2006-12-14 | permalink

A failure of hope

Josef Stalin, who would have known, is said to have told Winston Churchill at Potsdam in 1945, "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." [...] Most African nations are leery of genetically modified plants, even those that could save millions of their people from famine. [...] From an American point of view, this is maddening. As Mr. Hand notes, Americans believe in taking great risks to achieve great rewards. Europeans, and in this case Africans, culturally are more cautious; they prefer to wait on a sure thing. They also prefer to protect their own products from foreign competitors. Still there is hope in the cassava project, and inspiration. That American genius and generosity, nurtured in St. Louis, one day might help save millions of lives is no small thing. But there is frustration, too, in that politicians and bureaucrats in Europe and Africa would act out of fear rather than hope, would rather see hunger as a statistic, not a tragedy.

• St. Louis Post-Dispatch, USA: A failure of hope
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch, USA: Africa in the middle of U.S.-European biotech trade war
• The New Vision, Uganda: When will Africa’s scientists