Word: poore
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...There's little immediate relief in sight, because Africa's farmers face their own inflation problems and can't easily boost output. The FAO predicts that food prices will remain high for years to come, but that galloping price rises will begin to slow down. For poor farmers that is little cause for cheer. The surging price of oil has made using tractors costly, and the cost of fertilizer has doubled in Uganda over the past year, says Kenneth Kaboi, a 19-year-old farmer who was out in his family's maize field recently in Uganda's lush Kapchorwa...
...governments and international organizations now face the task of getting new projects off the ground quickly. Obstacles abound. After decades of neglect, transportation networks for getting crops to market consist mainly of rutted dirt roads; irrigation systems are in a shambles; and there's little access to credit for poor farmers. Aid agencies are starting some programs virtually from scratch. "There are very few plans to take off the shelf," says Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington...
...organization Llosa runs, now called Mibanco, converted from a nonprofit into a bank, demonstrating what other microfinance institutions around the world knew too: that the poor are good risks who repay loans on time; get enough of them together, you can not only chip away at poverty but also turn a profit...
What's happening? To be blunt about it: the pinstripes are chasing the poor. Microfinance, once a relative cottage industry championed by antipoverty activists and development wonks, is on the verge of a revolution, with billions of dollars from big banks, private-equity shops and pension funds pouring in, driving growth of 30% to 40% a year. Financiers are convinced that there's huge money to be made in microfinance...
...alarm bells are going off too. The emergence of players who are out purely for profit has raised the possibility that, far from nurturing the poor, microfinance schemes could end up milking them, especially in countries where lenders don't have to clearly disclose interest rates. When the Mexican microfinancier Banco Compartamos went public last year, revealing its loans carried rates of about 86% annually, the development consortium Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) and others scorned it for having put shareholders ahead of clients. Says Elizabeth Littlefield, CEO of CGAP: "There is some risk that the mainstreaming...