Today much of Africa remains hungry—almost a third of sub-Saharan Africa is undernourished. Since the late 1960s Africa’s agricultural production has been in decline: Farm productivity has dropped and food imports have risen. African governments are complicit in the continent’s hunger because they have hindered their citizens’ ability to grow as much food as possible.

In Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa, Robert Paarlberg argues that Africa fails to feed itself in part because of the limited use of biotechnology and blames African governments and their European counterparts for that failure. Starved for Science explains how the increased use of genetically modified seeds would benefit African farmers—and stomachs—and explains why the use of biotechnology and other agricultural science is so limited in Africa.

Paarlberg, who teaches political science at Wellesley College, makes the case for science in agriculture by detailing the dramatic impact the vast changes in agriculture have had over the past few hundred years. The book focuses on the latter half of the twentieth century, when the Green Revolution swept through Asia and, through the use of technology, hugely bolstered agricultural production.

Africa desperately needs similar changes—yields per acre in some African countries are less than a tenth of yields in the United States. African farmers would gain greatly from better technologies and seeds. Unfortunately, government policies stand in their way.

Paarlberg blames developed-world biases for Africa’s lack of agricultural improvement, especially a bias against genetically modified (GM) foods that dramatically limits Africa’s ability to grow more. In part these biases stem from the developed world’s ability to feed itself without a strong emphasis on the agricultural sciences or GM foods. Officials can therefore indulge environmentalist crusades against agricultural progress without apparent cost.

The European Union, non-governmental organizations, and the United Nations all played a role in exporting these biases to Africa, although the local governments also deserve a share of the blame. Instead of helping African farmers grow bigger crops to feed more people, European governments are doing the reverse, actively working to strengthen regulations in African countries, making the approval and use of GM seeds more difficult, and subsequently decreasing the potential productivity of African farmers. The governments of Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway, for example, have funded efforts to promote anti-GM regulatory frameworks and deprive farmers of the best tools they have. Similarly, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) exists not to help African farmers increase their output, but rather to increase the regulations that inhibit their farming.

Starved for Science makes a succinct case regarding the who’s and why’s of the barriers to Africa’s biotechnology use, but there are a few components of Paarlberg’s argument that could be stronger.

He spends little time discussing the specific problems that biotechnology can solve and the specific advantages of GM seeds. Although he details the possibilities of a drought-resistant seed, Paarlberg does not delve deeply into the successes of GM seeds in countries where they are currently being used, such as South Africa. With freedom to make their own decisions South African farmers are growing more food for themselves and their families and have enough extra to sell to others. Beyond increasing the local supply of food, having extra crops allows the farmers to increase the sizes of their farms, create jobs, start other businesses, and save money for the future.

The other incomplete aspect of Starved for Science deals with the incentives Africans face when debating growing GM crops. Even when they have the choice of using GM seeds they have to decide if it’s worth doing so, since European markets usually ban GM goods. The book would have been improved if Paarlberg had investigated the tradeoffs here more thoroughly.

Allowing free rein for biotechnology would be an important step toward eliminating the hunger that plagues Africa. The sad truth is that politics is apt to continue obstructing that and other avenues of progress.

One might think of Hood’s thesis as trendy. After all, the past two decades have vindicated significant portions of his main theme: that most households are favorably disposed toward politicians whose proposals strengthen individual ownership and freedom to manage their own assets.

Starting with a wonderfully prescient quote from Thomas Jefferson, the author does the reader a great service by tracing the historical forces and individuals most responsible for the rise of America’s welfare state. He emphasizes the powerful political movements that arose in response to migrations of citizens from a largely agrarian economy to a dense, more specialized, and predominately urban society. As farmers on their own land and as entrepreneurial merchants in small towns, Americans lived rather self-reliantly, owning most of their capital and labor resources. But as technology and investment capital flowed into agriculture, productivity and output rose, rendering much farm labor redundant.

Hood contrasts the land- and home-ownership situation of a farmer with the condition of a worker facing weekly or monthly rent payments required for living in rapidly growing industrial cities during the second half of the nineteenth century. The psychology and politics diverge sharply, based on such factors as self-employment versus employee status, and ownership of one’s own land and tools versus paying a landlord and leasing tools and equipment owned by a capitalist banker or shareholder.

The author dates the hatching of America’s cradle-to-grave welfarism with the writings of Edward Bellamy, the influential American journalist who wrote the utopian novel Looking Backward. But Hood is careful to chronicle the ways in which the foundations for America’s welfare state had already been excavated by the time Bellamy achieved national notoriety in the late 1880s. Hood is at his best when organizing for readers the political threads that coalesced to give us today’s welfarism.

Ironically from our current perspective, the Progressives were urban and voted for the Republican Party and the Populists were rural and voted for the Democrats. Hood explains how, by 1912, all political parties stood for increased government intervention in the economy. Proliferation of immense federal programs in the New Deal era marked a natural outgrowth of these earlier statist movements and the financial and employment insecurities exacerbated by the Great Depression.

Again, one testimony to the excellence of Hood’s book is its historical continuity. He recapitulates for readers the squalor of congressional pandering to the “envy lobby” of a bygone decade. However, note that the pandering to envy described here occurred 40 years before the Depression. Specifically, Hood points to Populist calls in the early 1890s for a peacetime corporate income tax not to raise revenues, but to redistribute income, and the 1894 congressional enactment of the first personal income tax since the Civil War.

As coherent and helpful as the historical developments presented by Hood are, his chief mission in writing the book is captured in its subtitle, which might be paraphrased: “Ways to restore American self-reliance, responsibility, and limited government.” From the introduction of 401(k) plans in the 1980s to welfare reform in the 1990s to early 21st-century momentum aimed at restructuring and circumventing the public-school monopoly, Hood is convinced that the public has made a profound course change. Aided by economic growth and prosperity in the 1990s, the author sees a growing segment of the public becoming increasingly insistent on controlling their own financial affairs and increasingly disaffected by government’s relentless assault on household incomes, assets, and private decision-making.

Hood is simultaneously convincing and entertaining: authoritative and educational in his proposals for generating permanent reform through greater individual asset ownership, and entertaining in how he uses history and empiricism to defrock political and economic charlatans. Citing the wisdom of Aristotle as his premise–”Great is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property”–Hood details the virtues of individually owned medical and educational savings accounts, privatization of Social Security, elimination of income taxation, and more welfare and unemployment-related reform.

The author harbors no illusions that converting our entitlement mindset into an investor mindset will be quick or easy, especially with entrenched bureaucracies and constituencies. But he sees favorable trends.

In a hard-hitting “war room” segment, Hood outlines a six-point strategy for undermining the welfare state. The key it seems to me is the author’s call to reformers to “clearly challenge the underlying immorality of writing envy into law.”