Greeny News

As a new diplomat in 1968, I was assigned not to the chandeliered ballrooms of Europe (as I had hoped) but to the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, as a rural development adviser. The green revolution was just beginning to spread around the world, and a new "miracle rice", known as IR-8, developed at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, was entering South Vietnam.

Where the road improvements stopped, though, so did any increased agricultural productivity. While no sign or physical obstacle kept the new miracle rice from the villages without an improved road, for some reason that was the case. In the villages without the improved road, houses were still ramshackle; children were poorly clothed and looked less nourished; schools were poorly attended and child mortality remained high; essentially, life was unchanged from 50 years earlier.

I took that lesson with me throughout the rest of my diplomatic career, and used the formula of new roads and new rice in the Philippines, as well as in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, to uplift smallholders in the villages in those countries. It was this focus on rural development that brought me home to Iowa after my time as ambassador in Cambodia.

• Kenneth M Quinn is president of the