Take a look at <A href="http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0103. html#6">the March Crypto-Gram</A>, where Bruce Schneier comments on the practicality of this.
An article in this months Mother Jones magazine (not available online yet, but check soon), "An Alternative to Progress", by Bill McKibben, mentions how vitamin A deficiency in "developing countries" is often a result of policies mandated by Western development organizations (like the World Bank). He visits a place in Bangladesh where they practice a form of organic subsistence farming, at odds with the policies the West is attempting to implement in Bangladesh.
The point of the article is that you only need crops like "golden rice" when you adopt conventional Western economic development policies. The area in Bangladesh that McKibben writes about is perfectly capable of providing its inhabitants with a balanced diets using the many crops they've grown for centuries. It's only by introducing Western-style monocultures (intended to create an export-dependent economy) that you end up with vitamin deficiencies.
Good reading. It certainly made me rethink the ideas I had about a country I've thought of in the past as one huge disaster area. I'm waiting for the letters to the editor over the next few months to see what other readers think of it.
Isaac Asimov wrote a story about this exact thing happening to a robot on Mercury: it was a conflict between the Three Laws of Robotics and the environmental conditions. The robot would circle around all day and never let anyone near it. Wish I remembered the details.
Slashdot Mirror
dowloading little girls with bad intent...
:-)
(apologies to Ian Anderson and all of you
I stand corrected, and thanks for fixing the link.
Take a look at <A href="http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0103. html#6">the March Crypto-Gram</A>, where Bruce Schneier comments on the practicality of this.
An article in this months Mother Jones magazine (not available online yet, but check soon), "An Alternative to Progress", by Bill McKibben, mentions how vitamin A deficiency in "developing countries" is often a result of policies mandated by Western development organizations (like the World Bank). He visits a place in Bangladesh where they practice a form of organic subsistence farming, at odds with the policies the West is attempting to implement in Bangladesh.
The point of the article is that you only need crops like "golden rice" when you adopt conventional Western economic development policies. The area in Bangladesh that McKibben writes about is perfectly capable of providing its inhabitants with a balanced diets using the many crops they've grown for centuries. It's only by introducing Western-style monocultures (intended to create an export-dependent economy) that you end up with vitamin deficiencies.
Good reading. It certainly made me rethink the ideas I had about a country I've thought of in the past as one huge disaster area. I'm waiting for the letters to the editor over the next few months to see what other readers think of it.
Isaac Asimov wrote a story about this exact thing happening to a robot on Mercury: it was a conflict between the Three Laws of Robotics and the environmental conditions. The robot would circle around all day and never let anyone near it. Wish I remembered the details.