Maggie's Farm

Dalrymple is spot on, as usual. I spent the first twenty years of my professional life largely in countries that were "blessed with resources" - and they were nearly all places of corruption and tragedy. What is worse, particularly in Latin America, was this wholesale 19th century style geopolitical view of the strategic value of natural resources and of how they almost alone guaranteed national power. It should have been long discredited, but the theory was given new life after the oil crises of the 1970s. I remember the wife of a Central American diplomat at a party telling me that the region was poised to become "the OPEC of bananas."