Roger Thurow
Autor von Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty.
Über den Autor
Roger Thurow is a senior fellow for global food and agriculture at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal for 30 years. He is a coauthor of the award-winning Enough and the author of The Last Hunger Season.
Werke von Roger Thurow
The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change (2012) 73 Exemplare
The First 1,000 Days 1 Exemplar
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- South Africa (1986-1991)
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- Wall Street Journal (foreign correspondent)
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Thurow gives the details, being careful to point out the prices of everything. This emphasizes the farmers' poverty; relatively small amounts of money are life-changing. One Acre comes across as an amazing program. It has any number of initiatives, but the main one is organizing groups of farmers, loaning them maize seeds and fertilizer, and teaching them how to plant them most efficiently (when to plant, how to use the fertilizer and place the seeds, etc.).
Thurow himself is invisible. Mostly this works to make the narrative seem more immediate and less intermediated. But sometimes you can't help but feel that the conversations he is reporting are for his benefit, and that the farmers might be a little less perfect idealists in reality. It is disappointing that he never gives any pushback. He discusses the funding of international aid programs in Washington, DC, as if their importance is self-evident—but in fact the programs are largely disconnected from the farmers he is following. (After this, One Acre did get a government grant.) He accepts without question the farmers' critique of the Kenyan government for not propping up maize prices during their harvest—even though there was an ongoing hunger crisis in Kenya, and just a few weeks earlier the same farmers were struggling to feed themselves because prices were too high!
Thurow also seems to believe that agricultural development is the way out of the poverty trap for these communities, instead of, e.g., moving to cities where they can be more productive. While the progress made is inspirational, one can't help but wonder how far it can go; doubling the yield on a family's half-acre plot of land is huge, but it isn't even close to enough for a family with seventeen children. Obviously, development is a hard problem, but these farmers show how it can be done, with their resilience, determination, hard work, initiative, and strong investments in education. At least implicitly, Thurow clearly understands that these qualities are more important than government or NGO programs. But it all works together, and the One Acre Fund makes a huge difference.… (mehr)