1994 Rwandan Genocide
The Rwanda genocide, which took place in 1994, was caused by multiple factors, which include the rise of its population, lack of food supply, lack of prospects for men aged in their 20s and the lack of land available for young men to start families.
This led to this genocide for multiple reasons, not just the ethnic tensions between the Hutus, who made up 85% of the population, and the minority Tutsi, 14% of the population.
The genocide itself is estimated to have killed between 500,000 and 1 million Tutsi, though modern estimates tend to average the number of around 800,000 people.
The people that were killed were not just Tutsi but also Hutus, with people just being killed because their neighbours had shoes or they had more land, which the other neighbours wanted and even intergenerational strife was caused due to the desire for more.
It is estimated that as high as 1/3 of the Rwandan population actively took part in the genocide of Tutsi, with at least 500,000 machetes being used to butcher the population.
Nations like Rwanda are agricultural economies. Their population survives by their ability to produce food, which they can sell to buy other products and services and sustain their households, with an average of between 5 and 6 people.
Agriculture is the main occupation of over 90% of the population, with Rwanda’s dense population of 571 per Km2 (1,480 people per mi2).
Sophisticated and industrial economies like the United Kingdom are just over 1% of the population. The size of the UK agricultural labour force has remained largely stable over the past decade, ranging between 464,000 and 481,000.
In 2021, 64% of those employed in the agricultural sector in the UK were either farmers, business partners, directors or spouses.
Compare this to Rwanda, where over 90% of people survived by working in the agricultural sector and sustaining themselves using their plots of land.
The rising population of the country and the economic pressures, as well as the pollution and damage to its topsoil, set that nation on an ecological and social collapse, which triggered the genocide.
