My analysis for this term project involves trying to find the best areas for agricultural production in Africa.  Africa is an incredibly self-sufficient continent, and needs to grow most of its own food as it cannot afford to import food products from other countries.  There are many programs in existence right now that aim to enhance the food security, income and well-being of resource-poor people living in this region, especially in the humid and sub-humid zones of sub-Saharan Africa.  Programs such as the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture deal with this problem exclusively.  My goal for this project was to find out which areas of Africa are the most suitable for agricultural production right now, and which areas suffer from lack of ability to produce essential agricultural products for consumption.  With the danger of famine and desertification looming in most African regions, I found this to be an important project in which I could discover just how crucial and widespread this problem is.

For this project I used the data off the SIS drive, as most of it suited my needs for this project.  I performed a series of reclassifications, area calculations, overlays and fuzzy maps to fill the requirements of this spatial question.  I followed a series of logical steps (which may be observed in my cartographic models), and created two final maps which are compared to a map of current agricultural practices existing in Africa (Agri.rst).  One map is the result of 11 reclassifications of the data, while the other map is created from a weighted linear combination of all reclassifications done.  I wanted to see how much my maps varied with the map of current agriculture in the region.  I also performed area calculations for the appropriate maps to be able to perform accurate comparisons between layers.  Needless to say, I found the results to be quite interesting.
 

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