The author never asks what the presence of these experts turned good listeners will do for peasants who now must run a kind of school as well as feed their families. Unfortunately, the book does not describe anything so extraordinary as the titles suggest. These projects are sometimes suspect in themselves, but even those that seem to be truly positive are piddling when compared to the enormity of the hunger problem. A first egregious error of Harley's work lies in is equating access to money with access to food. The two can be correlated, but there is one important difference.
Food is food, and income is subject to price level changes that often put food out of reach.
In most Third World countries, incomes have not kept up with rapidly rising food costs. The answer to malnutrition is increasing income, giving people something to do to earn more. Some of the participants in Operation Flood who did try to connect income and purchasing power complain that what they derived from milk sales was not enough to provide for their families' nutrition and health. Making income the primary goal of the poor short-circuits the impulse to address the fundamental causes of hunger through land reform or other efforts to bring the poor into control over their own food supplies. There are, of course, reasons why income improvement is preferred by some to land reform.