

And if you want the...

the historical comparison for the population density, that of Africa in 1960 was equivalent to Europe in 1500.

And so then we ask how much growth was there in Europe in 1500?

Well, there wasn't any.

So why did we think that there was going to be lots of growth in Africa?

Yes, I think it was.

You know, some of the things that were said in the 60s and the 70s about what Africa could do were frankly crazy and were really just based around some mineral investments.

And people thought that these mineral enclaves were going to translate into broad economic development, which they don't anywhere else.

in the world because mineral economies employ very few people and they are genuine enclaves cut off from the rest of the economy.

And I'm not saying that you shouldn't dig up your minerals, you should dig up your minerals, but they do not lead to broad-based economic development.

Yeah, so that's, I think, the biggest or the hardest evidence for optimism, if you like, in the book, would be what's been going on in agriculture since the mid-'90s.

But to make things more straightforward, I provide data from 2000 onwards.

Since when agricultural growth in Africa as a whole has been over 4% a year, highest rate in the world, and in many countries a lot higher than that,

You know, Nigeria has been doing 6% a year, and it's not because the government has got great agriculture policy.

It's because of the density of the population.