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North Star Fund, a community foundation, is seeking a creative, detail oriented grants manager to fill the Program Associate position. The Program Associate’s overall responsibilities include: 1) coordinating our activist-led grant making programs; 2) reporting and developing stories for our online and print materials; and 3) assisting as needed with donor programming and grants reporting. Founded in 1979, North Star Fund is New York City’s community foundation supporting grassroots groups leading the movement for equality, economic justice and peace. Since its founding, North Star Fund has awarded over 27 million dollars to 3700 organizations. As a community foundation, North Star Fund raises the majority of its annual operating and program budget through a network of individual donors, foundation partnerships and an annual special event. Duties and ResponsibilitiesThe Program Associate reports to the Deputy Director for Programs, and must possess outstanding administrative and coordination skills, be detail oriented, and provide energy, imagination and strong leadership to link North Star Fund’s programming goals and technical assistance with our development efforts. As directed by the Deputy Director for Programs, specific responsibilities include:
Qualifications
CompensationThis position will focus primarily on grants administration and management, with time devoted to working as part of a team to develop grants and social movement building strategies. It is ideally suited for community organizers seeking a transition into the foundation sector, or a grants administrator with a social change background who wants to improve their grant craft. It will offer a competitive salary in the progressive philanthropic sector, based on experience and qualifications, and the position includes an excellent fringe benefits package. The North Star Fund is firmly committed to affirmative action and strongly encourages people of color, women, LGBT, elderly and disabled candidates to apply. We appreciate all applicants but please be advised that North Star Fund is able to respond only to those best qualified for the position. To apply: Send cover letter, resume, salary requirements, 2 references to: Email: pasearch@northstarfund.org with “Program Associate candidate” as subject line. Mail: North Star Fund, Attn: Program Associate Search. 520 8th Ave, Rm. 2203, NY, NY 10018-6656 Application deadline: rolling with hire expected by late August to September. |
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North Star Fund is seeking a dynamic, strategic thinker to fill the new position of Deputy Director for Programs and Strategic Initiatives. The Deputy Director for Programs’ overall responsibilities include:
The Deputy Director for Programs will supervise a three member team responsible for program and development activities (grant making, technical assistance, donor workshops, fundraising, special events), and the foundation’s print and online communications. Founded in 1979, North Star Fund is New York City’s community foundation supporting grassroots groups leading the movement for equality, economic justice and peace. Since its founding, North Star Fund has awarded over 27 million dollars to 3700 organizations. As a community foundation, North Star Fund raises the majority of its annual operating and program budget through a network of individual donors, foundation partnerships and an annual special event. Duties and ResponsibilitiesThe Deputy Director for Programs and Strategic Initiatives will report to the Executive Director, and form part of a senior management team along with the ED and the Deputy Director for Finance and Operations. The Deputy Director for Programs must provide vision, creativity, and strong leadership to ensure successful coordination of North Star Fund’s programming goals with our fundraising & development activities. Specific responsibilities include:
Qualifications
CompensationThis is a senior position with a competitive salary in the progressive, philanthropic sector. It will be based on experience and qualifications, and includes an excellent fringe benefits package. The North Star Fund is firmly committed to affirmative action and strongly encourages people of color, women, LGBT, elderly and disabled candidates to apply. We appreciate all applicants but please be advised that North Star Fund is able to respond only to those best qualified for the position. To apply: Send cover letter, resume, salary requirements, 2 references to: Email: ddsearch@northstarfund.org with “Deputy Director search” as subject line. Mail: North Star Fund, Attn: Deputy Director Search. 520 8th Ave, Rm. 2203, NY, NY 10018-6656 Application deadline: rolling with hiring anticipated by late August to September. |
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Our Media Justice Fund panel have identified the new Media Justice Grantees for 2007/2008. They are: Center for Urban Pedagogy - $10,000 Global Action Project - $10,000 NYC Grassroots Media Coalition - $7,450 The three members of this year's Media Justice Panel were Betty Yu, Denisse Andrade, and Mitch Jeserich. |
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Your registration has been received. You will not receive an email confirmation. Thank you for your interest in North Star Fund's Beyond Giving workshops.The workshops will take place at the offices of North Star Fund, 520 Eighth Avenue, 22nd floor. Link to map.Please feel free to call us at (212) 620-9110 for directions or any other questions. |
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Giving to our favorite causes and issues is a must. But there are ways beyond writing a check that has also help make social change—you can invest following your values and your ethics. More and more individuals and organizations—including the North Star Fund—are exploring socially responsible investing and other ways to align their money with their values. North Star Fund second workshop in the Beyond Giving series will explore progressive estate planning. Progressive Estate PlanningThis Thursday, May 29, 2008, 6:00 - 8:00 PM Are you or your parents getting older and starting to think about what legacy you want to leave? Our second workshop in the ‘Beyond Giving’ series explores aligning your money with your values in estate planning. Whether you or your parents have a high net worth or a modest nest egg to pass on, this workshop will explore creative ways to limit excessive taxes, preserve what you’ve earned, and support the values you believe in.
Lisa Springer, Trustee, Millard Charitable Remainder Unitrust Register now for the workshop:The workshop is free of charge and will take place at the North Star Fund offices: 520 8th Avenue, 22nd Floor, between 36th and 37th Streets. The closest subway is the A/C/E at Penn Station.
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Ensuring Economic Justice
Ending Institutional Racism and Gender Discrimination
Securing Peace and Justice
United for Peace and Justice-NY (UFPJ-NY) is a coalition of over 60 peace, religious, labor, and community groups. UFPJ-NY has coordinated national demonstrations that have brought thousands of people into the streets to oppose the Iraq War. Plans for 2008 include a project to organize neighborhood peace groups and to facilitate collaboration among peace and justice groups. Protecting Civil Liberties and Constitutional Rights
Based in Queens, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) is an immigrant justice organization of low-income South Asian and other immigrants facing deportation in New York City. They fight to halt the expansion of anti-immigrant enforcement policies, win legalization for undocumented immigrants, and gain safe access to social services. |
The North Star News Prize awardees. (left to right) Farai Chideya, Maria Hinojosa, Errol Louis
Juan Gonzalez, Amy Goodman, Errol Louis, Arva Rice, Hugh Hogan, Maria Hinojosa, Farai Chideya and event co-chair Barbara Winslow.
German Perez, Maria Hinojosa, Hugh Hogan, event co-chairs Anne H. Hess and Toby D'Oench, Juanita Scarlett, Errol Louis
Event co-chair Toby D'Oench and Errol Louis
Farai dancing with a friend. |
"I'm thrilled to see this room filled with people committed to social justice," said Board chairperson Arva Rice, welcoming the crowd of 200 to North Star Fund’s inaugural North Star News Prize event. “Tonight, for the first time, we celebrate Frederick Douglass’s legacy by honoring the journalists and media makers who carry on his great contributions to these fields.” With a gorgeous view of Manhattan as the backdrop, North Star Fund supporters enjoyed an evening of live jazz, cocktails, and as many attendees remarked, inspiration. Though he could not be present in person, honorary Event Chair David Strathairn, Academy-Award nominated star of last year’s Good Night, and Good Luck, congratulated Prize winners Maria Hinojosa, Errol Louis and Farai Chideya, and reminded the crowd via a video greeting “to do everything you can to support the work of North Star Fund.” Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez were on hand to present the evening’s awards to Hinojosa, Louis and Chideya. "We need a media with a people's agenda,” said Goodman, emphasizing that the corporate media alone will not ensure all voices are heard. “And that's what Maria, Errol and Farai represent." "I'm being honored by people who are making change," said Chideya upon accepting her award. "It's a tough thing in this society to stand up for what is right instead of what is expedient." Chideya is a multimedia journalist, author and founder of PopandPolitics.com, which trains aspiring reporters. She is also a host and correspondent for NPR’s News and Notes with Ed Gordon. Introducing his New York Daily News colleague, columnist Errol Louis, Juan Gonzalez remarked that he found a kindred spirit in Louis when he joined the News in 2004. "It's a hard place to work," said Gonzalez, referring to the paper’s increasingly conservative slant. “New York is a much better place in terms of public discourse because of him.” Louis said his mother turned him on to journalism, enrolling him in a training program that led to a reporting job at Brooklyn’s now-defunct City Sun, a black weekly. Soon he was writing three columns a week. Louis would go on to found a federal credit union in Brooklyn with a grant from North Star Fund. "It was the best $5,000 we ever got," he said. "It took us nine months to spend it…We later brought millions into the neighborhood." The final award went to Maria Hinojosa, senior correspondent at PBS’ NOW and managing editor and host of NPR’s Latino USA. “She illuminates the stories of unsung heroes,” Goodman said of Hinojosa. Growing up as a Mexican on Chicago's South Side, Hinojosa felt "invisible". Accompanying her mother to a rally with Martin Luther King Jr. one day “was life changing. My mother had this great understanding of justice." Along with a broad array of social justice supporters, Hinojosa has interviewed her share of racist skinheads and xenophobic anti-immigrant vigilantes, and presents them fairly. "There's this notion of being a journalist that, because you believe in justice, you have an agenda," Hinojosa said. "I don't believe that. We all have to listen.” Hinojosa told of reporting on an undocumented immigrant who died in the World Trade Center. Afterwards, people from all over the country offered gifts and money to his widow and children in the South Bronx. "We all crossed boundaries," she said. Executive Director Hugh Hogan said North Star Fund's work cannot be done without the progressive media voice embodied by the three North Star News Prize honorees. “Reporting and activism can co-exist," he said, echoing Hinojosa. “Truth is not a bias.” |
