Billions Served: Norman Borlaug interviewed by Ronald Bailey, by
Norman Borlaug, Ronald Bailey,
Reason, Apr 2000
Topics discussed include his current projects, Africa, roads, DDT, biotech, crossing genetic barriers in nature, biodiversity, monarch butterflies, organic produce, Lester Brown, Paul Ehrlich, India and the Green Revolution
Biotech has a big potential in Africa, not immediately, but down the road. Five to eight years from now, parts of it will play a role there. ... Central African farmers don't have any animal power, because sleeping sickness kills all the animals–cattle, the horses, the burros and the mules. ... Supplying food to sub-Saharan African countries is made very complex because of a lack of infrastructure. For example, you bring fertilizer into a country like Ethiopia, and the cost of transporting the fertilizer up the mountain a few hundred miles to Addis Ababa doubles its cost.
Clinton in Africa, by
Thomas Sowell, 15 Apr 1998
Crititcizes Bill Clinton for his "apology for slavery" and suggests he was playing the "race card ... to escape the consequences of his own actions"
The idea that people in Africa are owed an apology ignores history as much as Clinton slavery ignored geography. It was the people of Africa who captured and sold the slaves who ended up in the Western Hemisphere. White men died like flies in Africa during the era of slavery. They were not about to linger around trying to capture Africans, even if the local rulers had let them. ... Africans, like most other non-Western peoples, saw nothing wrong with slavery. ... Children are still being bought and sold by the thousands in Nigeria and Benin, and 30,000 African slaves are at this very moment being held under brutal conditions in Mauritania.
