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Just as the mobile phone bypassed the vastly expensive challenge of upgrading dysfunctional African land-line systems, a big push into rural-based aviation, aimed at moving crops from the bush to African cities and beyond, would leapfrog the problem of bad roads.
This requires some kind of Thomas Friedman memorial award.
you are the media you consume.
Sheesh. How much Stupid (tm) can one person have?
Teleport. Sure, at the moment you need a hypothetical spaceship with a hypothetical matter / anti-matter engine to run the sucker, but those are just technical details. Surely the market will incentivize those egg-headed people to make one that is more physically feasible with a better EROI. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
Oh, yeah, and the farmers are charged for the cost of shipping in the mobile phones and diesel generators to recharge the mobile phones, at the same rate that the flowers get charged, even though it is totally back traffic and in a competitive system would cost maybe 1/10 as much as the main traffic freight on the flowers.
Like I said, Pascal Zachary is stronger on reporting than on analysis:
Floral exports from Ethiopia are growing so rapidly that flowers theaten to surpass coffee as the country's leading export earner. In Kenya, tens of thousands of small farmers who live within an hour of the Nairobi airport grow French beans and other vegetables, which are packaged, bar-coded, and air-shipped to Europe's grocers. Exports of vegetables, fruits and flowers, largely from eastern and southern Africa, now exceed $2 billion a year, up from virtually zero a quarter-century ago.
All useful reporting ... when it comes time to see that there are serious risks involved if the agriculture is primarily for export, well, noticing that seems to be an exercise left for the reader. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
Unfortunately, it can happen easily when farmers have already been for years (even generations) in a colonial cash-crop system (coffee). Tell them they can make more per acre with another crop, and they'll go there all the more readily that they're accustomed to working for export only. When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
cowfart-powered zeppelins...
etc Peace is not the absence of war -- peace is the absence of fear. Ursula Franklin