Another world is possible.Photograph courtesty of |
Last month in Atlanta, over 9,000 people gathered under the idea that if another world is possible, another U.S. is necessary. The United States Social Forum went for five days, from June 27 to July 1, bringing together representatives from every corner of the social justice movement to network and explore ways of organizing across issues. North Star Fund gave 12 grants totaling $20,000 to support the attendance of representatives from 29 New York City grassroots social justice organizations. The U.S. Social Forum sought to link local efforts, and groups that North Star Fund supports did that very successfully. Members of the Grassroots Literacy Coalition lead a workshop entitled, "The Fight to End Illiteracy in the US" that brought together grassroots education equity organizers for their first-ever face-to-face conversations. Domestic Workers United, Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, and Damayan—all groups with which North Star Fund has strong relationships—met with other domestic workers organizing groups from across the country to launch an exciting new national domestic workers alliance. To keep the energy up and the networks alive, local grassroots organizing needs to be supported. The challenge is making that support both strategic and accountable. North Star Fund ally Resource Generation (RG), lead two workshops on giving and grantmaking for social justice. Usually RG workshops attendees only include young people of financial wealth. Their workshops at the U.S. Social Forum workshops were open to all, which was both challenging and ground-breaking. Maggie Williams, who is on staff at Voter Enfranchisement Project and a board member of Resource Generation, attended. She says, “It was critical to have a dialogue in a cross-class environment defining what real social change is, and how individuals and institutions can engage in philanthropy in ways that strengthen and support the work instead of detracting from it.” These are the groups to which North Star Fund provided assistance to attend the U.S. Social Forum.
Individual GroupsMake the Road by Walking |
Family unity is a bottom line for socially just immigration reform. |
In the spring of 2006, North Star Fund played a pivotal role moving donor dollars to support the massive mobilizations against HR 4437. This draconian House bill would have criminalized anyone employing or providing support and services to the more than 12 million undocumented immigrants on which our economy relies. We reported on the outcome of these mobilizations in our winter 2007 newsletter. At the time, many in the immigration rights movement believed that new leaders in Albany and Washington, backed by the large, newly-mobilized constituencies for immigration rights, would be pushing for comprehensive immigration reform that was fair and family-friendly. That push came in early May—in the form of a plan introduced by Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.). A more conservative bipartisan compromise hit the floor later in the month. Even though President Bush championed the compromise, it failed twice—shot down for the final time on June 28. As soon as the rumblings of the immigration reform bill started, North Star Fund got busy organizing funding. Thanks in part to our partnership with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, we provided $35,500 in Rapid Response grants to groups working for fair and equitable immigration reform. The grants allowed the groups to quickly inform their membership about the bill, and to work together to include the voice of grassroots immigrant communities in the debate. To get a handle on what’s next for the immigration rights movement, North Star Fund went back to three people interviewed for the winter newsletter article: Miguel Ramirez, with Immigrant Communities in Action, Aarti Shahani with Families for Freedom, and Chung-Wha Hong of the New York Immigration Coalition. In addition, we spoke with Queer Immigrant Rights Project (QuIR), who received their first North Star Fund grant in December 2006. QuIR organizes and supports LGBT immigrants, who can face isolation within their own immigrant communities. Human Rights and Needs IgnoredAfter the mass mobilization in 2006, and the long years of hard work before and after, many in the immigration rights movement thought a satisfactory bill might be at hand. But then the fine print dried. Miguel Ramirez of Immigrant Communities in Action relates, “We had a sad scenario when we discussed the specifics of the bills with our constituents—excessive penalties and fees, incarceration, a wall between Mexico and the USA, family separation—and the slim possibility to improve the bill through debate.” Indeed, the extreme right had pushed hard to skew the debate and engineer a bill that broadcasted reform, but created inequality and heartbreak. The debate is complex, but these are the broad outlines: Path to Citizenship: An estimated 60 plus percent of Americans support a fair and equitable bill