I'd also like the kids to have a better awareness of their world, and the challenges different countries face in environmental terms, which is where that article about Africa comes in. An excerpt:
Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent over the past half-century trying to do something about the region's crushing poverty, but the situation remains desperate. Rural Africa is hollowing out, unable to feed itself, let alone supply food to the continent's rapidly growing megacities.
The Gates and Rockefeller foundations are stepping in with $150 million, but what they really need is another Norman Borlaug. West Wing fans may recall his name being dropped in that episode about the deposed African president. I spent a little time over lunch today reading about Borlaug, and it's some pretty amazing stuff. He's spent his entire life working on wheat hybrids that allowed starving countries to feed themselves and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. He's credited with saving over a billion lives in India and Pakistan with his "dwarf wheat" and is referred to by Penn and Teller as The Greatest Human Being Who Ever Lived. He's still alive and in the past couple of decades has been working on solving Africa's farming problems, so I guess they don't technically need another Norman Borlaug.
He's not without his critics, though. Borlaug's hypothesis states that since farmland isn't really increasing, what you gotta do is work on higher yields with the land you have. And so he promotes genetic crossbreeding, use of fertilizer, and other "modern" farming techniques in order to get countries the ability to feed themselves.
It's obvious that the world is getting better at feeding itself, but Africa still has a long ways to go. So, all I gotta do is produce another Norman Borlaug here at school and we should be in pretty good shape. Wish me luck.
