As the jockeying over who would join this US government fact-finding mission grew heated during the bitterly contested midterms, I was faced with pressure (as were you) to drop out. As you described it to me, the government was supposed to show a united front of compassion for the millions affected by famine and food scarcity the world over, and yet most of the ink, energy, and vitriol was spent debating who would or would not be on board the plane. A scientist like Jane Tufariello seemed noncontroversial, except that her presence made it impossible for Republicans to join, lest their caucus earn the wrath of Renaissance Media for conspiring with the former NOAA chief. Republican leader Ryan Doup was able to compensate, at my request, by dispatching his chief of staff, Joe Otero, who had a cordial relationship with Jane. Similarly, your invitation to climate security czar Admiral Michael Dahms proved hugely problematic since he obviously represents the Love administration, responsible for slaughter and mass detention. Among the murdered were my husband, among the imprisoned, my friend Dr. Anthony Pietrus.
Those who attended our tour—the congressional representatives, members of the Department of Agriculture, scientists, economists, policy advisors, and an army of Secret Service and security contractors—deserve credit for their bravery even as death threats accumulated back home. While the American government spared no expense, in the two weeks of our journey, through the gruesome sights of feeding centers and children with the reddish-brown hair and distended bellies of kwashiorkor, the adults with spindly limbs, hollow cheeks, and pitted eyes of the starving, I struggled to understand what our purpose was. The haste of travel across time zones, nation-states, and continents turned to sleep deprivation. Soon, every drab government office and chintzy ceremonial reception took on the feel of unreality, as if we’d wandered onto the set of a movie about high-stakes governance. Certainly, I felt as if we were all acting a role.
A concatenation of diverse environmental factors has played into the deepening crisis. The farmer sees his crops dry and brittle, and this represents an astonishing loss of surplus grain from heat, drought, and flooding in the world’s breadbaskets. Russia has lost a third of its wheat crop to drought, Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin has seen record temperatures and plummeting yields, and in the Midwestern US the corn crop was devastated first by the Great Eastern Flood and then by the so-called heat storm this past summer.
In my ancestral homeland, we witnessed the devastation wrought by Cyclone Malwan in Mumbai, and while the tragedy of two-hundred mph winds and a twenty-foot storm surge cannot be overstated, the greater legacy will be on the surrounding rice-growing deltas suffering a marked increase in salinity.
We saw peoples of the Indian subcontinent, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia trudging across perilous mountain regions. The floodwaters of melting glaciers have destroyed key farming areas in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Pakistan. The world’s “third ice cap” in the Himalayas lost 15 percent of its mass in just the last five years, with dire consequences for those who rely on that water. The global freshwater situation is a crisis for which there is no precedent in human history.
In Niger, we heard of a crop blight, the Chikungunya virus laying waste to that society’s yields even as arable land vanishes. The synergistic effects of soil degradation, desertification, and salinization have been precursors in the collapse of every civilization from ancient Greece to Mesoamerican empires.
The fishermen we met in Honduras saw their nets empty, so they pick up weapons and join whatever vicious militant group or narco-trafficker that will have them. Yet behind that empty net is the acidification of the oceans, overfishing, and anoxic dead zones created by fertilizer runoff. Marine ecosystems are near collapse, global fish stocks imperiled, and they will take with them one of the world’s key sources of protein and the livelihood of roughly 200 million people.
Yet in the middle of all this, Earth’s most fearsome species, the commodity trader and his algorithms of ultra-fast trading, sees only profit. Scarcity is lucrative and prices surge as Wall Street hoards grain futures. This, I fear, includes Peter’s firm, which has been particularly aggressive in the commodity broad baskets space. Therefore, I cannot escape my own complicity: Tara Fund utilizes systems models I worked on while consulting with the New England Complex Systems Institute in the early 2020s. Peter remains quiescent about the real-world effects of agro-trading and speculation, but nevertheless the major food multinationals, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Bunge, are experiencing their most profitable years on record.
The effects ripple outward. Vietnam bans rice exports, so Thailand and Cambodia follow suit, and Myanmar begins to starve. Russia marches troops into Ukraine to “restart agriculture” in the region’s famed black earth, the same rationale proffered by every leader from Peter the Great to Adolf Hitler, and this time the West holds its tongue in the hopes it will ease the strain on surplus grain. The continued flow of refugees has led to the ascension of a powerful coalition of white nationalist governments within the EU. Following his scheduled release from prison, the political rise of Anders Breivik, the notorious mass murderer, has reverberated loudly across Europe, where Far Right movements are making a serious play for majoritarian control with the so-called Six Arms alliance. The sense of isolation and uprootedness that immigrants, refugees, and native-born alike experience as they watch their worlds warp is exacerbated by deprivation. The hungry and starving will not die quietly.
While predicting civil and geopolitical unrest is difficult in the specific, in the aggregate it is relatively easy: simply look at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index. When it breaches 120, there will likely be war, riots, and revolutions to varying degrees around the world. When it reached 131.9 in 2011, the Arab Spring broke out. The index began a precipitous climb two years ago. Kate Morris thinks herself a revolutionary but the fuel for her revolt, which led to the death of a man I loved, was very much tied to the price of food. As of this writing the FPI has reached 167.3, an all-time high.
Understanding hunger intellectually is quite different from seeing its dazed victims, disproportionately children, wasting away to their deaths. On the outskirts of the Philippine city of Antipolo, while we toured the burned ruins of a farm, I saw a group of children, among them one I recognized. We’d stopped at the behest of our government escort, who wanted to show us what was happening to the country’s agriculture. What were once wheat and barley fields had been fried to a crisp by fire and drought, the soil ripped away by bracing winds. I could feel the grit scouring my skin. The farm was littered with the bodies of emaciated livestock, scorched to unrecognizable husks by a summer fire. They were being lifted by bulldozers and buried unceremoniously in a pit. Dr. Tufariello was beside me, listening to our escort and spitting out the dust. The sand had collected in the braids of her hair and its extensions. I longed to touch her hand and ask her if what I was seeing was in fact real.
As the rusted blades shoveled the charred cows into a pit, the children buzzed around the animals along with the flies. They were trying to pick meat off one of the cow’s bodies that was awaiting burial. One of them, who I was seeing from a distance of perhaps twenty feet, looked so much like Forrest, I almost expected him to come running to me. He was older, as Forrest might look in a year or two, but he had the same wide nose and head of soft curls. His eyes were slightly more almond-shaped, but the black eyebrows were arched in the same inquisitive way as when Forrest’s face was resting. Both of their faces came with the same permanent question. Of course, this child was malnourished and much thinner, but the resemblance was simply beyond my capacity to understand, beyond the easy answer that our lineage is exponential and our common ancestors much closer in history than we can comfortably believe. The ancestors of Forrest’s biological mother, Seth, and this boy, they’d certainly all crossed at some point in a past that feels distant to us, but was in fact genetically, biologically, and geologically practically yesterday.