Word: plan
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...built up infrastructure to make their colonies more productive and get primary goods quickly to market: railways, ports and canals linked the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. In the wreckage left by World War II, the Bretton Woods institutions and the Marshall Plan were premised on the idea that economic development was the handmaiden to peace. More recently, charitable organizations (which have been playing a role in development for centuries) responded to humanitarian emergencies in the poor world that aroused public sentiment in the rich one, like the famines in Biafra...
...arguments against long-term handouts of food - dependency, corruption, the disincentive effect, a tendency for outside shocks to be exaggerated in a country with little capacity to plan for them - are well known. Africa provides arresting proof of their validity. Today the continent can no longer feed itself, and its share of world agricultural trade is much less than it was two generations ago. Globalization of agriculture - a process as old as sailing ships - means products that originated in Africa are now grown elsewhere. Coffee came from Ethiopia; Vietnam now grows more than all Africa. Palm oil was originally exported...
Ideally, Afghanistan's South-Asian neighbors such as India and Pakistan will see their way to overcoming mutual antagonisms and establishing a collective, supplementary reconstruction fund - à la the Marshall Plan - to assist Kabul, but with private direct business investment. (India is booming, after all.) This proposed regional support, which could not as easily be stigmatized as "neocolonial" and therefore would have greater long-term legitimacy, could alleviate the burden on the U.S. and NATO and end up helping heal an otherwise failed and moribund state in a very critical part of our troubled world. Maurice Kane, SAN DIMAS, CALIF...
...lower in the coming weeks because the oil futures market finally is reflecting supply-demand shifts," Valliere said. "There is no policy initiative that could have done this, nothing from Washington. Market forces finally are dominating the speculators." And at least with the lights off, the Republican representatives who plan to spend all week talking gas prices on the shuttered House floor will be doing their part to save electricity...
...fact, Obama's actual energy plan is much more than a tire gauge. But that's not what's so pernicious about the tire-gauge attacks. Politics ain't beanbag, and Obama has defended himself against worse smears. The real problem with the attacks on his tire-gauge plan is that efforts to improve conservation and efficiency happen to be the best approaches to dealing with the energy crisis - the cheapest, cleanest, quickest and easiest ways to ease our addiction to oil, reduce our pain at the pump and address global warming. It's a pretty simple concept...