Lately we’ve done a fair bit of pointing you to other blog posts that have something worthwhile to say on topics of interest here. You may call this laziness. We call it content curation. And in that spirit I offer you one person’s take on World Food Day, which unfolded yesterday here in Rome and which continues all week with a diversity of talking shops. I’m not going to comment on the commentator, except raise a question about his description of FAO as
[T]he single entity that we rely on the most to inform us about the state of cultivators, what they’re growing in our world, and who isn’t getting enough of those crops as food.
Is it? Really? I’m too deep in to know whether this is a genuine reflection of how people see FAO, and would welcome enlightenment.
The `one person’ seems to be ill-informed over the Green Revolution demanding canals. In fact the Green Revolution in India made use of the canal system in the Punjab established by the British in the 1890s. Blaming the Green Revolution for manifold ills is common for anti-development NGOs – for example, genetic erosion of wheat in India. In fact the old Pusa institute (and the wife of Sir Albert Howard) was responsible for widespread breeding and spread of (for the time) modern wheats in the 1920s.