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Can Rick Warren succeed in Rwanda? The writer of this piece in Christianity Today has his doubts.

Warren uses the ancient proverb, "Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime," to explain his development plan for Rwanda. He wants to help Rwanda "sell its fish." Warren says Rwanda can produce far more fruit than it can actually consume and that exporting Rwanda’s agricultural products could be part of the solution to the country’s economic troubles.

While this would no doubt provide needed income for a poor country, I wonder if Warren has been able to sit with the leaders of the European Union and the United States to address the injustices of these countries’ current agricultural trade policies. Rwanda will not find receptive markets in the consumer powerhouses of the West. Currently, the U.S. and the E.U. provide more than $90 billion in annual subsidies to their domestic agricultural producers in order to protect them against competition from foreign exporters.

These farm subsidies assault the idea of free trade, and the ramifications for countries like Rwanda are profound. Without genuine trade-policy reform, no one in the U.S. or the E.U. will be buying Rwandan produce anytime soon. It is not enough to teach a man to sell fish. The question of who controls the market must also be addressed.

Warren’s relationship with Rwandan President Paul Kagame is also of concern. Kagame was the leader of the rebel Tutsi forces that brought an end to genocide in 1994. Yet as president, he has overseen a military that continues to occupy parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Human-rights observers such as Amnesty International and even the U.S. State Department accuse Kagame of not only stripping Congo of its natural resources, but also of mass rape, burning villages, and murdering civilians. Rwandan leaders reject these claims, yet the human-rights community maintains their accuracy.

Years of African corruption in the wake of colonial puppetry have created rifts of distrust between those who are suffering and those with friends in high places. Although Kagame is an improvement from past leaders, his connection to former regimes and to ongoing human-rights concerns should trouble anyone seeking to work with him.