How does one expect to build a tractor without materials? Like a mine to get iron ore from the ground, foundries to smelt it, machine shops to craft parts, rubber or oil processing to make tires, etc.? Supply chains under a command economy have been much worse slavery just as much as you would say they are when people are paid for their labor.
Let's look at examples. Albania's socialism was incredibly closed off, and the Hoxha regime a full on analogue surveillance state because they didn't trust their neighbors because they weren't socialist enough. They bought tractors from other socialist countries for decades (socialists doing capitalism with the government, so it doesn't count), until in 1978 they finally just made a factory to copy the Chinese tractors they were buying because of their paranoia about other socialist countries trying to infiltrate them.
Of course I'm describing capitalism, because I'm telling you that you genuinely can't expect some noble socialist utopia to actually get you tractors without conscripting people who don't want to build tractors into receiving rations - or money, take your pick - to work in a factory.
While every country in Africa has varied levels of impact from colonialism, there are places where the local economy is relatively untouched when you push down to the local level.
I lived on the border between 1 country that was poor with nearly no resources to be extracted, and 8km from another country with resources where the poverty deepened as you left the coastal area. And while in the 80's mining money paid for a few roads, that's about as far as it got. The village used the currency of the other country because they would walk 10km to the market there once a week because the markets where they lived didn't have anything much worth buying because it was all the same stuff they grew at home. One guy spoke about 6 words of English, no one spoke French, which is supposed to be the colonial language. So the local economy for most villages really were a perfect example of a post-apocalyptic world where the apocalypse was living in a place that barely supports humans anyway. Short of radios, batteries, lanterns, one bicycle, and canned tomato paste, life went on exactly like it did 100 years ago or 500 years ago, long before any Europeans every actually breezed through the area, which is a history I'm deeply familiar with.
To further explain the isolation, everyone grows seeds from the previous year, so there's no nefarious Monsanto to blame. It's the same millet and sorghum varieties they've grown since as far back as anyone can remember. There is no export, no international trade of their crops. During harvest season people who try and get some diversity in their diet and buy things like cooking oil sell some of their harvest at the worst time of the year, when everyone else is also trying to get cash. The grain they produce doesn't go farther than 15km from the field where it's grown, maybe 25km into a nearby town if someone comes out to buy it. Which is the modern version of caravans from the oasis towns of the Sahara coming down to buy it 150+ years ago. Cars using roads that follow caravan paths are one of those new developments, which actually reduce labor and resource needs to get food to people.
Your life savings will help educate young women in this country, so feel free to send that over when you get a chance. When you educate a woman, you educate a community.
Also, yes, please tell me what this "other option" is regarding mechanized farming. Man, if you tell me it's animal traction, I swear....
I'm talking about people who farm and need labor to survive, and placing that labor in the context that sometimes you can be left alone, have relatively little direct impact from colonialism or even capitalism, and that doesn't make one's labor somehow special or magical. You can do everything right and free from most trappings of capitalism and life can still be hard and suck.
Posts like this push some socialist farm worker fantasy, as if Soviet era propaganda of smiling peasants was how things were - I've lived like that. It's not pleasant on average, which is why people leave those communities unless something specific keeps them there. It works as a method of basic survival of the species, but so does having 7 or 8 kids per woman to try and get 3 to reach adulthood so you can sell off one girl for the dowry payment.
I'm also talking about places where no French or English is spoken, where the currency they use isn't even the one for the country where they live, and none of that changes the fact that rain-fed subsistence agriculture is backbreaking labor. There's no one to blame but the Earth itself, and climate change on a long enough scale, but desertification of the Sahara has been taking place for thousands of years. Climate change is simply speeding up the inevitable, but population growth is making that worse. Trees only grow so fast, and they don't grow fast enough for a village of 20 cook fires to suddenly expand to 50 cook fires in 20 years and not impact the environment.
Whatever, we'll all end up experiencing it ourselves in the next 10 years or so anyway.
FFS, just say that it's use of the letters RSTLN and E and make it arbitrary as fuck in a way that doesn't dance around the point we all know you're trying to make.
JFC - I'm talking about people that live in a village in West Africa. They own the land and work fucking hard just to survive and have never seen the inside of an office in their lives. Their lives are not bucolic fantasy, their lives are, at their core, not much different than yours and mine. They want to work less and have more and just be left alone. But they're farming millet and sorghum in literal sand, prone to the weather to dictate if they starve or not.
Or maybe you tell me more about the value of their labor and how somewhere far far in the distance someone is keeping them poor against their will and best efforts.
WEDON'T have the machines! John Deere and Case and AGCO and Claas have the machines. What open source non-profit modern machines are there out there you're talking about? Because I'd love to buy one.
Also, no one is incentivized to throw food away, people are lazy AF and rich westerners somehow don't seem to mind waste. Don't attribute to malevolence what incompetence will explain.
I used to live in a place that was at the bottom of the UNDP development scale. When I would go "out" to eat basic rice and sauce, I would usually have 2-6 kids, like actual children, standing next to me waiting to eat the scraps. And they would fight over a few handfulls of rice because they were starving and that was the system of alms-giving. And while I feel guilt now for every bite of food I waste, and I try not to, I'm not about to expend 200 times the energy to DHL cooked rice to West Africa. You have to balance resource use at a local level with the resources needed to move food other places. Even shipping all that soy that China didn't buy from the US to anywhere in need incurs huge costs, plus significant CO2 emissions.
Having lived in subsistence farming communities, this is such an ignorant rich bitch take.
Food doesn't just show up at your house. Someone somewhere has to engage in agriculture to get you that food you want to eat. Someone has to wait around for rains. Someone has to till the earth to get the food you eat. You don't deserve free food any more than a farmer does who had to grow it from the soil.
Lovely cook! Kind of makes me think I should be smoking salmon, too.