Foreign Policy

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek treks through “the hunger zone” in northern Kenya with a nomadic goat herder to get a better understanding of a region persistently devastated by famine. While describing his experience, Salopek also takes us through a history of hunger and foreign food aid:

“Mister Inas then showed us a few wild plants the Daasanach resorted to during famines: the berries of the kadite bush and a gnarled tree that produced a currant-like fruit called miede. People were forgetting their use. ‘Today, we eat food aid instead,’ he said.

“At that time, the U.N. World Food Program was helping feed 265,000 people in the Turkana region. The nomads, once canny at eking out a livelihood on the gauntest of Kenyan landscapes, had been settling into ramshackle outposts, essentially rural slums, where each household received a monthly allotment of 10 kilograms of maize. They were losing what relief workers termed “famine-coping mechanisms” — their ancestral survival skills. Cutting off assistance cold was unthinkable; countless people would die. So after having helped fund these supplemental feeding programs for decades, the U.S. government, through its African Development Foundation, decided last year to put its foot down. It earmarked $10 million for a pilot program in the Turkana area that might be called aid methadone — still more aid, but this time in the form of fishponds and irrigated market gardens, all intended to pry people off the old aid.”

How did more than 160 million women go missing from Asia? The simple answer is sex selection — typically, an ultrasound scan followed by an abortion if the fetus turns out to be female — but beyond that, the reasons for a gap half the size of the U.S. population are not widely understood. And when I started researching a book on the topic, I didn’t understand them myself.

“That scum!” Boris Yeltsin fumed. “It’s a coup. We can’t let them get away with it.” It was the morning of Aug. 19, 1991, and the Russian president was standing at the door of his dacha in Arkhangelskoe, a compound of small country houses outside Moscow where the top Russian government officials lived. I had raced over from my own house nearby, after a friend called from Moscow, frantic and nearly hysterical, insisting that I turn on the radio. There had been a coup; Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had been removed from power.

Welcome to the new food economics of 2011: Prices are climbing, but the impact is not at all being felt equally. For Americans, who spend less than one-tenth of their income in the supermarket, the soaring food prices we’ve seen so far this year are an annoyance, not a calamity. But for the planet’s poorest 2 billion people, who spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food, these soaring prices may mean going from two meals a day to one. Those who are barely hanging on to the lower rungs of the global economic ladder risk losing their grip entirely. This can contribute — and it has — to revolutions and upheaval.

Teodorin’s 68-year-old father, Brig. Gen. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, seized power of Equatorial Guinea in a 1979 coup and has made apparent his intent to hand over power to a chosen successor. Obiang has sired an unknown number of children with multiple women, but 41-year-old Teodorin is his clear favorite and is being groomed to take over. That’s a scary prospect both for the long-suffering citizens of his country and for U.S. foreign policy. As a former U.S. intelligence official familiar with Teodorin put it to me, “He’s an unstable, reckless idiot.”

“I can get anything here from anywhere,” he boasted to an American undercover agent in March 1997. “Nothing can be done to me. I could sell a panda — and, nothing. As long as I’m here [in Malaysia], I’m safe.” The key, he explained, was paying off government officials in the customs bureau and, importantly, in the wildlife department, the agency responsible for animals’ paperwork.

Turkey’s military doesn’t just discriminate against gays — it humiliates them. “K., a gay man in his mid 20s who works at an NGO, was called up to the military this year. ‘The first time I went for a medical examination,’ he recalls, ‘I told the psychiatrist in charge I was gay, but he claimed that I was pretending.’ K. was forced to spend a night in a military psychiatric hospital where, he says, another doctor asked him to provide pictures documenting his homosexuality.”

Thanks to the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, the public is finally seeing through BP’s decade-long greenwashing campaign.

My two days running with the mob in Kyrgyzstan.