When the push for survival is a full-time job
What is it like to live on less than a dollar a day? Hundreds of millions in sub-Saharan Africa know. Their work is an endless cycle of bartering, hawking and scrounging to get by until tomorrow.
By Davan Maharaj, Times Staff Writer
July 11, 2004
GOMA, Congo -- Every day is a fight for pennies.
At sunrise, Adolphe Mulinowa is out hauling 10-gallon cans of sand at a construction site. It takes him an hour to earn 5 cents. Then he hustles to a roadside with a few plastic bottles of pink gasoline, which he hawks alongside dozens of other street vendors.
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"Patron! Boss man! Gas! Gas! Gas!" Mulinowa barks as a battered Peugeot shudders past, kicking a spray of loose rocks at his face.
The car does not stop. Mulinowa, a short man in his mid-30s with sad, reddened eyes, squats down again beside his bottles. It is a scene repeated many times in the four hours it takes to sell them. Mulinowa pockets an additional 40 cents. Then, as the sun goes down, he heads to his evening job hawking used shoes and live chickens. A few more pennies.
After a 12-hour day, he returns home to his wife and six children with his earnings: about 70 cents and a bag of cornmeal swinging from his hand.
"We beat the belly pains today," he says in a tired mumble. "Tomorrow, more hard work."
Up and down the teeming streets of Goma, there is no real work as it is known in the West. There is only what everyone here calls se debrouiller — French for getting by, or eking a living out of nothing.
Decades of war and disease, followed by a volcanic eruption that entombed nearly half the city beneath a rough crust of lava, have reduced work to a mishmash of odd jobs and scheming. Civil servants survive on bribes. A lawyer moonlights by making pastries. A single mother of four turns to prostitution in her living room, decorated with pictures of Jesus and Mary.
They are among the poorest people on Earth, surviving on less than a dollar a day.
In the United States, an individual who makes less than $9,310 a year is considered poor. The World Bank sets its poverty line at $730 a year — $2 a day. Half of sub-Saharan Africa's 600 million people live on about 65 cents a day — less than what an American might spend on a cup of coffee.
It is never enough. In Goma, near the heart of Africa, an average family of seven spends about $63 a month, two-thirds of it on food. With every dollar, they make a choice among competing needs — food, rent, clothes, school and medicine.
Sometimes it is a matter of life and death.
Two years ago, Mulinowa's little boy, Dieudonne, or "God's gift," came down with a fever, cold sweats and shakes. Mulinowa knew that it was malaria.
He took the 3-year-old to a muganga — Swahili for traditional healer — who sprinkled him with water, squeezed the pulp from some herbs into his mouth and sent him home. Two days later, the boy was dead. Mulinowa knows that with 20 cents for medicine to fight the fever and chills, he might have saved his son's life. But he didn't have the money.
Neither did the families of three other children in the neighborhood who died about the same time.
"I do not want this to happen to my Annissette," Mulinowa says of his 2-year-old daughter. "That's why we work from dawn to dusk."
In some ways, the Mulinowas are better off than many Congolese. The family's wooden house, resting on an old lava flow, has a tin roof and some wooden furniture. The walls recently were whitewashed with paint from an aid agency. Their neighbors live in mud huts or houses fashioned from rusting galvanized sheets.
In a town of debrouillards, Mulinowa has learned to exploit tiny advantages. He has figured out that, because Goma has dozens of gasoline vendors, his chances are better two miles away at the Rwanda-Congo border. There, drivers have to slow down and are more likely to notice him.
His family also improves its odds by spreading out during the day, hoping that at least one member will earn enough to buy food.
If Mulinowa doesn't sell enough gas, shoes or chickens, then perhaps his son, 18-year-old Ivan, will have better luck making deliveries with his homemade wooden scooter, called a chukudu. For a few cents per trip, Ivan ferries goods through a bazaar of vendors hawking their wares, grilling lake fish on smoky coals and blasting the guitar rhythms of soukous stars such as Kanda Bongo Man. Sometimes the merchants also give him small bags of flour or vegetables.
If Mulinowa and his son fail, then daughter Bernadette, 15, might be able to bring in some money selling used clothes, canned sardines or other goods for neighborhood merchants.
