by Adele A. Wilby
Many decades ago, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity of living in India for several years. I was enthralled by that country: its cultural richness; the environment; the food, but most of all the friendliness and warm hospitality of its diverse people. There were, of course, issues that confounded me and stark contradictions stared back at me from many directions, but of particular concern was the scale of the poverty amongst vast sections of the population, an issue that visited me at home frequently. A small begging community gathered regularly at my front gate, hungry and calling out for food. As my knowledge of the Indian social structure deepened, I came to understand that these people belonged to the most oppressed castes in Indian society and not only they, but a multitude of others were living in poverty, and with hunger.
Jean-Martin Bauer’s book The New Breadline: Hunger and Hope in the 21st Century addresses those very issues of social oppression and politics also that create the condition of hunger for millions of people across the globe. He is well placed to author such a book. With twenty years of experience with the United Nations World Food Programme and now Country Director of the programme in Haiti, Bauer brings to the book a wealth of experience in humanitarian work to alleviate hunger in West Africa, Syria, Iraq and Central Africa, and now in his home country of Haiti.
Bauer tells us that fewer people than ever starve in the world today thanks to technological progress and the creation of systems to bring food aid to people. Indeed, at the turn of the 21st century the success in winning the battle against hunger was so encouraging the world’s governments publicly committed to eliminating hunger by 2030. That aspirational deadline however appears to have been kicked into the grass as tragically in 2023 it is estimated that 250 million people still faced acute hunger, double the number in 2020.
Acute hunger, Bauer tells us, refers to such a lack of food that it is life threatening. Given the recent outbreak of conflict in the Middle East and northern Africa, we must assume that the 2023 numbers have increased significantly. On the other hand, chronic hunger occurs when there is not nearly enough food for the person to thrive, and it affects 700 million people. For young children in particular, long-term hunger has devastating effects: it leads to stunted growth and impacts on the healthy development of the brain resulting in irreparable cognitive defects, putting the children on the backfoot before their lives have barely started. The figures documenting the numbers of hungry people in the world are even more tragic when, Bauer tells us, ‘There is plenty of food in the world to feed everyone’.
In a world where there is enough food to feed the global population and when the wealthiest country on the planet endowed with a plentiful supply of food, the United States, also has millions of hungry people, questions must be raised about the forces and circumstances that push swathes of humanity into extreme suffering, struggling to endure acute and chronic hunger. On one level, Bauer shows us, social inequality around race, gender, class and caste are factors that influence people’s access to food, but Bauer also reveals throughout his book, that political choices, corruption, and exploitation are also responsible for plunging people into the distress and the life-threatening situation of hunger. For example, spurring the surge in the numbers of the hungry was the global response to the pandemic, and Bauer cites the case of the Republic of Congo in 2020 where the political decision to lockdown the nation resulted in imported food remaining unloaded and rotting in the ports and local produce was never moved. Meanwhile, in the capital Brazzaville, people’s livelihoods vanished when the lockdown prevented them from going to work. In 2020, a study revealed that 700,000 people in Brazzaville, one third of the population, did not have enough to eat, triple the numbers from 2015, and yet there were only 100 fatalities from Covid-19. There is of course, no way of knowing how many people would have died from Covid-19 without the national lockdown, but this case does highlight the implications of political choices on people’s access to food. But just when the world thought the worst impacts of the pandemic had turned a corner, in 2022 another major course of hunger, international politics, came into the mix to complicate the food security issue. Russia invaded the Ukraine, a major global grain source. Food prices across the globe spiked, jeopardising food security for millions of people.
But as Bauer tells us, it is not only the contemporary political crises that impact on food security and the hunger of millions of people, but historical events have also played their role in creating hunger in the world today, and he provides a comprehensive account of the impact of French colonialism and its aftermath on the Haitian economy. Financially crushed by former slavers, the purchasing of small farms by the French speaking mulatto wealthy to grow large coffee plantations, and periodic political crises, a newly independent Haiti soon found itself unable to feed its expanding population. In more contemporary times, Bauer reveals how US president Bill Clinton added to the complexity of Haiti’s food crisis when he forced Haiti to drop its tariff on imported subsidised rice in 1994, and the Haitian market was flooded with cheap imported rice. The lowering of the price tariff for rice stands out, for Bauer, as ‘the moment when Haiti lost control of its food supply’. Since then, he argues, outside interests have taken precedence over the country’s food economy, and the concerns and needs of Haitian farmers and its people are given less attention. The country now imports half its food and 80 percent of its rice supply for it to be able to feed its people.
