One of the goals of Global Voices was to give people on the Internet access to voices they might not otherwise hear. For us, this has meant amplifying, translating and contextualizing voices from every corner of the world where someone has been blogging.

Early in our project, I’d hoped that we’d be able to feature the voices of bloggers in prison. There are more than 9 million people in prison worldwide - that’s a much larger population than many nations we cover. (By the way, the US is the world’s leading jailer, both in absolute terms - 2.09 million people in the prison system - and proportional terms - 0.71% of Americans are in prison. We beat out China and Russia in absolute terms, Belarus and Russia in proportional terms.)

We’ve covered people blogging from prison, including Alaa Ahmed Seif al-Islam/Alaa Abdel Fatteh, who posted extensively from prison in Cairo, where he was held for participating in a demonstration in support of a free Egyptian judiciary. Alaa blogged by writing on paper, passing the paper to his wife Manal, who posted his words on their joint blog. (If you have plans to blog from prison any time in the future, it’s a good idea to make sure your spouse is also a blogger.) Near as I can tell, this is the method - more or less - practiced by all prison bloggers, most of whom write letters to a contact on the outside who makes the post online.

While covering the detention of Alaa, Abdel Monem, Kareem Soliman and other prisoners of conscience, linking to other prisoners has been more controversial within the GV community. GV is starting to be blocked by some governments, and having a great deal of prison-focused content might serve as an excuse for a repressive government to block the site. It’s been argued that having GV closely associated with content from “ordinary” prisoners (i.e., people jailed for conventional crimes, not for political speech) might threaten the security of some of our correspondents in particularly repressive regimes.

As a result, I think we’ve probably neglected to link to Thai Prison Life, an amazingly comprehensive website about the prison experience of Panrit Daoruang, better known as “Gor”, the creator of the thailandlife.com website. The site is administered by Richard Barrow, who was previously one of Gor’s teachers, and who urges visitors to the site to visit Gor in prison, bringing him food from the prison store. Gor speaks frankly about his struggles with drug addiction as well as about Klong Dan prison, where he’s serving time.

US-based prison blogs are a bit more common, perhaps reflecting our national leadership in incarceration. Jon’s Jail Journal - the
blog of British rave promoter and former stockbroker Shaun Attwood - began as an activist project and has turned into a chronicle of his romance with a woman visiting him in prison. Attwood was initially held on drug charges in the infamous Maricopa County jail, where a sadistic warden prides himself on humiliating and mistreating prisoners. He’s continued to chronicle his experiences, sending letters to his father in the UK. While the focus is no longer directly on exposing Sherrif Joe Arpaio, it’s a moving chronicle of the challenges of incarcerated life.

Meet Vernon is the weblog of death row inmate Vernon Lee Evans, a convicted murderer incarcerated and facing the death penalty in Maryland. The blog has been part of a campaign to seek a stay of execution for Evans, which has succeeded thus far on a technical challenge about the cruelty of lethal injection as a method of execution. The blog has been dark since June 2006. But there’s a growing number of active prison blogs, including a set of blogs hosted by prisonblogs.net, a project started in the wake of video blogger Josh Wolf’s detention in federal prison to provide blogspace for prisoners throughout the prison community.

There are predictable angry reactions to blogging from prison, including from the always thoughtful and charming Michelle Malkin, who asks:

I thought the 1995 Zimmer amendment, which banned prison luxuries and has withstood constitutional challenges, was supposed to stop this nonsense. Maybe it’s time for someone in Congress to update the law.

If not, what’s next? The Menendez brothers sharing photos on Flickr? Charles Manson podcasts? A convicted al Qaeda terrorists’ group blog from Supermax

I assume Malkin is in the same camp as Arpaio and would like to see prisoners banned from writing letters, placed on chain gangs, dressed in pink underwear and housed in tents in the middle of a desert. For those who’ve got hopes for prison to involve rehabilitation, not just punishment, there’s an argument to be made that more prison blogging would be a good thing.

My friend Kevin Wallen runs the amazing Students Expressing Truth project within the Jamaican prison system. The program encourages prisoners to teach each other technical, media, creative and life skills, and produces radio programs that are broadcast throughout the Jamaican prison system and, through Wallen, on a major Kingston radio station. In the process of their work with SET, prisoners gain skills that they can use when they return to society. The program has graduated over 100 former inmates and has an astounding 0% recidivism rate, as compared to a 50% systemwide rate.

