The World According to Pimm by Stuart Pimm, McGraw-Hill, $24.95, ISBN
0071374906
I READ Stuart Pimm’s book on the way back from northern Nigeria. Less and
less rain falls here, and it has a fast-rising population and a hopeless and
venal government. Yet the evidence suggests rising farm productivity and a
generally well-fed population. There’s little sign of the dreaded
desertification.
Pimm believes in desertification, however, and his chapter on it resorts to
one of the UN’s dodgier datasets, reporting that “agricultural practices destroy
about 20,000 square kilometres of rain-fed crop land each year”. Of Africa’s
arid areas he…
