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I think you're missing the point here. Most food plants today don't even look like the originals, both from directed evolution and agricultural growing conditions. If you saw the original plant you wouldn't even know what it was.
For example, here's the Lumper grown naturally - 50 of these is not a lot of food. They were starving because of lack of calories. Compare that to a Russet potato for instance.
I said you thought they magically existed because you seemed to think Africa didn't have its own plants that could have been bred into food crops. Okra for instance, lots of yams and gourds. They just didn't do it. Europeans turned watermelons into what we know today instead of this. Peaches were tiny cherry-sized and almost all seed before Chinese made them into food.
It's not entirely Africans' fault; warmer temperatures and better growing conditions lead to more plant disease and pests, and the large area meant they didn't have to wait out a season. But whatever the reasons, they didn't make an agricultural society and didn't get the social and evolutionary benefits from it.
I'm well aware of this, but:
is the topic I'm talking about. And again, I wouldn't call Africa "better growing conditions" than anything in North America or Europe. Europe & North America are on fucking easy mode. Frankly, Japan, Australia, Africa, and the west coast of South America are fucking hard mode. The Japanese arguably out-preformed every other civilization in the development of reliable agriculture in poor terrain, and with sub-par crops like rice. It can be done, but it's not at all easy. Sub-Saharan Africa is particularly hard.
You mentioned those yams and gourds, but that's not an adequate source of protein in a crop. Not like Wheat, Rye, or Barley; which are critical for a civilization level food source. The Americas had Maze, which is pretty shit in protein content, and Asia had to develop the rice paddy system to get rice and fish to add protein. Instead, Africa is left with bush meat, bugs, and low protein crops.
As you say, it's not just one issue, but it's one compounded problem after another, and we aren't even mentioning Malaria preventing population density.
Wheat, rye, barley are just grasses. The only thing special about them is those are the strains that men chose to cultivate. There's grass in Africa, my dude (sorghum for instance).
Ultimately your reasoning here is backwards; Africans didn't develop an agricultural society of any significance so therefore the conditions must have been "hard mode" (they weren't).
That's going from the effect to the cause, which rarely pans out. Any inconsistent fact, like that they continue to fail at farming by rejecting good farming practices, throws it into doubt. A yearly $4 billion loss of minerals in 37 countries over 30 years, anywhere else that would take a concerted effort to fuck up that badly.
Finally, if you want to find out the real reasons why Africa can't farm watch Empire of Dust (2011).
Those aren't just grasses. Those cash crops have very high protein content. That's critical for development in feeding nutritious food to a society. High carbs, but unreliable protein doesn't help a civilization develop.
No, you're choosing to go backwards for no reason. Farming in Africa has always been hard, even when the Boers, French, British, Romans, and Greeks were doing it. There's obvious reasons for that, most of them geological, climatological, and ecological.
Collectivized farming is always pretty bad and does this kind of shit regularly. It's why there are farmer protests in Europe right now.
Minerals aren't relevant to this discussion.