This year production is expected to increase for the first time in eight years, but far more lies unexploited.
The UN's World Food Programme said this week that it expects soon to have to feed 1.2m Zambians (out of a population of 10.5m), though without more money it will have enough stocks for only 500,000.Why is the land unexploited?
More recent commercial discoveries include tantalum and tin, and there has been a rediscovery of something more enticing still: gold.Visitors to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo invariably gasp at the lavish use of that metal in the treasures of Tutankhamun, yet for nearly two millennia the mines in Egypt's eastern desert that made it the biggest supplier of gold to the ancient world lay unexploited.
On the other hand, peaks of food production would be unexploited without the periodic presence of migratory populations.
The area around the Araguaia's upper course has unexploited minerals, including uranium, copper, cobalt, zinc, and diamonds.
Guinea's mineral wealth is substantial — it has the largest deposit of bauxite in the world — but mismanagement has left the resources unexploited.
Similarly with moral norms: rational agents would not agree to a norm that could be expected to leave mutual advantages unexploited.
In fact, by 1990 unexploited reserves amounted to 900 billion barrels not counting the tar shales, of which a single deposit in Alberta contains more than 550 billion barrels.The Club of Rome made similarly wrong predictions about natural gas, silver, tin, uranium, aluminium, copper, lead and zinc.
The WWF suggested keeping an unexploited core of Ngoyla-Mintom while the rest is opened to limited "sustainable" hunting and forestry.
Many countries benefit from this non-accountability, even as it fuels mistrust about the security of orbiting satellites, intelligence gathering and the "dual use" of personnel for military purposes.Antarctica is the last unexploited continent.
For more than a century shale gas has gone largely unexploited because of the high cost of recovering it.
