Roger Thurow on global poverty - Part 1

Roger Thurow is a senior fellow for global agriculture and food policy for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He writes about many of the same issues that animate the work at the International Livestock Research Institute - nutrition, development, hunger, and aid for subsistence farmers.

As a writer, Thurow conveys what the lives of the poor are like in vivid, granular detail. We hear from him about what inspired him to focus on these issues - and how he has seen the lives of smallholder farmers change for the better.

Further reading

• Roger Thurow | The Chicago Council on Global Affairs
• One Acre Fund

Script written by David Aronson

Transcript

PART 1

RT: “Looking into the eyes of someone dying of hunger becomes a disease of the soul, because what you see is that nobody should have to be dying of hunger now, particularly in the 21st century.”

AS: Hello, I’m Annabel Slater, host of The Boma, a podcast from the International Livestock Research Institute looking at how sustainable livestock is building better lives in the Global South.  I’m delighted to have the well-known journalist Roger Thurow on the program today. Roger Thurow is a senior fellow for global agriculture and food policy for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He is a former reporter with the Wall Street Journal whose coverage of global affairs spanned the Cold War, the reunification of Germany, the release of Nelson Mandela and the wars in the former Yugoslavia–along with 10 Olympic Games. But it is issues of famine, poverty, hunger and nutrition that have held his lifelong interest. He’s written three books: ENOUGH: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty; The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change, and The First 1,000 Days: A Crucial Time for Mothers and Children—and the World. The Boma’s David Aronson spoke with Thurow about poverty and development. I understand, David, that you were really looking forward to this chance to speak to Thurow?

DA: Yes, I was. Thurow is one of a handful of Western journalists who have made global poverty into his ‘beat,’ so to speak. He’s spent his life, as a journalist, writing about many of the same issues that animate the work that we do here at the International Livestock Research Institute. We both, for example, focus on nutrition, development, hunger and aid for subsistence farmers. And what Thurow does so well as a writer is that he conveys what the lives of the poor are like in vivid, granular detail.  

AS: You begin by asking him what turned him away from being the typical foreign correspondent, always jetting away to cover the next global crisis, to his current focus on hunger and poverty.

DA: Yes, I was struck by a phrase of his—that once you look into the eyes of someone dying of hunger it becomes a disease of the soul. I wanted to know what that meant for him. 

RT: It was in May of 2003 in Ethiopia, it was during the - what turned out to be the first great hunger crisis, the first famine of the 21st century.

I was a reporter with the Wall Street Journal at the time, a foreign correspondent based in Zurich in Switzerland, not writing about banks or anything, but writing about humanitarian and development issues. So as this hunger crisis began to erupt in and unfold in Ethiopia, I was quickly down there to see what all that was. And it was 14 million people, 1 4 million people that were on the verge of starvation or being fed and being kept alive if they were going to survive at all by food aid being distributed by the World Food Program, coming from countries around the world, and then other food aid being distributed, emergency relief as well. 

So 14 million people out of then a population in Ethiopia of about 70 million. My first day in Addis Ababa. Then I was meeting with the World Food Program, folks that were doing work on the ground and in the coming days would be traveling with them to some of the hunger hotspots. 

DA: It was here that a relief expert first likened hunger to a ‘disease of the soul’ to Thurow.

RT: And I'm like a disease of the soul... Well, well, what is that? You know, you prepare as much as possible for, you know, kind of any other health concerns or diseases. With the malaria medication and watching out for cholera outbreaks or meningitis outbreaks, but a disease of the soul? So the next day then we were bound south of Addis in the Rich Plateau area, down by Lassa and kind of took a corkscrew road up to the top of a plateau and made our way to a a little community in a market area that was in a vast field.

Normally it would be filled like with with with marketing farmers, bringing in surplus crops, but then it was filled with emergency relief tents, a whole number of them. And inside each of those tents were dozens upon dozens of starving children with their parents. And their parents were also in very wretched shape. And it was their for the first time then that I truly did look into the eyes of the of the starving.

DA: Unfortunately, these issues remain all-too relevant, as poverty, climate change and drought continue to cause widespread hunger in the region. But what is it like for a journalist to be reporting on these kind of devastating issues?

RT: I felt ashamed because I had been a foreign correspondent for a number of years already at that time, had been based in South Africa, traveled quite widely through Africa, you know, hunger, malnutrition was certainly part of the the the fabric, unfortunately, of Africa and many other places in the world, but then particularly in Africa I was going around, but I had never really focused on -

And it was it was part of my stories, you know, and, you know, background pieces in in, in stories. But I had never really as as we saw, then looked into the eyes of the hungry and looked at that human dimension of it. 

And so that then, you know, did indeed become a disease of my soul.

I mean, to try to take it all in. And what's happening here that that three years into this new millennium of ours, the 21st century, that there was still this medieval suffering to such a scale, how did this happen? And I came across one a father and his son. He said it was about five years old and wages £27 or so, and his father carried him in and he was the smallholder farmers.

And he was looking at me and asking, what have I done to my son? I didn' t really know how to reply? And then I figured that that's the wrong question about what have you done to yourself, but what have we done to your son? A collective we that we have allowed, that we have brought this this medieval suffering with us into the 21st century?