with a clear path to citizenship. The bill did offer a path, but one that involved heavy fines and onerous, risky trips back to the immigrant’s country of origin. Family Unity: Family unity has always been a major focus of immigrant rights. Disregarding family values, the Right, including Bush, used the dehumanizing term “chain migration” to describe family unity. The bill eliminated a family-based policy for granting green cards and replaced it with a point system that favored higher education, work skills, and English-language proficiency. And deportation orders under current laws would have remained in place. Workplace Rights: The bill created a guest worker program that featured a similar point system to the one for green cards. It allowed employers to import workers, pay them less than minimum wage, and deport them without due process. Guest workers would have had no right to organize in the workplace. Heavier Policing: The militarization of our borders would have continued. The bill increased the border patrol by almost a third: from 13,000 to 18,000 agents, and ramped up the number of watchtowers and fences along the U.S.-Mexico border. Immigrant rights groups were horrified. Says Chung-Wha Hong, “The bill became such a monster. In the mainstream it was promoted as a pro-immigration bill. In reality, it was anti-family, anti-worker and anti-American.” Aarti Shahani reinforced this point. Families for Freedom organizes immigrant communities and families with members who face deportation. According to Shahani, “The bill didn’t take anyone off the deportation lists. The unjust deportation system would continue to destroy families.” Public health was also at stake. According to QuIR, “Our communities would wait longer to seek health care services, such as HIV/AIDS medications, for fear of being detained.” Similar fears would reverberate for other undocumented immigrants needing to access social or medical services. What’s Next?Leaders of the groups that North Star Fund supports are agreeing that an overall immigration bill may not be the best approach. According to Shahani, “People are pushing comprehensive immigration reform at high costs. But a piecemeal approach may be better. In recent years, anti-immigrant measures have passed by slipping small bills into larger ones.” In a similar vein, Hong says, “This will not be a time when we push for a single legislative bill. We need to do deeper and wider movement building. Even though millions of people came out to support immigration rights, we have so much more work to do to make grassroots action sustainable.” Grassroots organizing always begins in local communities. Says Ramirez, “We have to keep the pressure on. We will have to take the fight to our neighborhoods, towns, cities and states because the local governments are taking the initiative in the wake of the Congressional impasse.” According to Chung-Wha Hong, “Here in New York, immigrants do have significant local power. New York City has the responsibility to practice pro-active local policies as an antidote to the poisonous anti-immigrant policies being enacted elsewhere. And anti-immigrant sentiment is alive and well in Long Island and other parts of New York where anti-immigrant ordinances have been floated. We have to be ready for a lot of local battles.” Work in neighborhoods and other constituencies is central to this effort. For instance, QuIR says, “LGBTI [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex] documented and undocumented immigrants need to provide sustained and comprehensive education to mainstream LGBTI and immigrant groups. We also need to develop media messages and outreach materials to educate the larger public.” Another form of local action is the New Sanctuary Movement, a faith-based initiative in which communities accompany and protect immigrant families facing deportation and other forms of civil rights violations. Two member families of Families for Freedom were the first to be sheltered by New York’s New Sanctuary group. These local efforts translate to the national level by providing successful models for policies created with social justice in mind. According to Chung-Wha Hong, “The rightwing extremists communicated their vision very successfully, which is, ‘let’s deport all illegals and stop chain migration.’ Our challenge is to provide a vision of America that is strengthened by immigrants instead of treating immigrants as a liability.” Hong, speaking for many, adds, “Our fundamental bottom lines for immigration reform have not changed. We continue our call for broad and simple legalization for immigrants; a future worker program with full rights and a clear path to citizenship; family unity; and strong protections for due process and civil rights.” ResourcesLinks
Other LegislationThe drafters of the recent Senate immigration bill pulled, then compromised, many features from the following, much stronger, pieces of legislation: |
By Hugh Hogan, Executive Director
North Star Fund
Note to reader: an abbreviated version of this article appeared in the Fall 2007 of the Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA) Journal.
The Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller foundations made a philanthropic splash following their September 2006 announcement of a $300 million grant program across the African continent “to help millions of small-scale farmers and their families lift themselves out of poverty and hunger.” The plan, dubbed the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), has sparked controversy, evoking as it does the techno-scientific effort of the industrialized North in the 1960s and ‘70s to help peasant farmers of the global South.
The Rockefeller Foundation was the main philanthropic engine that drove the previous Green Revolution, the paradigm on which AGRA is based. Today’s AGRA will focus on three central components: better seeds, better practices, and better markets -- all backed up by better trained scientists and extension services. In the first phase, AGRA will invest $150 million in Gates and Rockefeller monies in developing improved crop varieties for “larger, more diverse and reliable harvests.” AGRA’s focus on better practices will seek a “more astute application of science” to improve how fertilizers are applied, soil is sustained, seeds are sown, and water is used through irrigation or catchment. Finally, AGRA believes Africa’s farmers need “more robust markets,” meaning they will supply farmers with the aforementioned improved inputs and better public and private extension services to use these inputs. And it means “stronger off-farm systems and markets, from storage, to transportation, to processing and final sale.”
Few can question the what of AGRA; it’s the how that should make all grantmakers sit up and ask some very hard questions if they, too, wish to provide the most marginalized of Africa’s farmers –most often women without access to technology, markets, and credit – a hand up instead of a short-lived handout. In moving forward with AGRA and initiatives like it, philanthropy must not ignore the lessons of the past, lest African farmers face the unintended negative consequences of the last Green Revolution.
Rice Farming in Senegal
My thoughts about AGRA stem from ten years living and working alongside some of the farmers that the initiative seeks to help. In 1990, I began a Peace Corps assignment as an agricultural extension agent in the Foundiougne district of Senegal. Thirty-two months later, I had gained a journeyman’s education in the agro-ecological culture and practices of Mandinka and Serrer women, who have long farmed rice in the tidal salt flats of Foundiougne. The area lies in the coastal region of Sine Saloum. I also gained unsettling insights into the promises and pitfalls of Western industrial-style agriculture the Green Revolution promoted.
Foundiougne is a marginal zone for growing rice. In most years, the area receives just enough rainfall to sufficiently quench the thirst of tender rice shoots in the tidal flats and upland gullies where the women seed their rice. Their harvests vary considerably from year to year due to the marginal nature of local growing conditions. Nonetheless, women’s harvests – which are based on annually collecting and experimenting with dozens of rice varieties -- form a vital component of household and village food security. They are particularly important as villages approach the “hungry time” between the end of the dry season in April and the arrival of new crops in the summer.
The agricultural extension program with which I worked was co-lead by our Peace Corps director and a very wise Senegalese agriculture advisor, Alphonse Faye. Following a three-month agricultural, language, and cross-cultural training, we moved to our host villages, meeting individually and eventually en masse with women peasant farmers from about 20 villages to present our hopes and plans for joint research and experimental trials that would seek to use local resources to boost yields. Then we sat back to listen.
The women immediately began asking for fertilizer and pudeur, or pesticides. Alphonse replied that was not what the program was about, at least not for now. Rather it was meant to focus on strengthening what the women were already doing without depending on too many outsiders or their resources. He reminded the women of past efforts that focused on men’s farm work, peanuts and millet, and irrigation and machines in the case of rice. These programs brought better seeds, free fertilizer, and pudeur for a time, Alphonse reminded them. But the government did not see the women’s rice farming system as worthy of innovation or support.
High Input, Mixed Results
Years ago, French and Chinese agricultural advisors had come to Senegal to advise the government’s agricultural ministry. These well-paid advisors, working with Senegalese counterparts, had experimented with using machines to farm rice, which brought men into what had been primarily a women’s farming system. They installed irrigation equipment and distributed “improved” seeds that were not always ideally suited to the erratic rains and salt and iron intrusion that plague local rice fields in the Sine Saloum region. They also issued free or subsidized credits to local rice farmers to buy fertilizer and pesticides. But they did not take much time to talk with the women about their existing varieties and how agro-ecological conditions in a given year led them to their sowing decisions.
