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Crops are being genetically engineered to produce a wide variety of drugs, vaccines and other pharmaceutical proteins. Although these crops may open the door to less expensive and more readily available drugs, there is concern regarding the potential for contamination of human food and livestock feed, as well as environmental harm. The outlook for the production of pharmaceutical crops in California currently appears mixed. To date, 18 federal permits for field trials involving pharmaceutical or industrial proteins have been approved in California. However, the state΄s farming community and general public have thus far rejected pharmaceutical crop production, and a handful of local governments have recently banned the cultivation of genetically modified crops, including pharmaceutical crops. In light of the many pros and cons, three major approaches – the precautionary approach, risk analysis and cost–benefit analysis – could be used to move the debate about pharmaceutical crops forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several recipes including Jessica's Banana Bread, Camilla's Millionaire's Shortbread, and Jason's "Good" Morning Bread are presented.

Several recipes including Peach-Allspice Soufflés, Baked Banana Soufflés, and Strawberry Angel Soufflé are presented.

Several recipes of camp foods including Yogurt Smoothies, Toasted Banana Wraps and Octopus Wieners are presented.

A chapter of the book "Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen: A Search for Serenity in the Sun: A Greek Parabola for Us All," by Roger Green is presented. It highlights the American interpretation of BANANA, which they wrote as an acronym for "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody." It also highlights a novel by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke titled "The Story Then and Now," which contains a figure who vaguely resembles Leonard Cohen.

A chapter of the book "Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen: A Search for Serenity in the Sun: A Greek Parabola for Us All," by Roger Green is presented. It provides a description of Leonard Cohen's bananas, which the author depicts as tiny little bananas or like baby's finger bananas that grow inside the pizzle end as a bird grows inside an egg. It also highlights his discovery that the original "Sisters of Mercy" came from Calgary in Alberta.

