I would have to do a little research but isn't Zimbabwe one of those countries that refuses to try genetically modified corn?

If so, it's just another example of fear of modernity causing trouble.

If not, this post is rather irrelevant, except to explicitly reveal myself to be pro-corn.

P.S. By "this post is irrelevant", I mean my comment, not your post. Your post is good. :)

Zimbabwe's problems are caused not by any reluctance to adopt exotic technologies, but by old-fashioned brutality, authoritarianism, and foreign indifference (or approval). The latter, however, is not particularly important--except for South Africa's despicable decision to celebrate the clearly and hideously anti-democratic "elections" that Mugabe relied on to give a fig leaf to cover his naked grab for power.

As to Adam's question: The public outrage is nonexistent, because MSM--still the gateway for media coverage--doesn't talk about any of the African horror stories (the long war in the DRC, the continuing civil war in Cote d'Ivoire, the separatist conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea) nearly as often as it should.

Paul, your comment reminds me of another hurdle to MSM - aren't foreign journalists officially banned from Zimbabwe? It's hard to get enough video footage to create outrage when they aren't even allowed in the country.

They are, I think, more or less banned--but then they are also mostly banned from Tibet, as they were from much of the Soviet Union or the various horrors of the Seventies. It's no excuse, either, because I have been following these events, off and on, for more than five years--and following them, I should say, in the better parts of the MSM (the NYT, the Economist, the Christian Science Monitor); these titles, however, are not exactly "mainstream" in the same way NBC Nightly News is, and so, with that important qualification, I stand by my point.

The fundamental reason why MSM doesn't care, of course, is because we First Worlders are, as a group, uninterested in what happens in the Third World, largely because we typically remain mostly unaffected by whatever cataclysms strike our poorer neighbors in the global South.

(In any event, what video footage is needed? More stock images of starving Africans is not going to shock anyone who is not already deeply troubled. So I won't let the media off the hook on that account.)

Zimbabwe as a name gives the lie to just why they are now starving. It was all predicted many years ago when the country had a different name but political correctness has thrown that name down the memory hole and America's part in it as well.

Yeah, I mean, who remembers Cecil Rhodes anyway?

(Our anonymous troll thinks too highly of himself and his suggestive, but ineffective, analysis.)

Oh, just who is it that is trying recruit back former Rhodesian white farmers? That would be an effective way of having a population that could be fed.

I have no idea what you're saying, but given that Mugabe has long been expropriating white farmers, I'm sure he's not "recruiting" them.

Paul, you need to pay more attention to the little reporting that is available. Instapundit, for instance, has a post on Rhodesia. Mugabe, the thug, has been doing what you say but thinking perhaps that he is Bill Clinton and that words have no meaning, he actually is trying to get whites to return. You gloss over America's evil part in bringing these thugs to power, America's role based upon some dumb thinking that Blacks in America somehow had any relation to Blacks in Africa, even Senator Lugar falling prey to this sort of stupidity in the case of ........

Jebus. Can any other commenter give me and the rest of the ITA crew a good reason not to ban you?

Well he still owes me a steak from when we wagered on the outcome of the Iraqi WMD search.

It appears that I erred. There are two countries near there who are recruiting white farmers hoping to lure expertise to their agriculture sectors. Those sectors were probably damaged by some of the same forces at work in Zimbabwe. Or, were you irritated by Senator Lugar's long ago vote to discourage American investment in South Africa? People who the world admires and who actually lived there did not think Lugar's policy helped their people. One such person later won a Nobel Prize, I think.