So normally, as a foreign correspondent, I would have left the tent that day, wrote my story and then moved on to something elsewhere. Next was - a next story to go to. This is the story that stopped me cold and the disease of the soul kept working on me, this then became the passion of my reporting. This the one story that I had to keep coming back to and back to and back to, and this being the story of hunger in the 21st century.

AS: A little bit later, Roger spent a year following the lives of four poor farming families in Western Kenya. Now this wasn’t famine—this wasn’t the emaciated bodies and terrible death rates we associate with starvation--but something more ordinary: the routine, grinding poverty of subsistence farmers, who earn so little that they are scarcely able to adequately feed themselves.

DA: Yes, and the stories he tells of their lives can be really heart-breaking, for example of families who must constantly make the choice between buying food or paying school fees or paying for malaria medications. 

AS: Grim, impossible choices.

DA: Yes, they are. But during the year he spent with them, an American NGO began providing assistance in a big way—with higher-yielding seeds, with financial mechanisms, with educational programs. And the farmers began to do significantly better. In fact, over time, as conditions in the village improved, Thurow had an insight into what economic development means. It’s not just about getting a little bit richer—as important as that is to very poor people. It’s about something less tangible.

RT: Spending all that time speaking with those the smallholder farmers and talking about the decisions that they're making in life, kind of it turns out, boy, they're kind of decisions that we all make, you know, a different scale, obviously. But these decisions.

It's like so if people are leading at, say, you know, the very the very basic, they're leading 'neither nor' lives.

Neither do they have enough money to provide food for themselves at a sufficient daily basis, nor do they have enough money for or resources, for health or education or anything else that's going on in their lives. So neither nor lives. As they improve a little bit and they income rises, then they can start living 'either or' lives. Oh, so now I have enough resources and money that I have these decisions.

Either I can buy some food for the day or I can pay some school fees that are due or, you know, buy medicine at and and provide some health care for, you know, at the pharmacy or the or the clinic. So then suddenly it's either or lives. Then as as income improves and and you know development increases and circumstances improve, then you see people and families start living 'and' lives.

So these three little words 'a n d' then becomes so powerful and profound, Oh, now I have enough resources, you know, my income is approved, my farming has improved. I have surplus crops. I can I have this added income now I have this and I have enough to feed my family for today or for a longer period and to provide a health care and medicine and to be able to send my children to school and to to repair, to repair my house and to improve my, my, my shamba, my farming operation.

AS: By the way, do we happen to know anything about what happened to those 4 families in the years since Thurow visited them?

DA: Fortunately, I asked Roger exactly that. 

RT: Yes, it's a great question. So the book came out in 2012.

And yes, I have gone back. So last last summer when I was in Kenya and then in Uganda, kind of on the way to Uganda, that was in western Kenya, went up and saw the families they're doing they're doing well there. The children, they're in high school or have have finished high school. The younger ones kind of on par to do that and grandchildren as well. So that was great to see. You can see the expansion of their houses. So again, how kind of 'and' comes into their lives. So they're able to have you know, additional - take cooking structures so they're not having to cook inside the house, they're kind of the indoor smoke. How they're able to maybe have a couple more bedrooms so that the children are sleeping and everybody is sleeping kind of in more secure rooms so they can have the malaria nets and the protections that they need. 

They all continue to say that, yes, the wanjala is gone from their lives that hasn't hasn't come back and visited them so their farming operations seem to be doing better. They have diversified their crops. And so you see that they're planting trees. They are, you know, that one then sees that. So at the time they were, as I was doing reporting affiliated with the One Acre Fund. Are they still are are or most of them are and that they're still practicing the principles certainly and then some and then and then still in the program.

And so, you know, continuing to gain knowledge that way. And so you see kind of the what difference it what what what huge difference and profound difference it can make when these smallholder farmers and all farmers of the world, when they have access to the essential elements of farming, that so many of us in the rich world take for granted.

Proper soil conditions and soil treatments, access to the the seeds and the properties that they need for their elevation, for their rainfall levels, access to financing, which is the lifeblood of farmers everywhere in the world. 

And then plus to the extension advice of how to best use all these things, you know - Once they have that access to these essential elements of farming, we see how much more successful almost in quantum leaps that they that they can become.

And so the four farmers in the last hunger season, yes, they all seem to be. It was it was great to see them all again and that they're in in in good shape. They're still dealing with, you know, the aspects of, you know, the weather, extreme weather patterns, pests, price fluctuation, sort of saying the normal things that farmers kind of everywhere in the world deal with.

But they seem to be a much more much more stable footing.

AS: So in Thurow's words, these farmers have moved from 'neither/nor' lives to 'and' lives.

DA: Definitely. And that is an incredibly encouraging story, not just for those four families, but for everyone. Because what it means is that poverty isn’t this huge intractable problem, this thing we’re just fated to live with, but that intelligent, targeted and relatively inexpensive interventions can make a huge difference. 

AS: Thurow’s first two books focused mostly on Africa. In his third book, The First 1,000 Days, Thurow turns his attention to nutrition as a global affair. In it, he focuses on four young mothers, in Chicago, Guatemala, India and Uganda, to illuminate the science, economics, and politics of malnutrition, charting the exciting progress of this global effort and the formidable challenges it still faces. The Boma had a chance to discuss that book, and some of its wider implications, including for livestock, in a second podcast coming out in two weeks’ time.

DA: I’m David Aronson

AS: And I’m Annabel Slater, thank you for listening.