Of People, Pride and Potatoes

Why should you care, anyway, that the descendants of the greatest empire ever to unite and oppress pre-contact America have been reduced to this? To lives, that is, of relentless toil and constant exploitation, scraping survival from the depleted soil of the Andean subalpine, one mottled potato at a time?

(Here is a hint: Smallshare farmers such as these are the ones who currently feed around 70 percent of humanity.)

Fortunately, Susan Walsh—a development anthropologist and veteran of the foreign aid world, currently executive director of USC Canada—is someone who already cares. In Trojan-Horse Aid: Seeds of Resistance and Resilience in the Bolivian Highlands and Beyond, the question she is out to answer is not why you should too, but rather how people like her ought best to proceed in places like Bolivia.

Trojan-Horse Aid takes us back to 2000, the year Walsh first beheld the red mountains of Potosí in southern Bolivia: cold...