Reducing recidivism is one of the goals of a new initiative by songwriter Billy Bragg, Jail Guitar Doors, which does something very, very simple: it provides acoustic guitars and percussion instruments for prisoners in UK jails. In a nod to Woody Guthrie - whose guitar bore the slogan “This machine kills fascists” - some of the guitars bear the legend “This machine kills time.”

There are reasonable concerns about letting people in jail blog - Malkin references a horrific story about jail writings of a convicted murderer about his crimes being published online to taunt the victim’s family. But I’m not convinced that the story about a very sick man sending letters to another very sick man who posted them should get people to ignore the lessons of Wallen’s success. Helping inmates build skills for the outside world is a part of rehabilitation. And hearing what life is like in prison sheds light on an otherwise dark corner of our world, a corner that’s grown quite huge in modern American life.

When I was in Zimbabwe last September, debate over a proposed interception of communications bill was the major topic of conversation in the Zimbabwean internet community. The bill would give certain members of the Zimbabwean government - notably Zimbabwe’s secret police and revenue authorities - the ability to monitor postal, telephone and internet traffic with authorization from certain Ministers if there were “reasonable grounds for the Minister to believe (among other things) that a serious offence has been or is being or will probably be committed or that there is threat to safety or national security of the country.” At the time, Zimbabwe’s largest internet provider had its net access throttled back for nonpayment of bills, and it seemed safe to assume that a country heading for economic collapse had better things to do than to build communications monitoring facilities.

Almost a year later, the bill passed into law, and there are early signs that companies are taking steps to come into compliance with the law.

But it’s worth reading between the lines. The chairman of the Zimbabwe Internet Access Providers, a group of three Zimbabwean ISPs, told the Financial Gazette, “We are in the process of complying. We are putting in place projects to see that we comply.” In other words, “We’re not monitoring yet, but we recognize that we can be locked up for three years if we don’t comply, so we’re figuring out how to buy the equipment we’ve just been forced to purchase.”

One of the objections offered by the Zimbabwe ISP association - which fought the interception of communications bill tooth and nail - was that the costs associated with monitoring were borne by the ISPs. Given the precarious state of the Zimbabwean economy (four-digit inflation, massive unemployment, thousands of people fleeing to South Africa every day), it’s likely that ISPs are going to have a hard time getting their hands on the equipment neccesary to intercept communications.

When I talked to ISP owners last September, they told me that people were already self-censoring because of fear that the government would read their email. By talking about an interception of communications bill - even a bill that hadn’t gone into law, and might not be able to be implemented by Zimbabwean ISPs - the Mugabe government managed to create a panopticon. Since successful surveillance should be invisible, the fact that there’s no evidence of surveillance means nothing - if the government says they’re going to monitor your communications, there’s a chance they are, and you might modify your behavior as a result.

Will Zimbabwe start monitoring email? I find that somewhat hard to believe. After all, Zimbabwe has evidently created a blacklist of websites - Global Voices included - that are to be banned… but there’s no evidence that access to any of these sites is blocked in any way within Zimbabwe. Blocking sites is much easier to accomplish technically than monitoring email (especially if Zimbabweans switch to using email providers that provide an https:// interface, like GMail.) If they can’t block websites, can they really hope to intercept phonecalls and email?

(The argument had been that China would provide the hardware and expertise to monitor communications. But UK minister Mark Malloch Brown is reporting that China may be pulling back assistance to Zimbabwe, joining the majority of nations in isolating the Mugabe government.)

While I think communication monitoring in Zimbabwe is more likely to be threatened than implemented, friends who know Zimbabwe well have pointed out that my assumptions may be wrong. If the government is sufficiently worried about keeping power, monitoring communications may be a higher priority than paying government salaries, importing petrol or providing basic public services. If Mugabe and ZANU-PF are sufficiently concerned, it’s possible that the last dollars in public coffers will go towards monitoring growing dissent, not towards governing.

It may not matter whether or not the Zimbabwe government is actually monitoring communications - some Zimbabweans are being moved to silence. Zimpundit, who covers Zimbabwe for Global Voices, hasn’t posted to her blog since May. While the brave folks at Sokwanele and Kubatana continue to make their voices heard, some other Zimbabweans writing online have dropped away, either due to the increasing cost of accessing a cybercafe or from fear that big brother is reading over their shoulders.