The fallback is Mulinowa's wife, Faith, who struggles to feed her family of eight when a 50-pound sack of manioc flour costs $24; a sack of beans, $17; and a dozen salted fish, $7. Occasionally she receives produce from relatives in outlying villages that she can sell for extra money.
"When you work hard, good things happen to you," Faith Mulinowa says. "That's why we make it."
*
Goma, on the eastern edge of Congo, is controlled by rebels fighting the central government hundreds of miles away in Kinshasa, the capital. One aid group estimates that at least 3.3 million people have died in the country's violence and chaos since 1998.
But even a society living on the edge needs civil servants. Men with government seals, such as Pancrace Rwiyereka, a grandfatherly former schoolteacher who runs Goma's Division of Work, engage in their own version of se debrouiller.
They don't bring home an actual salary, but the majority still show up for work every day. A government job gives them the opportunity to demand money from businesses and members of the public. Their official jobs are a charade.
"Bribes are the answer," said a mid-level government employee in the finance department. "Why do you think we would never give up our jobs or strike to get our salaries?"
Authorities require entrepreneurs importing goods to obtain stamps from at least six agencies: the main customs office, an immigration office, a health agency, a separate health office that certifies goods for consumption, the governor's tax revenue office and a provincial office that collects money from truckers for nonexistent road rehabilitation.
Bureaucrats typically sell the stamps to the businesses at a reduced rate and then pocket the money. If a supervising officer discovers that the appropriate taxes haven't been paid, he too is paid off.
Bribes in Goma range from about $5 for a birth certificate to about $100 for an import license. But workers have to share the take with colleagues and superiors. So on many days they go home with less than $1. The system ensures that a single bribe will feed several families for a day.
Civil servants say they are merely finding a way to get paid for their services. That's the way it is here: Ordinary people always have had to scramble to survive. The only ones who have ever gotten rich are the leaders and those with connections.
In the 19th century, King Leopold of Belgium treated the Congo colony as his personal possession. And the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who took power in 1965 — five years after Congo won independence from Belgium — plundered an estimated $8 billion from the treasury during his three-decade rule. In a famous speech, he openly acknowledged the role of corruption.
"Everything is for sale, everything is bought in our country," he said. "And in this trade, holding any slice of public power constitutes a veritable exchange instrument, convertible into illicit acquisition of money or other goods."
Or, in the words of a government accountant: "Everyone has to look out for themselves. If you fail, you die."
So each workday, 61-year-old Rwiyereka dons a brown jacket over a secondhand Izod shirt, grabs his briefcase and heads for a sparse office at the Division of Work. The beige walls have been stained by tropical rains that pound through the leaky tin ceiling.
Rwiyereka has jammed his desk next to a window so he can catch a narrow shaft of sunlight. Several months ago, looters stripped the electrical cables from the building.
From the window, he sees lush jungle and fertile, black land that once made this area the breadbasket of Central Africa. The hills are rich in fine hardwoods and minerals, including coltan, which is used to make computer chips in Asia and cellular phones in Finland.
Despite this natural wealth, some Goma residents believe that the gods have cast them into hell. When it rains, lava still cooling after the eruption of Mt. Nyiragongo in January 2002 emits clouds of steam that envelope the city. The pungent smell of sulfur sometimes wafts in through Rwiyereka's window. Often, the bowels of the volcano rumble, forcing methane gas to bubble up in nearby Lake Kivu.
At his desk, Rwiyereka points to two stacks of letters from workers. He says that those who want him to investigate grievances have to bring in their own paper so his unpaid secretary can pound out an official response on his manual typewriter.
Rwiyereka chuckles when a visitor asks whether he and the 27 staffers in his office take bribes.
"I try to tell them that is not allowed," he says. "But they have mouths to feed. They and I know that having a job that doesn't pay is better than having no job at all."
*
There was a time when people thought that there was a way out. In a country where the vast majority of the people are illiterate, a college education would put one among the elite.
But Diane Kavuo has learned the hard way that even with a diploma, she needs se debrouiller.
Her father, who owned a small trucking business, poured most of the family's earnings into educating the brightest of his 11 children. It seemed like a ticket out of endless need.
Kavuo, like many people in Goma, speaks five languages — English and French, and three African languages: Swahili, Lingala and Kinande. She also has a law degree. But the chaos of Congo's civil war shattered her plan, and today the 28-year-old lawyer helps the family by selling fritters in the market.
