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WHY AFRICA CANNOT DEVELOPWe have a new government and a new Secretary of State for International Development. Sadly, the new government wants to improve trade links with the rest of the world, and it wishes to include parts of the world that will never benefit from more trade: if anything, they will be more impoverished.

Today, in the pages of the Independent, is the beginning of a nice row on GM seeds.  Apparently, according to the articles, the Action Aid people in Uganda have been telling the world that GM is bad for you!  This message is accompanied by the picture of a rat with a, GM related, tumour.  It was a local person on the team that included this information in their literature.  Their office in London made them take it down quickly.  London is the main funder of the work they undertake in Uganda and they did not want to back what is patently a lie.

It says all the right things - that Africa can feed itself, that there is plenty of land, that productivity in Africa can increase enormously, and so on. But then it goes off the rails  because it misses a key factor; that the conditions in Africa are not the same as in North America.

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