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by fierarul 1994 days ago
You should debate the facts not the motives.

I had no clue about this situation but it doesn't look very well. Introducing continent-wide IP-law for seeds, getting farmers into debt by having them used only approved fertilisers and then showing virtually no productivity increase against the baseline shows no redeeming quality to the program.

But hey, Gates will be declared a saint in the next 10 years so who is this little mag site to comment?
1 comments
jevgeni 1994 days ago
The program follows practices already common in the West. That means it makes it easier to convince Western companies to make long term investments there without fear of some arbitrary action to their assets (cough-Sakhalin-2-cough).

But yeah, important thing is that the western upper-middleclass has a convenient boogeyman to vilify in a digestible form for day-time viewing.

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AndrewBissell 1994 days ago
> The program follows practices already common in the West.

Is this supposed to be some kind of defense?

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hnracer 1994 days ago
The sentence following the one that you quoted is the defense, perhaps you should argue against that instead?
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AndrewBissell 1994 days ago
That sentence is just more question begging. "Running things the way it is done in the West (i.e. encouraging 'investment' by Western firms) is good, therefore a program which furthers that end is a good one."
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hnracer 1994 days ago
The burden of proof is on the individual claiming that agricultural investment by Western firms into Africa is a negative, given that it's commonly believed that FDI is a good thing and African governments routinely and actively seek out FDI as part of their policy. So I don't believe that to be question begging.
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jevgeni 1994 days ago
It is natural that questions arise, when you insist on not understanding what I've said.
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fierarul 1994 days ago
What are you trying to say, exactly?

The program is supposed to improve agricultural yields and they claim it did not. Is the program just about helping Western investments? So the investments result in unchanged yields?

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jevgeni 1994 days ago
It is as much of a defense as saying that software which needs to unzip files needs to implement at least the deflate algorithm.
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