Let’s trade in these old stories

Roll the tape from my childhood TV screen: image of a 4 year old Ethiopian girl, ribs visible, distended belly, flies on her face, and a voice over, “For just 50 cents a day, you can feed this child.”
This story is  emotional, concrete, personal…and effective.  It accomplished its goal (getting people to donate).  But the [...]

The need for genetically modified food in Africa

Here is an excerpt from an incredibly interesting piece by Paul Collier in the Guardian.  Simply put, he is arguing strongly in favor of genetically modified foods for Africa.  (The ban on GM food in Europe is just one in a litany of actions by first-world governments to subsidize and protect domestic agriculture at the [...]

Forget the Olympics: another barometer of China’s rise

I just came across this great post in Chris Blattman’s blog. Chris and I overlapped in graduate school, and he’s now a rogue Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale.
Apparently, across certain parts of Africa, the ubiquitous greeting of foreigners as “mzungu” (“white person”) have begun to be replaced by “mchina!” (“Chinese person”), regardless [...]