Feeding its population is a fundamental concern for any nation, and nothing has highlighted this more than the 2008 food crisis when food prices spiked, and scarcity became an issue. The response of some businesses and states to these situations, Bauer shows us, has been to ‘land grab’ farmland outside its own borders, particularly in poor and import-dependent nations. In a bid to secure the finance to develop their domestic agriculture production, poorer countries are signing off their farmland to investors and other nations in return for infrastructural projects such as irrigation systems.
A controversial case of land grabbing was Libya’s acquisition of a massive swathe of Mali’s best farmland in 2008. Libya was desperate to secure farmland in another country to feed its people, while the Malian government needed the finance to develop its agriculture sector and to feed its people at the same time; it could not do both. The presidents of the two countries launched a venture that covered 100,000 hectares. The Malian government conceded the land for fifty years, free of charge, including water rights. However, in the end the fickleness of politics played its role: the Libyan leader Gaddafi was toppled as was the Malian president, putting an end to the joint project. The Malian people returned to farming having learned the bitter lesson of how easily outsiders could take their land at a moment’s notice.
Hunger and conflict also often march together. Bauer cites the case of conflict in the Central African Republic (CAR). The civil conflict devastated the agriculture sector and the nation’s food production shrank by 58 per cent. Insurgents added to the food crisis by confiscating food supplies, leading to widespread hunger amongst the people. After a decade of war, in 2023, 3 million people, half the population, were facing food shortages, Moreover, in CAR, according to Bauer, ‘widespread hunger is only increasing’.
Over the years Bauer has clearly acquired a great deal of experience and knowledge on the issues related to hunger and strategies to alleviate hunger, and one of those major issues he came to understand is the limitation of international law for holding those accountable for strategically pushing people into starvation during times of conflict, as in the CAR. However, after many decades and a great deal of debate, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2417 in 2018, a Resolution that condemns starvation as a tactic of warfare. So far however, despite the extent of hunger in the world, the Resolution remains untested and there have been no prosecutions, primarily because the standards for evidence remain unclear, making it difficult to bring or prosecute cases. That apart, armed insurgent groups frequently disregard international law. Until international law is tightened, and armed non-state actors take seriously the implications of reducing populations to hunger and starvation, depriving people of food is likely to continue as a tactic or consequence of war.
Part of Bauer’s experience in humanitarian work has also been confronting the issue of racism, not only as a cause for hunger, but both personally and institutionally. As Bauer tells us, international organisations engaged in humanitarian assistance are, in principle, ‘colourblind’. However, as a biracial man working in a senior position in a humanitarian organisation, Bauer narrates his personal experience of racism, and the ‘racial tension’ that remains present in humanitarian agencies. Many aid agency offices in Africa are diverse, with senior management coming from Africa and all over the world, but the headquarters are less diverse than field offices, with very few Black or African office executives. Moreover, in Bauer’s observations, racism is not only present in the way the system works but in ‘the way assistance is delivered on the ground’. He cites a case in his early career when working with the World Food Programme in 2001 in Niger. Through an American colleague he came to realise that the population in the Kosovo emergency were receiving better rations than the population in Niger. Enquiries as to why the discrepancies in qualities of rations should exist, Bauer was informed that living standards were lower in Africa and cost-conscious donors were not willing to pay for high-quality food in the world’s poorest nations. Some of these issues have been overcome in the methods used to distribute food in an easy, accessible way for many people. For example, rather than providing food supplies people are provided with access to ‘mobile money’ on phones. This allows people to purchase food supplies to a certain cost from the local merchants and to choose their own food types at their discretion.
In a book that exposes the most tragic instances of hunger throughout the world and Bauer’s work to alleviate that hunger over the years, the reader cannot help but ask how the noun ‘hope’ fits into the title of the book, yet for Bauer there is ‘reason to be optimistic about our ability to fight hunger’. Technology has a role to play, but not all technology will provide a solution to the long-term issue in the modern world of feeding 9 billion people on a planet that is running out of land, pasture and water. Bauer explores how scientists are developing lab-grown food and other measures taken to produce food, but for him that is only part of the story for finding a solution to providing food security for the world’s population. Ultimately, he argues, it comes down to better political leadership, laws that hold people to account for starvation in war and the building of food systems that are fair and resilient to climate change and disease. Feeding people is for Bauer, an issue where ‘feeding people should be the business of everyone, down to the individual’.
Bauer’s illuminating book exposes the tragedy of hunger across the globe for millions of people and the measures dedicated humanitarian workers are implementing to alleviate hunger. He provides historical accounts of regions and countries struggling to cope with food security. His personal reflections of working with the World Food Programme are an added and informative bonus to the book. But he also looks ahead to the future of humanity and the issue of feeding the global population. Better political choices and more equitable social and political systems across the world which will prevent hunger in the first instance, are, for Bauer, the ultimate solution.