SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
A Green Revolution for Africa?
from the New York Times Magazine (Registration Required)
“When we started,” Rajiv Shah recalled over a late-evening coffee at the Serena Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, “developing-world agriculture seemed very much out of fashion.” That was before the food riots and rice tariffs and dire predictions of mass starvation that accompanied the global rise in food prices last spring.
And it was before the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for which Shah has worked since 2001, made agriculture, particularly African agriculture, a top priority. Agriculture may have been unfashionable four years ago, when Shah and others on the foundation’s “strategic opportunities” team began discussing an agriculture initiative, but it is fashionable now.
This is partly a result of market forces leading to the prospect of severe food shortages; but it is also partly because of the market-making power of the Gates Foundation itself. Bill Gates began this year with a promise to nearly double the foundation’s commitment to agricultural development with $306 million in additional grants.
Read more...
Click here to listen to podcasts of American Scientist Pizza Lunches, informal lectures where scientists present new research to non-scientists. Originally intended for science communicators in the Research Triangle Park region of North Carolina, the audio slideshows are now available to anyone online. New talks are posted periodically during the academic year.
Science in the Media
Newspapers:
Magazines and Web Sites:
The Science-Media Intersection:
Subscribe to Our Content!
Visit our RSS Feeds page to choose among 13 customized feeds, or create a free My AmSci account to request an email notice whenever a specified author, department or discipline appears online.