Months go by without Kavuo earning a penny in fees from her legal cases, most of which involve unpaid loans of perhaps $100. Sometimes, lawyers groups pay her way to attend human rights conferences across Africa, where she highlights the plight of child soldiers and of women who have been raped by militiamen.
Kavuo spends her per diem money on handbags, lotions and cosmetics, which she brings back to Goma and gives to hawkers to sell. She uses her profit to buy sugar, flour and baking powder for the fritters.
A $50 investment returns $65. Almost half the fritters are given away to street children. But in Goma, the $15 profit can sustain a large family for several days.
Kavuo says she dreams of a day when Congo is a stable and prosperous country.
"Light is going to come," she says. "It's been dark too long."
Until then, another Goma resident, 37-year-old Mama Rose, also will have to struggle to feed her four young children.
Four years ago, militiamen robbed and killed her husband. Like Adolphe Mulinowa, he did odd jobs. But he had been his family's sole breadwinner.
For several months, Mama Rose worked menial jobs and tried hawking goods on the street. But she found herself relying mainly on neighborhood men who befriended her and brought her small baskets of food.
For that, they expected — and received — some intimacy.
Many women in Goma rely on such relationships to feed their families. But Mama Rose had another idea. Why pretend that she was befriending the men for their company? Why not admit to herself that it had become a job and start charging money?
"Every truth is not good to say," says Mama Rose, her radiant smile exposing her capped gold tooth. "But let us face it. In Goma, everything has a price. And I don't want to sell myself short."
In some months, Mama Rose earns less than $25, mainly in her small living room decked out with pictures of Jesus and Mary. Stuffed toys lie on her single wood-framed bed.
In a good month, when she works the better-off U.N. soldiers who are monitoring the conflict in Congo, she can earn up to $75.
Mama Rose has persuaded other prostitutes to organize. They recently confronted the regional governor, who had declared that 80% of Goma's sex workers were infected with HIV or had AIDS.
Mama Rose acknowledges that AIDS is a big problem, but denies that the infection rate is that high. Yet many of her friends have died of the disease, leaving their young children to fend for themselves and starting a new generation on the cycle of poverty.
"We're not bad people," she says, dusting some breadcrumbs from images of the Virgin Mary printed on her dress. "This is how we have to live. This is how we put some food in our stomachs."
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Foreign Policy Goes Glam
WHO WOULD you rather sit next to at your next Council on Foreign Relations roundtable: Henry Kissinger or Angelina Jolie? This is a question that citizens of the white-collared foreign-policy establishment thought they’d never be asked. The massive attention paid to Paris Hilton’s prison ordeal, Lindsay Lohan’s shame spiral and anything Britney Spears has done, said or exposed has distracted pop-culture mavens from celebrities that were making nobler headlines.
Increasingly, celebrities are taking an active interest in world politics. When media maven Tina Brown attends a Council on Foreign Relations session, you know something fundamental has changed in the relationship between the world of celebrity and world politics. What’s even stranger is that these efforts to glamorize foreign policy are actually affecting what governments do and say. The power of soft news has given star entertainers additional leverage to advance their causes. Their ability to raise issues to the top of the global agenda is growing. This does not mean that celebrities can solve the problems that bedevil the world. And not all celebrity activists are equal in their effectiveness. Nevertheless, politically-engaged stars cannot be dismissed as merely an amusing curiosity in foreign policy.
Consider the most notable example of a celebrity attempting to move the global agenda: Angelina Jolie. Her image has come a long way since her marriage to Billy Bob Thornton. In February of this year she published an op-ed in The Washington Post about the crisis in Darfur, referencing her work as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. During the summer, her press junket to promote A Mighty Heart included interviews with Foreign Policy’s website and a glowing profile in Newsweek, modestly titled “Angelina Jolie Wants to Save the World.” In that story, former Secretary of State Colin Powell describes Jolie as “absolutely serious, absolutely informed. . . .She studies the issues.” Esquire’s July 2007 cover featured a sultry picture of Jolie—but the attached story suggested something even more provocative: “In post-9/11 America, Angelina Jolie is the best woman in the world because she is the most famous woman in the world—because she is not like you or me.”
