No post yesterday: the nicer the hotels, the less is free. I wasn't going to pay 10 dollars to spend an hour of my sleeping time online, sorry.
What else can we do about hunger, besides giving food?
Education is the key, really, to improving lives in the long run. The old saw is that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, if you teach him to fish, you feed him for life. Well, if you teach him aquaculture techniques, you feed his country for even longer.
Not just agricultural education, though. For many people in places where hunger strikes on a regular basis, their only capital is themselves. They have no savings, no valuables, little to no land: no real assets. But they have themselves. Most of the time, that means they have a body that is used to hard work, which they can rent to people. Wouldn't it be better to provide them with a strong mind, capable of higher-level, better-paying jobs, to accompany that body? With education, Bangalore has gone from low-income to IT center to the world. Despite an agricultural history, they have developed a way to feed their people through non-agricultural jobs.
Ag education does have its place in the grand education scheme. In countries currently relying on ag production, schools and universities should try to develop a strong extension and research service in each of their production zones or regions. This requires a good training program for scientists and extension specialists, preferably to return to their home regions and work in cooperation with the local farmers.
All of this requires a good primary and secondary school system feeding into upper-level training. I cannot stress enough the necessity of universal primary education. It may not put food in stomachs today, but it will do more in the long run than we ever can with free corn.
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ARM's work in Haiti has discovered that often the teachers need to learn to teach. The education in Haiti consisted of rote repetition with little cooperative learning and no critical thinking. It is important with the elementary education to teach the people to be lifelong learners, and then provide non traditional opportunities to continue learning.
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