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.

America’s founders felt it was important enough to know how many people lived in the country that they wrote a requirement for a census every ten years into the third paragraph of Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution. For the important purpose of apportioning representation in the House of Representatives, that passage specifies that the federal government, under the direction of the Congress, shall count the number of people—period.

The first census in 1790 included a question about race and residence, but that was about the sum of it. In the intervening 213 years, the census has morphed into much more than a head count. Indeed, it may now be the clearest index available of the growth and intrusiveness of the federal establishment.

In mid-March, a census “short form” was mailed to nearly every American. Its seven questions are designed to find out the recipient’s name, age, sex, race, relationship to household, whether or not the recipient is His panic, and whether his housing is owned or rented. One in six households were mailed the “long form”—a 53-query marathon of nosy inquiries about everything from disabilities to employment to income. Answering the census is not an option; under the law, it’s mandatory.

The folks who devised the long form are particularly interested in your house. They want to know how many rooms it has, when it was built, where you get your water, what your utilities cost, how you financed it, and how many cars, telephones, and bathrooms you’ve got. Other questions on the long form ask about your education, health, job, and ride to work (to find out if you drive a car or take a bus). To borrow a line from a famous tabloid ad, “inquiring minds want to know.”

The more important question that cries out to be asked, however, is just why do these inquiring minds want to know all these things? Who and where you are is now a minor part of this decennial exercise; the census these days is much more about how to divide the loot. The U.S. Census Bureau isn’t bashful about admitting this in its literature:

Census 2000 will be the information cornerstone for the next century. Billions of dollars of federal, state, and local funds will be spent on thousands of projects across our nation. How and where that money is spent depends on how accurate the census count is . . . . Twenty-two of the 25 largest Federal funding grant programs of fiscal year 1998 are responsible for $162 billion being distributed to state, local, and tribal governments, and about half of this money was distributed using formulas involving census population data, according to a report by the General Accounting Office. We expect that at least $182 billion will be distributed annually based on formulas using Census 2000 data.

Bureaucrats and central planner wannabes aren’t the only folks who want to use the census to learn a lot about you. In between each count, the Census Bureau is besieged with requests from private interests who want to get their pet questions baked into the next one at taxpayer expense. Marketing and health research people want data on behavior and ailments. Internet service firms want to know who’s wired and who isn’t. Sociologists push to find out more about who’s going to which church, and which individuals are providing support to their grandparents. Maybe we owe Congress and the bureaucracy a little appreciation for resisting most of the litany of requests and keeping their questions on the long form to a “mere” 53.

It all reminds me of the wisdom of Frederic Bastiat, the great French statesman and philosopher who wrote in his magnificent primer on the proper function of government, The Law: “As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose—that it may violate property instead of protecting it—then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder.”

That a head count is no longer the primary focus of the census was dramatically illustrated by a proposal from the Clinton administration. In the run-up to the 2000 census, the administration announced it wanted to incorporate something called “statistical sampling” into the counting method. Instead of trying to count each person the government would count people in 90 percent of American households and then on the basis of those numbers, make guesses and assumptions about the remaining 10 percent. Because a Republican Congress figured a Democratic administration would make guesses and assumptions that would boost the electoral prospects of its friends, statistical sampling was on the ropes until the Supreme Court landed the final blow and killed it several months ago.

Perhaps the focus on extraneous information has cut into the very accuracy of the count that is supposed to be the main purpose of the census. By its own estimates, the Census Bureau missed 1.6 percent of the U.S. population in 1990—worse than its performance ten years before. The government misses millions of people, but it wants to dole out their money based on such details as how many bathrooms they have.

While Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt says it’s your “civic duty” to complete the 2000 census form, not everybody thinks so. The Libertarian Party captured some headlines when its national director, Steve Dasbach, declared in January, “Real Americans don’t answer nosy Census questions. You can strike a blow for privacy, equality, and liberty by refusing to answer every question on the Census form except the one required by the Constitution: How many people live in your home?” Noting the real purpose of most of the long form’s queries, Dasbach said, “Census information is used to forge the chains that bind Americans to failed government programs, meddlesome bureaucracies, and sky-high tax rates.”

It’s not happenstance that as the government’s share of our income rises and its toll on our liberties grows, the census gets longer and more intrusive with each passing decade. It’s part of the package: a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you’ve got. To do all that for you and to you, it has to ask you lots and lots of questions.