Aid Type Agriculture

Agricultural aid is essentially agricultural supplies, with a modest amount of compounding infrastructure improvement. It's especially important with capacity effects turned on. The more people you can feed on the same amount of land, the farther you are from running out of agricultural capacity.

When Agricultural aid ends, productivity drops sharply, though not all the way back to its original 100%. Mortality completely reverts to its original levels.

In practice, Agricultural aid probably takes more the form of a political or business deal than the form of charitable aid.

Agricultural supplies permit large yield, or productivity, improvements, allowing the population to feed the same number of people on less land. Supplies might include new hybrid seed, fertilizers, biological or chemical pest or weed control, equipment and fuel, etc. The focus is on the supplies, but in practice they can't be delivered without enduring structural improvements, such as water supply, roads, land clearing or leveling, farmer training, etc. So a small fraction of the productivity improvements compound, and remain past the end of the Agricultural aid.

Agricultural aid, since it improves food availability, decreases mortality. However, unlike food aid, it isn't specificially targeted at the most needy. Indeed the country may export much of the product to help pay for supplies. So its mortality effects are weaker than Food aid.

The productivity impact for the same level of aid may go down over time, because it is in the form of constant supplies for a constant number of points spent. So Agricultural aid's productivity impact goes down as the amount of land under cultivation goes up.

The productivity impact of Agricultural aid may seem astronomical compared to the effects of the other aid types. Giving 4 points to Agricultural aid increases yields by a whopping 35%. That's powerful, but it is possible. (I don't know how much it would cost.) The book World Resources 2000-2001 (full reference on the Credits page), says worldwide, cereal crop yields rose an average of 20% in the developing world in the decade 1988-1998. As you'd expect of an average, many countries did better. In others, yields fell. Some examples:

Country Cereal Crop Yield
%Change 1988-1998
United States & Canada 22%
Australia 30%
India 34%
Viet Nam 38%
Venezuela 46%
Mozambique 86%
Cuba -23%
Albania -42%
Somalia -47%
North Korea
(Democratic People's Republic) 		-59%
Mongolia -72%

For some of the countries whose productivity fell, a major cause was the fall of communist trading blocs, which essentially meant their agricultural supplies were cut off. The book discusses Cuba's situation at length. During this decade after the Soviet bloc dissolved, malnutrition in Cuba went from less than 5%, to over 20% of the population, due largely to the loss of agrochemical supplies and food import/export (they had specialized in supplying sugar to the bloc instead of food self-sufficiency.) Cuba's plight is softened by one of the highest education levels in Latin America. They're making major progress at getting yields back up via organic fertilizers, biological pest control, and oxen-powered farming. A less organized and educated populace would not fare so well if extensive agricultural supplies were cut off.

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