A few things have come together at the same time in that serendipitous way that makes me value even more the pattern detecting abilities of dear old Homo sapiens. First, I blog a feature that takes quite a close look at what the Gates Foundation is trying to do with (for?) agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. Then I read a post from Marcelino over at Biopolitical arguing that the best way to help the poor may be to give them money. And finally, Karl over at The Inoculated Mind, introducing our post on high-carotene maize, says this: “Grrr, the opposition to humanitarian efforts such as golden rice sure gets my blood boiling … perfect for this weather”.
And I think, hmmmn, I feel a hypothesis creeping up on me.
Let’s go back first to Marcelino. He quotes Robin Hanson, an economist, who says:
A suspiciously large fraction of people who claim to care about the third world poor believe that the best way to help is to pursue their favorite hobby or career, and not to just give the poor money. Medical researchers seek disease cures, computer folk build laptops or subversive software, musicians hold concerts to inspire donations, policy wonks lobby governments to build schools, and so on.
That certainly seems true of the Golden Rice effort. The reasons it is unlikely to help the third world poor are many. Even the new improved version does not contain very much in the way of vitamin A precursors; you would have to eat an awful lot of it each day — probably an amount impossible to ingest in a day — to overcome the levels of malnutrition seen among the poorest children. The people who need it most are not going to be able to afford it — indeed, they are often out of the cash economy completely. And as for giving them seed and expecting them to grow it, their effort would probably be much more successful ploughed into more diversity in their fields and in their diets. Dark green leafy veg and orange fruits could make a much greater contribution than golden rice.
So the idea that Golden Rice was created, or given away, to help the third world poor does seem a little far-fetched. At the very least, the idea wasn’t thought through very carefully.
Then there’s the Gates Foundation’s support for agricultural research, which to me on the outside often seems to be suspiciously like using the previous generation’s weapons to fight the generation before that’s battles. Now, Gates wants results, and he wants impact. So, why not let two (or more) methods fight head to head?
Take two villages, or even two countries. Give one a bunch of cash to spend with scientists and others solving problems in a genuinely participatory way, trying some weird stuff (like agricultural biodiversity) along the way. For the other, put the usual advice to work in the usual ways. Give them both, say, five years. Then see which has improved most.
Simplistic, I know, but what, actually, is wrong with the idea? Smart people (not just me) are criticizing current approaches with sensible suggestions. Humour them, listen to them, do the experiment; then one way or another we’ll know. And smart people, as opposed to those who merely have an axe to grind, will change their opinion based on the results.
Something like this could have been tried with the Millennium Villages, but as far as I know it hasn’t. I wonder what would happen if you created the equivalent of a voucher system for research and development, and gave poor people in rural areas a choice of how to use their vouchers.