What in the name of Walter Scott’s Personality Parade is going on? Why has international relations gone glam? Have stars like Jolie, Madonna, Bono, Sean Penn, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney and Sheryl Crow carved out a new way to become foreign-policy heavyweights? Policy cognoscenti might laugh off this question as absurd, but the career arc of Al Gore should give them pause. As a conventional politician, Gore made little headway in addressing the problem of global warming beyond negotiating a treaty that the United States never ratified. As a post–White House celebrity, Gore starred in An Inconvenient Truth, won an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize, promoted this past summer’s Live Earth concert and reframed the American debate about global warming. Gore has been far more successful as a celebrity activist than he ever was as vice president. This is the kind of parable that could lead aspiring policy wonks to wonder if the best way to command policy influence is to attend Julliard instead of the Fletcher School.
Joking aside, celebrity involvement in politics and policy is hardly new: Shirley Temple and Jane Fonda became known as much for their politics as their films. The template for Live Earth was the 1985 Live Aid concert, which in turn echoed the 1974 all-star concert for Bangladesh. Actors ranging from Ronald Reagan to Fred Thompson have taken the more traditional star route to power: running for political office.
Not everything old is new again, however. There is something different about the recent batch of celebrity activists. Current entertainers have greater incentives to adopt global causes than their precursors. Furthermore, they are more likely to be successful in pushing their policy agenda to the front of the queue. These facts have less to do with the celebrities themselves than with how citizens in the developed world consume information. Whether the rise of the celebrity activist will lead to policy improvements, however, is a more debatable proposition. Promoting a policy agenda is one thing; implementing it is another thing entirely. Regardless of what Vanity Fair or Vogue might want you to believe, celebrities really are just like everyone else. Some are competent in their activism, and some are…something else.
The Supply of Celebrity Activism
ONE REASON for the newfound global agendas of celebrities is simply that today’s stars have more autonomy than previous generations, and many of them recognize the benefits of being a popular saint. Stars may have always cared about politics, but they have not always been able to act on these impulses. Entertainers likely feared speaking out in the past, but the entertainment industry is not as authoritarian as it once was. The studio systems of yesteryear exerted much greater control over their movie stars. Mostly, the studios used this leverage to hush up scandals before the press found out about them. In the decades since, celebrities have acquired more leverage in Hollywood. In some cases—see Winfrey, Oprah—they have become moguls themselves. This gives them the autonomy to adopt pet causes, policy initiatives and make their own publicity missteps. It also affords them the opportunity to manage their own “brand”, as it were. Just as Nike or Pepsi recognize the benefits of developing a positive brand image, so do George Clooney and Sheryl Crow.
This leads to another, somewhat more selfish reason for celebrities to embrace policy activism: It distinguishes them from their tawdrier brethren. We now live in a world where the path to fame can be as fast as a 15-second YouTube clip. Paris Hilton became one of the world’s most well-known faces on the strength of a famous name and a poorly lit home video. In such a world, marquee celebrities need to take steps to differentiate themselves from the lesser stars of stage and screen—or distance themselves from past scandals.1 So when Angelina Jolie attends the Davos Economic Forum or sponsors a Millennium Village in Cambodia, she’s not only trying to do good, she’s trying to create a brand image that lets Americans forget about her role in breaking up Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.
The final reason more celebrities are interested in making the world a better place is that it is simply easier for anyone to become a policy activist today. An effective policy entrepreneur requires a few simple commodities: expertise, money and the ability to command the media’s attention. Celebrities already have the latter two; the Internet has enabled them to catch up on information-gathering. Several celebrities even have “philanthropic advisors” to facilitate their activism. This does not mean that celebrities will become authentic experts on a country or issue. They can, however, acquire enough knowledge to pen an op-ed or sound competent on a talk show. And when they look sexy doing it, all bets are off.
The Power of Soft News
EVEN AS star activists aspire to appear on hard-news outlets, they dominate soft-news programs—a different but no less influential media format. Celebrity activism matters more now because Americans get their information about the world in different ways from a generation ago. Way back in the twentieth century, the available news outlets were well-defined: the major television networks, the weekly news magazines, The New York Times and the local newspaper. By relying on the same “general interest intermediaries”, the best and the brightest editorial gatekeepers forced most Americans to consume the same information. Clearly, the gates have been crashed. Cable television, talk radio and weblogs have radically diversified the sources of news available to ordinary Americans. The market for news and entertainment has shifted from an oligopoly to a more competitive environment.
