> The challenge is to modernize agriculture in the best way feasible.
I don't think anyone by a straw man would argue with that.
> I can't help but take today's NY Times Op-Ed entitled "The Cancun
> Delusion" as a something of a personal vindication.
I wouldn't if I were you. It's based on the delusion that high-tech American style farming has a higher yield per unit land than low tech. It doesn't. American farming has been wasteful of land since the very beginning precisely because we had so much. (Land-mining Michael Perelman once called it.) What it is remarkably productive in is in output per unit labor -- which is not necessarily what you want to maximize in countries which have lots of labor and little land.
The Cancun negotiations seem to offer a pretty stark refutation of the idea of the productivity of high-tech agriculture. If it's so productive, why do American cotton farmers -- the most highly technologized in the world -- need massive subsidies to keep dirt poor Malian peasants on small plots from eating their lunch?
Michael