The G8, apparently meeting rather fruitlessly in L’Aquila, Italy, in July, unexpectedly addressed the issue of poor African people feeding themselves. They promised US$20 billion over three years, and said they “wanted to focus less on sending food to the poor and more on helping small farmers … produce more and better crops”. The difficulty of reducing starvation and improving human dignity in rural Africa has deeply troubled good people in affluent countries for many decades. Unlike most of the rest of the world, in much of Africa crop yields have not increased significantly over the last century. In recent…