Where have we heard this before?

I would guess that journalists must be most willing to take liberties with the truth when they are discussing subjects or places they can count their readers knowing very little about.

So I gather from this cover story that Business Week readers can be assumed to know very little about Africa. I assume that's why the author chooses to join a couple of entrepreneurs with a factory in rural Mozambique, and incorrectly generalize this experience to a continent. He describes Africa thus:

Airports open and close arbitrarily. Roads are often unpaved and clogged. Gasoline and diesel are scarce, and rolling blackouts common. The medical precautions are even more forbidding: Traveling to mosquito-infested interiors requires a round of injections and weeks of antimalarial pills that often induce hallucinations.

Was our correspondent really taking mefloquine? Only if his physician is seriously out of touch or old-fashioned - Doxy and Malarone and far more commonly prescribed, especially for short trips like our correspondent's. And even mefloquine produces hallucinations very rarely, not "often". But hallucinogenic anti-malarials sound like a great story, so why not take some liberties. (And the round of vaccinations is not that different from what you need to travel to South America or Asia.)

As for scarce gasoline and airports that close down, that's a bit dramatic. 25% of Africa's GDP comes from South Africa, where neither of those things are true, and another good chunk comes from North Africa or various capital cities with pretty robust refueling infrastructure at least. It's not really fair to pretend that this is a normal part of the business environment.

But I am nitpicking - the rest of the article isn't that bad. The title "Can Greed Save Africa" does make one think of another time in history that greed drove all kinds of investors into Africa, harvesting resources and cutting off hands and the like...

At least one thing hasn't changed - it's the land that matters. The world is experiencing an unprecedented commodities boom. Africa is one of the planet's last untapped resources. (Though the BusWeek article talks mostly about microcredit and agriculture, the biggest business in Africa is still natural resources, and the commodities boom is driving the credit boom.) So do you think these resource extraction projects are sustainable?

The most telling comment for me is by the Dutch South Africa manager of a project in Mozambique: "I'd be the last person in history to go down as a philanthropist, but you cannot run a business when your workers are out with malaria or sick from dirty water."

This then, is the trade being offered. Anti-malarials and clean water, for the land.