Reed:

Agreed about schools, clinics. Much of it has been window dressing with little sustainable benefit---other than pr. Water and irrigation is job one, period.

Funny you should mention India, land of the 198o's Era Green Revolution. Lots of wells to spawn agricultural expansion---until the ag aquifers failed. So, yeah, they imported food from Afghanistan.

Now, without driving the need for much fuel imports, what can be done to create a significant enhancement for sustainable irrigation that could, together with trade movement solutions, drive a solid internal and external market.

Saddam and the Baathists were big on socialism until they found out that the more the government put into agriculture, the less output it got. So it pursued land reform and agricultural privatization to some success, but the effort got swamped with too many other factors...

Steve