where was aklilu lemma born?

Yes, perhaps. And, along came the MIT study, Limits to Growth, which shook the world community, although it has hardly penetrated into Africa so far.

Why not?

I don't know. I think some of the African reaction was based on the view that Limits to Growth mainly dealt with the future problems of the developed world and it simply was not their business. On the other hand, some Africans I have talked to who did read the book expressed genuine interest. There was lively concern about what the MIT group is trying to teach us. I am not an economist. I am not a politician. I am a simple biologist. But even as a biologist, I am intrigued by the methodology used to relate human survival to human needs through studies of resource depletion, population explosion, limits of energy, and so on. Such a study shows the genuine interest of the Club of Rome in humanity at large, the world as a whole. They have now constructed a first world-model, feeding information of all types into the computer and receiving answers which predict the situation twenty, thirty, forty years from now. My own interest and possible contribution to the work of the Club of Rome is to interest African economists and computer experts to see if we can use these systems dynamics models to predict the future of less-developed countries in the world.

For instance, I would like to see some studies on what the factors are that are causing the widening gap between the developed and the developing worlds.