Mixed rationales accompanied early colonial endeavours, from the quest for grandeur and a global presence to the profitability that was, for some, the crux of empire. This economic rationale has outweighed other reasons to those who have sought decolonisation and opposed exploitation. Yet in every region, every period, and at every scale, the extent to which the colonies proved profitable has been contentious. Much evidence suggests that contemporary overseas territories have tended to be an economic cost to the colonial powers, most obviously in recent times. Nonetheless, varied geographies – in terms of the size, location of territories and distribution of various natural resources – histories and cultures have made general conclusions over the economic significance of empire difficult. Over time, as colonial powers occupied smaller and more distant places, the economic rationale for empire became exceptionally weak. In the South Pacific, for example, the French bid for New Caledonia in the 1850s was greeted in Australia with uninterest. Australia was a vast continent still to be finally explored and conquered, and such small islands were of little consequence. Britain took over the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (Kiribati and Tuvalu) without competition from other metropolitan powers; colonialism was a matter of duty rather than the acquisition of a valuable area, in either economic or strategic terms. There was little wealth or grandeur in this distant fragment of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seventeenth-century maps of New Granada show a country divided into four great administrative units, each a relic of the years of Spanish conquest. On the Caribbean coast were the two gobiernos of Santa Marta and Cartagena; in the interior, the Nuevo Reino de Granada dominated the east of the country; in the west and southwest lay the great governación de Popayán, extending to the borders of Ecuador. Eighteenth-century maps, by contrast, present a more detailed picture of the territory's topographical features and administrative divisions, showing all the provinces created by postconquest settlement and, in later maps, placing these provinces within the framework of the viceroyalty created by the Bourbon monarchy. Greater cartographical sophistication was in part a reflection of the progress of government under Bourbon rule, and the splendidly detailed Plan Geográfico del Vireynato de Santafé de Bogotá, Nuevo Reyno de Granada, drawn up in 1772, mirrors the new concern with ordering and controlling colonial territory. But if better maps present a more accurate definition of the land and its political boundaries, much is also concealed beneath their orderly surface. When New Granada first came under Bourbon rule, it was a mosaic of regions, each isolated from the others by long distances and difficult terrain, and distinguished by cultural differences arising from variations in the local blend of Europeans, Indians, and Africans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Any attempt to treat the rural history of such a large and varied area as that embraced by the term Spanish America must first make clear the conceptual difficulties and the limitations imposed by uneven research. One approach has been to divide the entire area by elevation into lowland and highland or by zones of plantations and haciendas. This permits a broad and useful distinction between the sugar-producing, former slave regions such as the Antilles and the classic hacienda-dominated landscape of central Mexico or the Ecuadorian highlands. But the usefulness of this scheme disintegrates as one attempts to squeeze additional regions into it. The Cuautla depression in the Mexican state of Morelos, or Salta in Argentina, for example, both had many of the features of plantation life, such as capital intensive sugar centrales and a modern national market, but their labour force was drawn mainly from the smallholder Indian peasantry. Another typology can be drawn along vegetative lines, that is, to examine rural society in terms of the crop it produces. To the extent that coffee or tobacco or sugar do in fact produce certain common or general requirements this scheme is useful, but only up to a certain point. The coffee plantations of Cundinamarca led to a very different society from that found among the independent smallholder coffee growers of Caldas or Costa Rica. And while it is true that the classic hacienda built on the high culture remnants of Mesoamerica and the Andean highlands shared several features, there are wide ethnic and cultural differences among both landowners and village workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General trends During the period from independence until the middle of the nineteenth century – in general a period of economic stagnation, or only modest economic growth – the population of Latin America as a whole grew at a rate of about one per cent per annum. This was in line with the rate of growth of the more developed European countries but less than that of the United States. It was also lower than the rate of growth during the late colonial period, a rate which had been expected to continue or even to accelerate after independence. In Mesoamerica and the Andes, where subsistence agriculture predominated and where the population was predominantly Indian, population growth was slow, hindered by conditions which can only be described as Malthusian. For example, after 1825 the population of the central states of Mexico grew at annual compounded rates which varied between 0.4 and 1 per cent; the northeastern states of Veracruz and Chiapas experienced somewhat higher rates of population growth; the population of the north-west and Yucatán decreased consistently until the 1870s. The regions of Latin America suitable for the cultivation of staples in demand in the industrializing European countries witnessed somewhat more dynamic demographic growth. Although the population there was generally sparse, it tended to increase faster. For example, the expansion in cattle raising was responsible for populating the pampas of the River Plate area. The rural population of the province of Buenos Aires – excluding the capital – increased at a staggering annual rate of 4.2 per cent between 1836 and 1855. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anglo-American rivalries after independence The newly independent Latin American nations found themselves in 1830 in a world of international rivalries and power politics. The European powers, especially Britain which had played at times a decisive part in the struggle for Latin American independence, continued to play a significant political as well as economic role in Latin America until well into the twentieth century. After independence the British showed special concern for Brazil, the Río de la Plata region, Chile, Central America and Mexico. To a lesser degree the French demonstrated an interest in the Río de la Plata and Mexico. And the Caribbean remained a European-dominated lake with Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark holding the many islands as colonies. Between 1830 and 1890 European powers on numerous occasions directly intervened in the hemisphere with varying degrees of military force. Some of these interventions were directed at maintaining influence by aiding friendly Latin American countries in their rivalries with hostile neighbours as well as protecting their own nationals when they were ill used by Latin American governments. These elements were combined in the various British and French interventions in the Río de la Plata between 1836 and 1850, two of which, the French blockade of Buenos Aires in 1836 and the joint British–French blockade in 1845, lasted over two and a half years. The Argentinian dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas, who was hostile towards both foreign interests and the neighbouring states of Uruguay and Brazil, was the main cause of these interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The half-century following the wars of independence in Latin America, that is to say, the period from the 1820s to the 1860s or 1870s, had been generally disappointing in terms of economic growth, although here and there, in the niches of a somewhat ramshackle but nevertheless changing structure, modest material and organizational gains were made. Over the region as a whole, the uneven diffusion of commercialization during the colonial period had left a complex mosaic of capitalist and non-capitalist relations of production, ranging from reciprocal labour networks, slavery, other compulsory labour regimes and debt peonage to share-cropping and various forms of tenant farming, wage labour and small-scale commodity production by artisans and smallholders. Communal ownership of land still existed alongside privately held properties both large and small, while other rural holdings were controlled by ecclesiastical and public authorities. Gradually, however, over the course of several decades, relationships more compatible with capitalist modes of interaction gained ground as long established colonial mechanisms for allocating resources fell into disuse and the world capitalist system expanded. A half-century of incremental change had not been enough to transform the economic organization of Latin America, but it did sufficiently alter conditions for the more sweeping institutional and technological developments of 1870–1914 to get under way. The regulatory systems established during the colonial period were being dismantled at the same time as public administration was breaking down and new, sometimes contested, national boundaries were being drawn. These developments disrupted local commerce and in many instances halted the former inter-regional (but by then inter-country) currents of trade within Latin America, while the strong gravitational pull of the expanding North Atlantic economies reoriented economic life towards a slowly growing participation in global trade no longer determined by Iberian commercial policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The six decades from 1870 to 1930 witnessed the somewhat late full integration of Central America into the capitalist world market through the expansion of its export economies. They also saw the formation of several relatively viable states and, therefore, the strengthening of the division of the United Provinces of Central America established after independence into five republics, even though there were some attempts to restore the lost union. Central American scholars were, and still are inclined to see the history of the isthmus (with the exception of Panama, which only became an independent state in 1903) as a unity. They preserved a somewhat vague, even romantic aspiration that the five patrias chicas (‘small homelands’) should eventually merge again in a patria grande (that is to say, a united Central America). Up to a point, there are grounds for such an ambition. In this period, for instance, some of the central features of economic life - for example, the production and export of coffee and bananas - were shared by most Central American countries; as, in politics, they shared the upheavals of Liberal reforms and then the hardships of Liberal dictatorships, as well as a common and very strong dependence on the United States. But much more striking in such a small region are the strong differences which existed between the five Republics. In this chapter we shall frequently be contrasting the evolution of Costa Rica with that of the other countries in the isthmus. Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador, from 1870 to 1930, may be seen as more advanced countries economically and politically than Honduras and, to a lesser degree, Nicaragua. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political economy By the later eighteenth century the kingship of Buganda was evidently a prize for which ambitious men were willing to compete with desperate ferocity, staking their own lives and killing without mercy, while other men, not eligible for the supreme position, strove no less avidly for a share in the spoils of power. There was in other words a large surplus to be seized, and obvious questions follow. How did the surplus arise? How was it extracted, and from whom? And these are part of the larger questions about state formation which have been the main themes of African historical studies since their academic beginnings some forty years ago. Structures of political authority of the kind that Europeans could recognise as states were by no means universal in sub-Saharan Africa, and where they existed they were generally smaller, weaker and less durable than those of Asia and Europe. This undeniable fact has troubled African intellectuals and foreign sympathisers, because states are commonly regarded as the proper mode of political existence and have now become the compulsory mode. Africans thus appeared to have fallen behind in the normal journey of political development, with the natural implication that they were deficient in some crucial capacity, either genetic or environmental. Colonial apologists had welcomed this inference, since government was held to be chief among the blessings conferred on Africa by European rule. Hardliners among them had seen the deficiency as incurable and the foreign rule therefore necessarily eternal. Liberals had thought it possible to implant new political organs and withdraw when they were capable of autonomous functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sun and moon Thanks to a slight northward tilt of the plateau, nearly all the waters of Buganda actually flow away from the great Lake, in slow papyrus-choked streams which wind their way towards the Nile as it turns westward through Lake Kyoga. Only the Nile itself, to the east of the ancient kingdom, has breached the line of hills fringing the northern coast of Nalubaale. It is not surprising that many of the key places in Buganda's history should lie on this narrow watershed between the Lake shore and its hinterland. The moving capitals of the nineteenth-century kings were always on one or other of the hills overlooking Murchison Bay, within the boundaries of modern Kampala or not far away. A few miles just south of west is Buddo where, since the middle of the eighteenth century, the rites of the king's installation have been performed. Further to the west, near the end of a long swampy finger of the Lake, the shrine of the war-god Kibuuka at Mbaale, ‘the Rock’, was a major focus of patriotic sentiment. However, there is reason to think that the most ancient nucleus of the realm was further away from the Lake, in the lands lying almost encircled by the two branches of the upper Mayanja river, which have their sources close together just north of Kampala. This was Busiro, ‘the land of tombs’. The modern county of that name extends southward to the Lake shore, including Buddo and the seat of British and later governments at Entebbe; but the name properly belongs only to the northern area, containing all the shrines in which the decorated jawbones of the early kings were preserved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The explorers who claimed to have discovered the interior of East Africa during the third quarter of the nineteenth century were following routes that were already familiar to Muslim (Arab and Swahili) merchants from the coast, and before that had been trodden by a great many parties of Africans taking ivory and slaves to sell there. So the journey of Captains Speke and Grant to Buganda in 1861–2 took them along the great caravan trail that led through the middle of what is now Tanzania and then north-west to the kingdom of Karagwe in the far corner of the modern state. It was a roundabout route, but for several generations Karagwe had been the entrept for the trade of the rich region between the Lakes. It was there that King Muteesa's great-grandfather had arranged the sale of his country's ivory in exchange for dark blue Indian cloth, though it was not until his father's time, in the late 1840s, that the first Arab merchants passed through on their way to the Ganda court, bringing back to the coast, and thus to Europe, news of a powerful monarch whose favour could unlock the commerce of a region rich in ivory and perhaps in much else besides. It was this road that the British travellers were following, though for them the immediate attraction of Buganda was that they believed it to hold the key to the mystery of the Nile source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recipe for Banana Walnut Muffins is presented.