• BBC NEWS | Health | Typhoid making a comeback in UK
  Brits are increasingly travelling to tropical destinations, and a possible result may be a surge in typhoid cases…
  (tags: globalization travel health)
• Al Jazeera English - News - Hezbollah Video Game Targets Israel
  Hezbollah releases a videogame designed to introduce “a culture of resistance to younger generations” through capturing Israeli soldiers and destroying Israeli targets in a virtual southern Lebanon
  (tags: gaming simulation israel lebanon)
• For Sudanese refugees, a cycle of flight | csmonitor.com
  Refugees from Southern Sudan are finding circumstances increasingly uncomfortable in Egypt and some are fleeing to Israel. Follows from the raids on the protests at UNHCR in Cairo almost two years ago
  (tags: egypt sudan africa migration refugee)

I used to spend a lot of time in American embassies. For much of its existence, Geekcorps was funded primarily by USAID, so meetings in nations where we worked or wanted to work were often in the embassy compound. (In nations where USAID has a large presence, it often has its own offices - in ones where it’s a smaller presence, the office is often within the embassy.) I also got into the habit of meeting with the Commercial section of US embassies, always a good way to get a sense for the local business scene… or the US government perception of the local business scene… which inevitably involved embassy meetings.

It’s not easy to get admitted to a US embassy, even if you’re carrying a US passport. (The situation is much worse for people attempting to get interviews to obtain US visas.) Not only is there a security check involving x-rays of bags and a pass through a metal detector, followed by a patdown, but certain items can’t enter an embassy. Anything that might be used as a bugging device - a mobile phone, a PDA, a laptop computer - must be checked at the gatehouse before you enter the main building. Working with the US government, you get into the habit of working on paper - at the height of my work with Geekcorps, my calendar, phone book and other critical resources were all printed out in my Circa notebook, so I could have access to my digital data on paper during meetings…

(The security rules had some other odd implications. You can’t bring any medicines or drugs into most US embassies, including aspirin. As an insulin-dependent diabetic, this is a really unnerving situation, as you’re leaving medicine which is hard to obtain in a country like Mongolia with the Wackenhut guards, praying you’ll get it back. One of the reasons I don’t wear an insulin pump is that the notion of having to explain the pump to the guards or leave it with them…)

You can learn a lot about how the US government views a country by virtue of the location and the structure of the embassy. In Ghana, the US embassy had two main locations - one was on the Ring Road, the main road of Accra, and another was in a residential neighborhood in Osu, an upscale part of town. We shared a security wall with this second part of the embassy - the consular section - and they were excellent neighbors. If you ignored the fact that the road was blocked in front of the consular section, you might have imagined that the compound was merely the location of a somewhat security-conscious Ghanaian business.

That style of embassy - an approachable, visible building integrated into the downtown of a city - is an old-school approach to embassy design. According to Jane Loeffler, who literally wrote the book on US embassy design, the visibility and accessibility of these buildings was part of their mission: “prominent, accessible public buildings to be visited and admired by American citizens and their foreign hosts.” The US built a lot of these embassies in the 1950s, but changed tactics in the 1960s, as US policy in Vietnam became less popular and attacks on embassy buildings became more common. Attacks on the embassies in Khartoum, Athens, Kuala Lumpur and Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s changed the philosophy of embassy design for good. In countries where the US government believes that the local population is unlikely to be opposed to US interests, embassies tend to be easily accessible, located downtown and protected by a modest amount of visible security (usually substantially set back from the road, with a perimeter of concrete road obstacles). In countries where the threat is considered more serious, US embassies are fortresses. Specifically, they are “Inman” buildings, designed to meet a set of security standards proposed by retured Admiral Bobby Inman, a former head of the NSA - Inman proposed that buildings be remote, on large and fortified sites, and designed to withstand bomb blasts.

In 1998, terrorist attacks on embassies in Tanzania and Kenya killed at least 220 people, primarily African employees of the US government. The old Kenyan embassy had been near downtown Nairobi - the old one is far, far removed from the city center, a long taxi ride from downtown. Non-official vehicles aren’t allowed into the compound, and you’re not allowed to park your vehicle nearby - instead, you take a taxi to a drop-off point hundreds of meters from the main gate and walk to the gatehouse, then walk again to the main building. The doors to the embassy are thick, bomb-proof vault doors, and when they close behind you, it’s clear that you’re far, far away from Nairobi.