As one might expect, yields increased in many fields where the conditions were ideally suited to such “high input” agriculture. Over time, however, the advisors moved on. The machines broke down and, without a local infrastructure to fix or replace them, the broken bits were left to rust. Eventually the free inputs and credits dried up. By the 1980s, the rice-farming system across Foundiougne to the Senegambian border devolved fully back to the women who had been responsible for it for centuries – with no support from local extension services.
A Community-based, Farmer-driven Alternative
Alphonse’s experience led him to create a very different approach to agricultural extension and implementing change in Senegal’s rural communities. He focused on community-based work that put Fioudiougne’s women rice farmers more in control of how we went about agricultural research and experimentation.
Working with farmers who had been selected by their women’s associations, we conducted detailed surveys on local agro-ecological conditions, farming practices, calendars, and cultural beliefs. Understanding tenure, power, and local clan associations was never easy, but we were keen to ensure that information would be shared across different networks. The farmers picked the fields where we did on-farm experiments, and picked the experimental plots that we monitored and harvested together.
Our tests involved simple changes, such as a locally forged, appropriate technology seeding rake which the women used to sow their rice in rows. Sowing on line enabled the women to distinguish weeds from rice shoots earlier, so they could weed sooner and give more nutrition to growing rice plants, which in turn boosted yields. In a couple of plots, we also enlisted willing husbands to bring their animals down to plough the soil prior to sowing, as directed by their wives, and arranged to apply cow or sheep dung on a more precise schedule to coincide more tightly with the growth phases of the rice.
Fundamental to the success of Foundiougne’s rice farmers has always been their ability to collect a wide variety of rice seeds adapted to different growing conditions from year to year. Our goal was to support these practices, and we encouraged the women to be diligent in seed selection and sharing. The women were also given two pounds each of improved seed varieties that Alphonse had developed as a young researcher and breeder. They enthusiastically tested them in a variety of plots and returned the two pounds at the end of the season so others could experiment as well.
Right Path or Wrong Turn?
Success stories like this can be found throughout the global South (For a more recent example, check out the NY Times story of Zambian extension agent, Hammerskjoeld Simwinga, a recent winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize). Before grantmakers dive into the pool of funders focused on feeding 21st-century Africa, they should research at length what has worked, what hasn’t, and why. Some key questions include:
- Who will benefit? Will subsistence farmers maintain control over their seed stock – both their diversity and best place to plant from year to year? It would be catastrophic if AGRA becomes simply about creating more customers for monoculture farming that relies on Western seed companies’ hybrid, genetically modified, or “terminator” seeds. This would erase farmers’ deep ecological knowledge in the name of progress and corporate profits.
- Will scientists and extension agents trained by the program be required to carry out their research and training by living in the communities they serve? And who will decide what crops are prioritized for research? If AGRA is serious about supporting a farmer-led research and implementation agenda, then agenda-setting should be tied to village-based farmer associations empowered to help set research agendas, methods, and dissemination of results.
- Does AGRA address the role of power in agricultural change and innovation in Africa? These huge new investments should not undermine food sovereignty or ignore cultural traditions. If AGRA is serious about bolstering the ability of farmers, especially women, then they should be helped to organize. Money should be earmarked for leadership training in many places where patriarchy and government neglect or corruption are well entrenched.
- Will AGRA focus solely on cash crops? Will it seek to convince farmers through heavy subsidy or incentives to commercialize subsistence crops? This latter effort will be a tough sell and if successful could undermine rural food security. And if AGRA seeks to bolster African farm incomes derived from commercial crops, will it seek changes within the WTO and GATT to enable Africa’s poorest farmers to market their goods competitively in Europe, the U.S. and Asia?
Perhaps AGRA’s partners have answers to these questions, and the others coming from those familiar with the costs of the previous Green Revolution. At the very least, AGRA should seek out the Alphonses Fayes of Africa, learn from them and use their history and wisdom to guide the vision and implementation of this Promethean philanthropic undertaking.
To learn more about AGRA visit www.agra-alliance.org.
To respond to this “Perspectives” essay or submit one of your own, write to editor@ega.org. (For the Spring 2008 issue, we are seeking submissions on the topic of nuclear power.)
