Quote Originally Posted by Shatov View Post
Egypt? Sicily? North Africa?

Are these areas somehow less worse off than I imagined?
Pretty sure Egyptian agriculture these days doesn't work on the Nile floods anymore, which used to be the main cause of its fertility (the Assuan Dam was partly built to control those IIRC, as they were kind of annoying for the rest of the infrastructure). Sicily and North Africa probably actually haven't changed too much since the ancient times, save of course for the changes in agricultural technology - it's just that the extensive cultivation of the much more fertile lands north of the Mediterranean Alps has totally overshadowed them.