A recipe for Banana Morsels is presented.

The article presents several Cameroon recipes, including West African Chicken-Peanut Soup, Sese Plantains and Banana Bread.

A recipe for Toasted Banana Flowers is presented.

A recipe for Caramelized Banana Canapes is presented.

A recipe for Banana Caramel Truffles is presented.

This section presents recipes including Rwandan Chicken, Banana Fritters, and Peanuts-Nougat.

This article presents the recipes for Banana Fritters, Curry Chicken, Banana Porridge, Beef Soup and Vegetable Callaloo.

This section provides botanical evidence of the presence of Africans in America before Christopher Columbus discovered it. The Portugese found a cotton growing plentifully in West Africa and they took this cotton and planted it in the Cape Verde islands in 1462--thirty years before Columbus. Professor M.D.W. Jeffreys of Witwaterstrand University, showed how American maize had traveled to Africa. In South America, the European visitors also found plants brought in through earlier contacts--such as the banana. The banana is not African. It is an Asian cultigen. However it was brought into Africa through trade and acquired a name associated with the Africans--bakoko.

A recipe for Bread-Based Canapes is presented.

A science experiment to study the rotting of banana slices with yeast is presented. A list of materials is provided along with specific procedures and safety considerations. It is concluded that yeast eats the banana and breaks it down into different kinds of raw materials including carbon dioxide gas.