This shift in the information ecosystem profoundly affects how public opinion on foreign policy is formed. Matthew Baum has argued in Soft News Goes to War that a large share of Americans get their information about world politics from “soft-news” outlets like Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, SportsCenter, The View, People, US Weekly, Vanity Fair, Vogue, The Daily Show, The Tonight Show, or Gawker, TMZ and PerezHilton. Although viewers might not watch these shows or read these magazines to learn about the world, any reporting of current events aired on these programs reaches an audience unattainable to The New York Times or Nightline.
In the current media environment, a symbiotic relationship between celebrities and cause célèbres has developed. Celebrities have a comparative advantage over policy wonks because they have access to a wider array of media outlets, which translates into a wider audience of citizens. Superstars can go on The Today Show or The Late Show to plug their latest movie and their latest global cause. Because of their celebrity cachet, even hard-news programs will cover them—stories about celebrities can goose Nielsen ratings. With a few exceptions, like Barack Obama or John McCain, most politicians cannot make the reverse leap to soft-news outlets. Non-celebrity policy activists are virtually guaranteed to be shut out of these programs.
The growth of soft news gives celebrity activists enormous leverage. The famous and the fabulous are the bread and butter of entertainment programs. Covering celebrity do-gooders provides content that balances out, say, tabloid coverage of Nicole Richie’s personal and legal troubles. ESPN can cover both Michael Vick’s travails and Dikembe Mutombo’s efforts to improve health care in sub-Saharan Africa. MTV will cover Amy Winehouse’s on-stage meltdowns, but they will also follow Angelina Jolie in her trips to Africa. They covered Live Earth for both the music and the message.
The power of soft news is not limited to television. Vanity Fair let Bono guest-edit a special issue about Africa, knowing that cover photos of Madonna and George Clooney would attract readers and buzz. Without intending to, those perusing the pages might form opinions about sending aid to sub-Saharan Africa in the process. Similarly, celebrity blogs can garner higher amounts of traffic. We may only speculate why Internet users flock to Pamela Anderson’s website—but we know that while they are there, they can learn about Anderson’s stance against animal testing.
Indeed, celebrities actually have an advantage over other policy activists and experts because hard-news outlets have an incentive to cover them too. Celebrities mean greater attention, and hard-news outlets are not above stunts designed to attract readers or ratings. Consider this question: If The Washington Post is deciding between running an op-ed by Angelina Jolie and an op-ed by a lesser-known expert on Sudan, which author do you think they are most likely to choose?
Do Celebrity Do-Gooders Do Any Good?
THERE IS no doubt that celebrities have the ability to raise the profile of issues near and dear to their hearts. Highlighting a problem is not the same thing as solving it, however—and the celebrity track record at affecting policy outcomes could best be characterized as mixed. Star activism has been reasonably successful at forcing powerful states to pledge action to assist the least-developed countries. It has been less successful at getting states to honor these pledges and not successful at all in affecting other global policy problems.
There have been some significant achievements, though. In the 1990s, Princess Diana embraced a ban on the use of land mines. Her death became a rallying point that led to Great Britain’s ratification of the 1997 Ottawa Convention to ban the devices.2 The Jubilee 2000 campaign, which Bono championed, should also count as a success.3 According to the Center for Global Development, the movement to assist highly indebted poor countries resulted in “the most successful industrial-country movement aimed at combating world poverty for many years, perhaps in all recorded history.” Celebrity activism also helped fuel the pledge at the 2005 Gleneagles G-8 summit to double aid to developing countries. Bob Geldof, who organized Live Aid a generation ago, arranged the Live 8 concerts to coincide with the summit. Bono, George Clooney, Claudia Schiffer and Nelson Mandela all appeared on stage.
To be clear, celebrities were not the only reason that the Ottawa Convention was signed or the G-7 launched the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative. In each of these cases, celebrities were buttressing organized, grassroots campaigns to change the status quo. At a minimum, however, star activists raised the media profile, spurring politicians to act sooner than they otherwise might have.
But there have been failures, too. While Bono provided an invaluable assist in promoting debt relief, he has not been as successful in his (Product) Red campaign. The idea was for consumers to do good through consumption—by buying iconic products colored red, a portion of the price would go to the UN Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The campaign was launched in January 2006 to great fanfare at Davos. According to Advertising Age, however, it has been a bust: After an estimated $100 million in marketing expenditures, the campaign netted only $18 million. (Product) Red has challenged the validity of these numbers, but the story invited media critiques of the campaign’s strategy, denting its momentum and cachet.
