by ROBERT SKIDELSKY
Europe can’t solve its migration crisis without tackling Africa’s poverty and instability at the source.
In 2023, 150,000 migrants crossed the Central Mediterranean in small boats from North Africa, fleeing war, pestilence, and starvation in their own countries. Over the years, thousands have died making this journey, because their boats have capsized or caught fire. Yet while these tragedies regularly evoke humanitarian concerns, the steady flow of migrants has also fueled right-wing nativist parties across the democratic world.
A prescient but now almost unobtainable, 1990 film hinted at darker outcomes. Director David Wheatley’s The March (based on a screenplay by William Nicholson) tells the story of thousands of starving Sudanese refugees who make their way to the Mediterranean and attempt to cross into Europe at the Strait of Gibraltar, only to be met by a wall of machine guns. The crisis depicted in the film should by now be purely fanciful. Yet Sudan once again faces catastrophic hunger on an unprecedented scale. What went wrong? Or, rather, what hasn’t gone right?
The Millennium Development Goals were designed to avert the kinds of scenario portrayed in the film. In 2000, 191 United Nations member states committed to halving extreme poverty – defined as living on less than $1.25 per day – by 2015. Most of the focus was on Africa, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa, which was to receive $165 billion in development aid.
The MDGs were only partly realized. Extreme poverty was halved ahead of schedule, but largely because China’s real (inflation-adjusted) per capita income grew by a stupendous 10 per cent per year between 2000 and 2015. With around 18 per cent of the world’s population, China’s growth reduced the global poverty figure dramatically. Moreover, China owed its real income growth not just to the productivity of its economy but also to the stabilisation of its population. China’s escape from poverty was not held back or reversed by a rising number of mouths to feed. India then followed a similar, albeit less dramatic, trajectory.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, Malthus is alive and well. Between 2000 and 2015, the region’s GDP grew at an average annual rate of about 5%, but its population increased from 670 million to one billion. This trend limited its real per capita growth to about 1%, which is far too low to achieve a 50 per cent reduction in extreme poverty. Although the percentage of extremely poor Africans dropped from 54 per cent to 41 per cent between 1990 and 2015, the number of poor people increased in absolute terms, from 278 million to413 million. Desirable outcomes like reduced infant mortality have improved survival ahead of any reductions in fertility.
Explanations for Africa’s failure to break out of the Malthusian cycle include violence, extortion, climate change, and ideology. Some African countries have long been ruled by military juntas and crony capitalists who fight for control over scarce resources like oil, minerals, and water, while extremist groups like Boko Haram and al-Shabaab continue to spread terror across the Sahel region.
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