> “Malawi is poor because its agricultural productivity is low” is closer to a tautology than an answer.

I used to make the same error. Thing is in the natural sciences this looks like circular reasoning, but in the humanities quite commonly things just hang in thin air. Case in point, the banker looks at the poor farmer and denies credit because the guy doesn't have capital, and the farmer doesn't have capital because he can't get credit. Thing is, both sides understand that.

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nikanj 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The agricultural output of Finland is dismal, with the low-quality soil, short summer and frequent cold snaps. Still doing pretty good on GDP

	▲	asdff an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Even with this, a farm in Finland I'm guessing is probably far more productive with better equipment and increased investment in fertilizer, pesticide, and utilization of elite cultivars, which have increased western yields in many crops by several fold change over the past 70 or 80 years (corn shown in 1, yellow denotes "old agriculture", green denotes introduction of industrial fertilizer, blue denotes introduction of hybrid engineered cultivars). But Finland obviously has other economic sectors to rely upon than mainly farming. 1. https://scotthirwin.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/02212023_...
	▲	VLM an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		For those who don't "get it", it's output is not dismal, far from it LOL. About 5M people, a fifth the population of Malawi, none the less are one of the top producers in the entire world for oats and barley. Not per capita... total. Wow. Note that only about 10% of the population farms which makes the ratio even crazier. Finns as a whole somehow produce about 2x their entire countries body weight in barley per year which always freaks me out. The country is also one of the top 10, usually top 5, producers of oats in the entire world, and they're competing with giant countries like Canada and Russia. Giant Canada only produces about 3x as much oats as tiny Finland. Finland climate isn't what you'd think of for tomatoes but they produce about three dozen tomatoes per capita every year, which is also weird to think about. Not just how do they grow that many tomatoes, but why? They like pasta sauce and pizza sauce that much? However Finland is not massively wildly overpopulated with frequent famines like Malawi. Those conditions will annihilate a countries productivity, including ag productivity.