Robert L. Paarlberg
Essay
May/Jun
2000
New technologies often provoke strong resistance -- even when, as with genetically modified crops, their benefits vastly outweigh their potential harms. The fact is that transgenic food has no proven downside. Nevertheless, scare-mongering consumer groups in Europe have led a global backlash against this new technology. The battle has thus far pitted rich American farmers against rich European consumers. But the real losers are the poor farmers and underfed citizens of the tropics, who desperately need all the help that gene science can deliver.
Review Essay
May/Jun
1996
Lester Brown asks, Who Will Feed China? He forecasts food shortages there in coming decades, caused by population growth, a depleted environment, and farm production that he claims is pushing its limits. But he misgauges the potential of farmland and markets worldwide. The real problem is, who will feed Africa?
Capsule Review
Winter
1985
Essay
Fall
1980
The urge to teach someone a lesson seldom inspires sound policy. The lessons learned are too often one's own. So it is with President Carter's 1980 grain embargo. Soviet food supplies have been little affected. U.S. illusions about its own "food power" have been properly dispelled.
Essay
Apr
1976
Only yesterday, globalism was dismissed as an overreaching foreign policy style, a dangerous magnification of national interests and ambitions. How surprising that now, in slightly different form, it should come to be regarded as the best means for nation-states to coexist and prosper in an intimately interconnected world.