Celebrity campaigns are also not always considered a greater good. Development expert William Easterly has argued that the celebrity focus on Africa’s problems has been misguided. By focusing exclusively on the diseases of sub-Saharan Africa, celebrities have unwittingly tarnished an entire continent: “[Africans are] not helpless wards waiting for actors and rock stars to rescue them.” Many African officials and activists share this sentiment, even heckling Bono at a development conference.
Though celebrities have a mixed record in promoting development aid to Africa, the record on other issues is even worse. The Live Earth concerts generated mixed reviews because of their disorganization. Promoters had to cancel the Istanbul venue because of a lack of local sponsorship, and the other concerts were less than sellouts. More significantly, some celebrity activists questioned whether the extravaganza even had a clear purpose. Bob Geldof told an interviewer, “Live Earth doesn’t have a final goal. . . .So it’s just an enormous pop concert or the umpteenth time that, say, Madonna or Coldplay get up on stage.” Roger Daltrey of The Who concurred: “The last thing the planet needs is a rock concert.”
Steven Spielberg came up for criticism in a Wall Street Journal article co-authored by actress Mia Farrow. The article warned that Spielberg, as an “artistic advisor” to the 2008 Summer Olympics in China, would become “the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games” if he did not speak out. The chastised producer later sent a letter to Chinese Premier Hu Jintao because he felt compelled to “add my voice to those who ask that China change its policy towards Sudan.” Regardless of the reasons, Beijing has begun to pressure Sudan’s government into cooperating with the United Nations on Darfur.
Richard Gere has devoted decades to the cause of Tibetan independence to little avail. Yet with one onstage kiss of Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty, he did manage to get himself burned in effigy across India—the reverse celebrity problem. On the whole, celebrities have made little headway in bringing peace to the world’s trouble spots.
Even if celebrities are judicious and focused in promoting their causes, there are diminishing marginal returns to activism. A celebrity who repeatedly harps on a particular cause risks generating compassion fatigue with the general public. As Bono recently told CNN, “Look, I’m Bono and I’m sick of Bono. And I fully understand. . . .I look forward to a time when I’m not such a pest and a self-righteous rock-star. Who needs one?” Clearly, there is a fine line to walk between sustained focus and righteous indignation.
Hindered Hollywood
IT IS TRUE that star activism can influence the global policy agenda. But as we’ve seen, when it comes to concrete achievements, celebrities have a spotty track record. They face a number of constraints on their ability to affect policy. Most obviously, celebrities might not be the most grounded community of individuals. While some celebrities have mastered the activist game, others seem out of their depth. Hip-hop singer and Live Earth performer Akon admitted to reporters that he didn’t know what it meant to be “green” until the day of the concert. Sean Penn’s recent fact-finding trip to visit Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez served little purpose beyond a story in The New York Times that gently mocked both men. Then there’s Peter Gabriel’s idea for “The Elders”, a group which includes Nobel Laureates Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu that tries to “use their unique collective skills to catalyze peaceful resolutions to long-standing conflicts”—something that seems more at home in a Matrix sequel than in the here and now. For every Bono or Angelina Jolie, there are other celebrities who are less well-versed in their cause du jour. The problem for the savvy stars is that when other entertainers act foolishly, it becomes easier to summarily dismiss all celebrity activism.
Another problem is that some celebrity causes are more controversial than others—and controversy can still threaten a star’s bankability. Tom Cruise’s sofa pitch for Scientology (and against psychiatry) likely played a role in Paramount’s 2006 decision to sever its business relationship with him. When the Dixie Chicks blasted George W. Bush on stage at a 2004 London concert, radio stations pulled their chart-topping single from playlists, affecting the record’s sales.
None of these episodes ended a career, but they did sting. These cautionary tales reveal a clear constraint on celebrity activism: Most stars will be reluctant to risk their professional careers to take a controversial political stance. When Michael Jordan was asked to endorse a Democratic senatorial candidate during his playing career, he demurred with a famous reply: “Republicans buy sneakers too.” There are certainly those who present exceptions to this rule, such as Robert Redford, