By Alec MacGillis
NEW YORK: In 2004, Jean-Martin Bauer was doing humanitarian work in southern Mauritania when he met a woman named Binta living with her children in a patched-up tent by a dry riverbed. A member of the oppressed Haratin caste, Binta often struggled to feed her kids, and had developed a trick to cover for that: “At night,” she told Bauer, “I gather the pots and pans, and build a fire. I pour out water into the large pot. I act just as though I am making dinner. And if my kids become suspicious and start asking me when dinner is ready, I snap at them and tell them: ‘Quiet! Can’t you see I’m cooking?’” When they’d finally fall asleep, she’d stop the charade.
This is one of many memorable moments in “The New Breadline,” Bauer’s illuminating account of his 20 years working with the World Food Program, for which he has led country offices in Haiti and the Republic of Congo in addition to serving in the western Sahel and central Africa, and responding to crises in Afghanistan and Syria. The book is a close-up look at efforts to vanquish hunger amid both major, front-page disasters, such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the Syrian civil war, and the countless lower-profile calamities that are documented on the inside pages, if at all.
The theme linking the landscapes of want depicted by Bauer is straightforward: Hunger is almost always the product of political decisions, whether the immediate cause is violent conflict, misguided trade and aid policies, or discrimination against minorities and lower castes. The downside of this reality is that humans are constantly engaged in “forces that lay the groundwork for hunger.” The upside is that hunger should, in theory, be largely avoidable. “By making better political choices and creating more equitable and humane systems of aid, we can reduce or even eliminate hunger,” Bauer writes.
Unfortunately, world hunger has lately gotten worse, not better. In 2023, an estimated 250 million people suffered from acute (life-threatening) hunger, double the figure from just three years earlier, and that’s in addition to the 700 million who suffered from chronic hunger meaning they had barely enough food to survive. The chief driver of this surge, Bauer maintains, was the global response to the coronavirus pandemic. He cites the Republic of Congo, where a strict lockdown in the spring of 2020 left containers packed with imported food stuck in port and local produce stranded in farming areas “the plantain is rotting in the forest,” a colleague told him while in Brazzaville, the capital, hairdressers, food vendors, taxi drivers, construction workers and others saw their livelihoods vanish. At one point, Bauer received a WhatsApp video showing two thin teenage boys skinning a cat to roast. “It’s the lockdown,” one says, by way of explanation.
By June 2020, a study found, one-third of Brazzaville’s population, or 700,000 people, did not have enough to eat, triple the level in 2015. The situation was worse in outlying districts. And yet, by the end of 2020, Congo had recorded only 100 or so fatalities from Covid-19, in line with lower than expected death rates in other sub-Saharan African nations. “Were the public health benefits of lockdowns and quarantines worth it, considering their destructive impacts on people’s ability to feed their families?” Bauer asks.
This is an uncomfortable question, but Bauer has earned the reader’s trust by documenting other examples of seemingly justifiable policies that turned out to be harmful, including, in 1994, President Clinton’s forcing Haiti to lift its tariff on imported rice, which severely undermined domestic growers (including Bauer’s uncle), and the implementation of NAFTA, which resulted in cheap U.S. corn flooding the Mexican market as well as a surge in northward migration. Over-reliance on imports to feed nations, he writes, is “shortsighted, corrosive and dangerous.”
What makes “The New Breadline” so compelling, though, are not the big debates it touches on but the small details Bauer shares from a realm that usually operates out of the public eye. He introduces readers to the “wheelbarrow boys” of Monrovia, Liberia, who tamper with the tins cans used to measure out rice so that customers on the street receive less than they think they’re buying. He relates efforts by a Congolese colleague to persuade insurgents known as Ninjas that the rice and cooking oil the colleague was bringing to civilians in their remote district was not poisoned: He proved the point by consuming both goods in front of Ninjas manning a checkpoint.
Bauer tells us that after Saudi Arabia put Qatar under a trade blockade in 2017, Qatar flew in 4,000 milk cows from Germany; that farmers in the Central African Republic started planting cassava instead of corn because it was harder for marauding rebels to steal; that central African elites import champagne and cognac in quantities so great that they risk compromising other pressing national needs — such as technology to facilitate industrialization.
In giving us the tour of his world, Bauer is self-effacing to a fault, keenly aware of the fraught ethics of relief work, the fact that his career is dependent on the need of others. He opens up a bit about his own experience as a biracial man with a Haitian mother and French father, raised in Washington, D.C., and how the complexities of his racial background affect his job; I was left wishing for more of his personal perspective throughout.
I also wished that Bauer had been able to reckon with the world’s latest food-related horrors: The looming famine in Sudan; the struggle to bring aid into Gaza, where seven workers with World Central Kitchen perished in an Israeli airstrike in April; and the charge by the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court that Israel has used starvation as a weapon of war, a tactic Bauer addresses well in other contexts. But one effect of this book is to leave the reader oddly hopeful about the prospects for mitigating these nightmares, having given us a glimpse of the deeply committed people working to overcome them, again and again.