Headline Aug31,2012/

"AFRICA'S LEG IRONS!" 

Epochal change is difficult to grasp as it occurs. But there is a rare clarity to the Historic Shift that is now underway. The World is moving from an Era in which responsibility to self was the 'overriding value' in business, politics and every facet of life, toward a time in which responsibility to one's society, nation and fellow beings returns to the front-line of Thought and Discourse.

Professor Sachs continues: So what kind of accidentally dawned on us that we could just go ahead and get these concepts proven on the ground. And that's what we attempted. And many philanthropists have come forward now and said, We'll give you some backing ; show us what you can do. And when I met a CEO of a major corporation, a man who understands first and foremost the value of a good investment, and I was describing this effort to him, and he got it immediately. I hadn't even finished talking when he blurted out, "Sign me up for two villages!"

Our first village in Kenya, called Sauri, is actually a cluster of eight villages in what they call a sublocation in western Kenya, a very hungry, very disease ridden, very isolated, extremely impoverished community. And it's a community that some of my colleagues knew because they had been analyzing the soils there and in nearby communities for many years. A colleague from Columbia University, Pedro Sanchez , who is a soils expert, felt strongly that there was an opportunity for a quick development there. He told me that the soil simply lacked the nutrients to grow a proper crop. A little Nitrogen, to be specific. He said to me, "You know, this situation could turn around quite quickly."

Now when you have the experts saying that on one side and the philanthropists on the other side telling you, "Come on, let's do something," it gets pretty exciting And that's how the Millennium Villages concept was born. The Scientists said, let's move. The philanthropists said, let's move. So we went and met with the community in Kenya. And they said, let's move. So we moved!

We then timed a trip in summer of 2005 to Kenya's harvest festival. The community celebrated the biggest harvest that it had ever had. And it's stunning how easy it was. I had told Pedro that he'd better be right about the Nitrogen because a lot of people were watching, and lo and behold it was Nitrogen.  Putting in some basic fertilizer and helping the farmers use some improved seed varieties led to doubling of their yields. Just like that, in one growing season. Very low cost, a few bucks per person in work in one of the toughest places on the planet, drought ridden Ethiopia, where it's just easy to throw up your hands and say, It's impossible. But get on the ground, talk to the community, talk to the local experts, understand their distinctive problems, put it into bite-size units, and what looks at first to be impossible becomes solvable.

Good night and God bless.

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless