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| Harper's Monthly | ||
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1859 | In the year 1696, bound from Bombay to Charleston, in the just-founded colony of the Carolinas, a ship was becalmed and obliged to make port on the coast of Madagascar, where it obtained a supply of a very superior quality of rice, large and full in the grain. The Dutch captain, on arriving in Charleston, made Governor Thomas Smith a present of a half bushel which remained over. The governor, instead of using it himself, divided it among his friends to plant in their gardens. The new plant succeeded admirably, and from this small beginning has sprung the extensive rice culture of North and South Carolina and Georgia, whose grain still retains its superiority in the markets of the world. | |
| The Economist | ||
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2006/12/09 page 65 | Most of the nearly 19m Malagasies barely survive off tiny plots of land for which they often hold no title, growing rice the old way. Just outside Ambohibary, a little village east of Antananarivo, a farmer labours on a tiny rice plot with four of his eight children. His grandparents once owned several hectares, he explains, but they were divided among ten children, each with seven or so descendants. The rice he grows cannot feed his family; he must also earn cash as a bricklayer and lumberjack. |
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