GOOD IDEA: “The United States will propose biotechnology as a strategy to boost agricultural production at a UN global food crisis summit in Rome next week, the top US farm official said Thursday. . . . With the United States contributing more than one-half of all the world’s food aid, he said, ‘the world’s other developed nations have an obligation to provide food efficiently without obstructing access to it or limiting safe technologies to produce it.'”

And read this report from Ron Bailey on the Copenhagen Consensus conference and free trade. “Anderson looked at a number of econometric modeling scenarios and calculated the cost and benefits that would obtain from full trade liberalization under realistic assumptions derived from the current World Trade Organization’s Doha Development Agenda negotiations. Anderson estimated that liberalization of global merchandise trade would mean an annual increase of $287 billion per year in global GDP, of which $86 billion would go to developing countries. This compares very nicely with the $104 billion in development assistance that the governments of industrialized countries gave to developing countries in 2006.”