Obviously it makes sense that the US government wants to protect diplomats and the people who work with them from attack - had the US embassy in Kenya not been in a crowded part of town, the collateral damage to citizens (reports of up to 4,000 people wounded) would have been much lower. But this new style of embassy construction has practical and symbolic implications. Loeffler wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post two weeks after the East Africa bombings titled “Diplomacy Doesn’t Belong In Bunkers“, which argued in part, “defensive building styles bring problems of their own, creating an atmosphere of suspicion and divorcing diplomats from the communities they need to know and understand.”

Architecture sends messages. Our embassies say that America fears Kenyans more than Ghanaians (or did - see update at the end of this post), Chinese more than Mongolians. And we fear no one more than the Iraqis.

Loeffler has an article in the upcoming issue of Foreign Policy that analyzes the US Embassy in Iraq in detail. It’s the largest embassy building in the world, covering 104 acres in the Green Zone. That’s six times larger than the UN complex on the banks of the East River in New York. It incorporates 619 one-bedroom apartments, as well as all the facilities to support a small city - an electricity plant, water, sewage, a food court, movie theatre, market - all surrounded by nine-foot high walls.

What message does this send? Loeffler observes, “…the United States has designed an embassy that conveys no confidence in Iraqis and little hope for their future. Instead, the United States has build a fortress capable of sustaining a massive, long-term presence in the face of continued violence.” Another clear message is the fact that the US is never, ever planning on leaving Iraq - a perception many Iraqis will tell you they’ve had since the opening days of the invasion. The embassy may cost more than a billion dollars to build and a similar amount per year to operate - its architecture, cost, self-sufficiency and isolation make it very clear that the US isn’t going away any time soon, no matter what Congressional democrats - and most Americans - may hope.

Approachability is clearly not a priority for American diplomats in Iraq. The New York Times reports that Iraqis who’ve worked for the US government and contractors - who are therefore at great risk of death or kidnapping in Iraq - aren’t signing up for refugee status. Why? Because they can’t do so in Iraq - they need to flee to Jordan or Syria, where they’re likely to be turned away at the border. I can’t think of a more shameful policy than forcing people who’ve risked their lives to support our disastrous mission in Iraq to flee their country to seek refugee status in our country.

In the halcyon days of Mission Accomplished, IESC - the USAID contractor that took over operations of Geekcorps - started bidding for projects in Iraq. They hoped that we could recruit computer geeks to come build internet centers in schools and libraries around Iraq. I refused to work on the project, believing that there was no chance that volunteers would be able to have the cultural experiences we wanted to create with the Geekcorps program - the chance to work and live close to people in the country. A few months later, I’d left the company, and it seemed clear that it would be years before it might be possible for volunteers to walk the streets of Baghdad and interact with Iraqis without armed escort. The structure of the US embassy in Iraq implies that the time when that sort of interaction might take place may be never.

I can understand the need to build a fortress in Baghdad. But Loeffler warns that the design for the US embassy in Iraq is going to inform future embassy design around the world. The cosy, approachable neighborhood embassy may well be a thing of the past, from Accra to Ulaanbaatar. In the grand scope of all the terrible decisions made post-9/11, it may seem like a small thing, but I suspect it’s a huge step backwards for US diplomacy for many years to come.

Architecture is a form of communication that lasts for decades or centuries. I hope for a future where embassies that embody Fortress America seem like anachronisms, the memories of an unhappy, scared time that’s now past.

Kwasi points out that I’m already behind the times with this post - the US has upgraded its embassy in Ghana to a new structure that comes much closer to the fortress model than the humble old structures did.

The fine folks at WBUR’s Here and Now, a daily news show syndicated on many NPR stations, invited me in to speak with them about the potentials - realized and otherwise - of the Internet as it spreads to all corners of the world. The interview with Robin Young - based on several long and enjoyable conversations with producer Hitesh Hathi - took place a couple of weeks ago, but aired on the station yesterday. I don’t use RealAudio Player, so I haven’t heard the piece yet, but you can listen and let me know if it came out okay… :-)

• China’s economic revival is minted in counterfeit - International Herald Tribune
  “Life in China today often seems purely situational, not governed by rights and wrongs so much as by what one can get away with.” Howard French on China’s dysfunctional regulatory system
  (tags: china economics trade regulation intellectualproperty)
• A nation of outlaws - The Boston Globe
  You think tainted dogfood from China is bad? You should have seen American meat exports in the 19th century… an argument that China’s in an “adolescent phase” of capitalism
  (tags: china economics regulation intellectualproperty)

I’ve just spent eight days completely offline. I realize that’s not a very impressive figure - as I’m often reminding people, more than five billion people spend every day offline. But I’m not very good at taking vacations and even worse at taking vacations from the Internet, and that’s the longest I’ve been offline since 1998, when Rachel and I took a two-week honeymoon.

Driving back from Maine on Saturday night, I was listening to old episodes of This American Life. In an episode titled “Promised Land”, David Rakoff takes a 14-day liquids-only fast, hoping it will lead him to some sort of transcendent, religious experience - he’s disappointed when he discovers that he feels great, but hasn’t achieved transcendence.

My thoughts exactly. My expectations for a week offline weren’t as ambitious as Rakoff’s, but I’d hoped that freeing my mind from digital information might magically allow me to see my work from a different perspective, providing the clarity I lack on a day to day basis. Nope. But it felt great to break out of a routine for a week, to feel like I could start a day without email triage and the ritual removal of spam from the blog…

I spent a good part of the week enjoying old media. One of my favorite places in Maine is the Big Chicken Barn, an antique store housed in, you guessed it, a big chicken barn. The barn has an amazingly comprehensive collection of old American magazines, including near-complete runs of Time, Life, the Saturday Evening Post and others. I worked my way through piles of Time, looking for old airline ads, and found myself travelling through time through a wonderfully tangible, dust-smelling Wayback Machine.

My best find of the week wasn’t at the chicken barn, but at a roadside tag sale somewhere west of Belfast. It’s a gem from 1892, a coffee table book given as a gift by E.W. Berry, a menswear store in Rockland, ME, to their customers. It’s a collection of photographs from around the world, famous buildings liberally augmented with portraits of European leaders, pictures of people in traditional dress and the occasional inexplicable collage of babies.

You’ll be unsurprised to discover that I was fascinated by the table of contents, trying to figure out the geographic distribution of the photos in the collection. There’s a heavy focus on Western Europe and North America, with nothing farther south on the African continent than Egypt. Some countries, like Turkey and Japan, feature multiple plates portraying the costumes of ordinary people and the wealthy - others feature nothing more than street scenes.

Rachel was fascinated by language in the preface of the book, which went to some lengths to defend the legitimacy of photography as a way of providing insight into the rest of the world:

The photographer’s camera makes no mistakes; it takes exact likeness. By the photo-type process, which has recently become very popular, the photo is transferred to copper plates and then printed. The beautiful views which render this volume a vast and charming picture-gallery are, therefore, exact reproductions of the famous originals. The eye looks at the object exacrly as it looked to the unerring camera.
No such accuracy could be obtained by engraving on wood or steel. From the whole grant outline down to the minutest details the reproduction is perfect, without any additions or omissions by the artist or engraver. The value of such copies must be apparent to every intelligent person.

The occasional photo makes one wonder about the dedication to accuracy. My friend Daniel - who manipulates images for a living - points out that it’s hard to believe that all the figures in this Cairo “street scene” all happened to be facing the camera at the same time. A little work with a magnifying glass makes it very clear that most of the figures were pasted into the picture, and in a few cases, that faces were pasted onto bodies, using “the Photoshop of the times”. It’s pretty impressive work, nevertheless, given that each pasted figure needed its own handdrawn shadow as well…

It’s hard to imagine families gathering around an album of scenes from around the world and staring with fascination and wonder… though that’s precisely what my family did for almost an hour when I brought the book home. We spent a good deal of time wondering who the audience for the book was - educated people who hadn’t had the chance to travel to Europe, but felt like their education demanded a knowledge of the Continent? Working people who’d likely never travel beyond their home states, giving them a chance to see more of the world than they’d otherwise ever see.

With four of us crowded around the kitchen table of the house we’d rented in Maine, we’d collectively seen roughly half the places depicted in the book - with the exception of myself, my family isn’t unusually well-travelled. It’s just become vastly easier - and vastly more common - for the average American to see the Alhambra or the Pyramids at Giza than it was for the book’s owner 115 years ago.

