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Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa
by: Robert Paarlberg

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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 630.96
EAN: 9780674029736
ISBN: 0674029739
Label: Harvard University Press
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: March 31, 2008
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Sales Rank: 109650
Studio: Harvard University Press

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Listen to a short interview with Robert Paarlberg
Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

Heading upcountry in Africa to visit small farms is absolutely exhilarating given the dramatic beauty of big skies, red soil, and arid vistas, but eventually the two-lane tarmac narrows to rutted dirt, and the journey must continue on foot. The farmers you eventually meet are mostly women, hardworking but visibly poor. They have no improved seeds, no chemical fertilizers, no irrigation, and with their meager crops they earn less than a dollar a day. Many are malnourished.

Nearly two-thirds of Africans are employed in agriculture, yet on a per-capita basis they produce roughly 20 percent less than they did in 1970. Although modern agricultural science was the key to reducing rural poverty in Asia, modern farm science—including biotechnology—has recently been kept out of Africa.

In Starved for Science Robert Paarlberg explains why poor African farmers are denied access to productive technologies, particularly genetically engineered seeds with improved resistance to insects and drought. He traces this obstacle to the current opposition to farm science in prosperous countries. Having embraced agricultural science to become well-fed themselves, those in wealthy countries are now instructing Africans—on the most dubious grounds—not to do the same.

In a book sure to generate intense debate, Paarlberg details how this cultural turn against agricultural science among affluent societies is now being exported, inappropriately, to Africa. Those who are opposed to the use of agricultural technologies are telling African farmers that, in effect, it would be just as well for them to remain poor.

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Customer Reviews

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Rating:

- Feels like half of the story
Robert Paarlberg (RP) seems sincere in his desire to help solve the problem of African hunger. Even though he advocates doing so using technologies owned by Monsanto, Synergen or Du Pont/Pioneer, he's candid that these companies aren't likely to win popularity contests. If, as some might suspect, the book is propaganda for those companies, it's unusually sophisticated. Nonetheless, I'm troubled by some of the book's argumentative techniques, and especially by its failure to engage with some pertinent issues. Even if sincerely motivated, it comes across less like a balanced book about policy and more like a legal brief, a style of writing in which you skate over or even ignore the weak points of your argument rather than confront them.

1. RP's argument focuses on the health and environmental aspects of GMO foods. Europeans consumers don't see much benefit for those foods, and, according to surveys, are ... Read More

Rating:

- Truths beyond popular culture
Friday, June 13, 2008 - Feminist Review.org

As a mom who does what I can to buy organic food for my family, I completely understand the general distaste most of us have for genetically modified (GM) foods. The very thought of vegetables altered by scientists in labs seems creepy and somehow inherently wrong, doesn't it? But when I read Starved for Science, I quickly realized that such a romanticized and emotional standpoint in such a critical debate as starvation is not only uninformed, it is just plain irresponsible. I also realized that, whether we like it or not, most of us are already eating GM foods on a daily basis.

In plain language and with plentiful sources to back up his positions, Paarlberg describes how in first world countries, where food is plentiful and obesity more of a problem than starvation, people can afford to pine for the days of small neighborhood farms - and can turn ... Read More

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