http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/7/16/22229/1604#1

Were there no intervention in the situation the population would stabilize at the carrying rate of the local environment.  Desertification from deforestation and climate change would leave the local area suitable only for desert nomads and the sparse vegetation they survive on.

So why all this intervention?  Oil and mineral wealth under the local area.

Those who exploit it need to maintain a friendly dictatorship to facilitate the extraction of that wealth.  Starving, desperate people interfere with that business.

They are driven off or massacred by the oil industry friendly dictatorship, onto land already occupied by other groups of starving, desperate people.  This creates further devestation as the horsemen of the apocalypse are then in charge.

The money to buy those "apples" ought to be obtained by taxing the companies that profit from the oil extraction, instead any money from that source goes to support the dictatorship, that buys the guns, that hires the thugs, to drive off and massacre the people.

And if that money were only used to buy sustenance from others, then eventually when that oil runs out, a large population supported by that money from the oil will once again be desperate and starving.

If that money is used to educate the local population and establish businesses that produce products that can bring in the money to sustain it, then it will survive the end of subsidy from oil extraction.  If reproductive rights for women are part of the education, then the population will stabilize without the horsemen's help.

A state that is solely supported  upon oil revenues that would be a benevolent dictatorship would leave people helpless at the end of oil.

Natural economic and political evolution would produce a culture based on small family farms and businesses operating in a free market protected from outside interference by monopoly forces like the oil and mineral industries.  

The only solution to these problems is global regulation of monopoly corporate power to facilitate that local economic and political evolution.  That is what the UN and other development agencies ought to pursue.

And every arable region ought to grow their own "apples".  Local business cannot be replaced by global commerce.  In fact local business must be protected from the forces of global monopoly businesses like big oil.

Real competitive capitalism engenders economic and political evolution, monopoly corporatism produces a devolution into global mega-feudalsim.

It is to the benefit of economic and political freedom in each local area to prevent encroachment of corporate monopoly upon any other local region on planet earth, for once the four horsemen start to march, they often march into areas far away from the original scene of conflict created by corporate greed and corruption.

They did that in NYC on 9/11.