I wonder sometimes if the possibility of travel, and the ability to “visit” places through much richer media than black and white photographs limits our interest in seeing those places. In the 1980s and 90s, Rick Smolan and collaborators created a series of books that documented daily life in America, the Soviet Union, and then eventually different corners of the world, including the wonderfully dated “24 Hours in Cyberspace“, assembled in 1996.

A decade after Smolan’s cyber-project, you can see photos from Ghana or television from Thailand with a mouse click. But it’s hard to believe that looking into another country or another culture would have the same appeal that staring at these prints 115 years ago might have had for a small-town boy in Maine.

• David Weinberger: Andrew Keen’s Best Case - Media on The Huffington Post
  Weinberger has become our champion, fighting against Andrew Keen - this is a particularly compact and useful defense of amateurism against Keen’s critiques
  (tags: davidweinberger Andrew_Keen books media web2.0 debate memes)
• The water margin | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited
  Is the failure of Biwater plc in Tanzania evidence that privatizing infrastructure is a bad idea, or that corporations can be as incompetent as government operators?
  (tags: worldbank economics development infrastructure water tanzania africa)

I’m going on vacation. If all goes well, I hope to be offline from now until August 29th. Things seldom work out that way, but you can help me by yelling at me if you see me online in the meantime.

If I owe you a response to your email, blogpost, blog comment, angry letter, or fruit basket, please forgive me - you’re not going to hear from me for some time to come. If you really need a response, you could try mailing me again on the 30th.

Have a lovely week and enjoy your break in hearing from me.

What does maize cost in Ghana today?

That’s a useful question to ask if you’re a farmer in Burkina Faso, wondering if it’s worth selling your harvest locally, or whether you might invest in a lorry to take your grain south, where it might fetch a higher price. The TradeNet system built at the BusyLabs technology incubator in Accra makes it possible to find up-to-date prices on agricultural products throughout West Africa, and to offer transactions to users in other countries, selling commodities across national borders. The aim of systems like this one is to increase regional trade, which will benefit local farmers and should help decrease food emergencies, which tend to be highly local and can often be corrected by bringing food from other parts of a country or region into the affected area.

White maize is selling for $0.32 a kilo in Ghana today, and for $0.22 across the border in Burkina Faso, a disparity that might be explained by Ghana’s comparative wealth and spending power. But if you’re looking to engage in agricultural arbitrage, you might want to go long in onions, which are selling for $0.31 a kilo in Benin and $0.91 a kilo in Ghana. Of course, before you load that lorry, you should probably do some research. One of the reasons that commodity prices are so varied in the region is that regional trade is tough to accomplish - the infrastructure connecting Ghana and Benin isn’t great, so transport costs are high, and the process of crossing borders between Ghana/Togo and Togo/Benin is likely to involve tarrifs, shrinkage of your crops and a number of other unanticipated costs.

Still, the ability to triple your money by shipping onions 300km looks like a great commerical opportunity for a knowledgeable entrepreneur. It’s an opportunity that’s only available if the information is accurate, timely and available, which is why the TradeNet system is so interesting.

What will maize cost in Ghana in a few weeks?

That’s a harder question to answer, but one that’s on the mind of NASA scientist Molly Brown. She’s building a system that sythesizes information from the NDVI - Normalized Difference Vegetation Index - a map of how green or brown vegetation is in various different parts of the globe - with rainfall and humidity information to offer forecasts of market prices for various commodities. Brown hopes to make these maps available for West Africa in 2008 and in other parts of the world in 2010.

The value of these maps is that they can predict localized famines, which might be alleviated by using data from a system like TradeNet, allowing millet from Mali to be moved to Niger to feed hungry populations in areas where crops have failed. It’s possible to build these maps because there’s generally so little mobility in African markets - in rural areas, most grain is sold within a few dozen kilometers of where it’s produced. As Brown explained to Science Central, building maps like this for the US doesn’t make much sense, as we’re already used to buying strawberries from California, Guatemala, or wherever they’re cheapest. But having information both on future agricultural production and current agricultural pricing could have a huge impact on food security in West Africa… so long as questions of transport infrastructure and cross-border trade can be worked out as well.

I’m always interested in what leads scientists to study a particular problem - it’s my firm belief that lousy problem selection is why we’ve got four thousand competing online social network projects and so few regional agricultural trade networks. It comes as no surprise to find that Brown was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal… there’s nothing like seeing these problems first hand to make you want to focus your research on projects that have a high probability of solving realworld problems.