Joel K. Bourne Jr

This reads exactly like your standard National Geographic magazine story. It isn't terrible, and does have a good high-level overview of food security and the Green Revolution, fairly standard stuff. But there's also lots of gee-whiz reporting, uncritical reporting based on single sources, and some questionable choices of topics. That's why I mostly look at the pictures!

> "To sequence the Arabidopsis genome—the fruit fly of plant breeders—took $70 million and seven years," says Pam Ronald, a rice geneticist at UC Davis. "The same process is now done in a week for $99. …"

> The food riots in Haiti in 2008 revealed the pitfalls of relying on free trade to provide a poor nation with its staple grain. Haiti had been self-sufficient in rice as late as the mid-1980s. But in 1994, when President Bill Clinton restored ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide to power, he requested that Aristide drop Haiti's protective tariffs on imported rice. The country was soon flooded with cheap "Miami rice" from the United States, a crop that is heavily subsidized and grown in just a few states, including Clinton's home state of Arkansas. The imports destroyed local rice production—Haiti's small farmers simply couldn't compete—and left the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere at the mercy of the international grain market.… (meer)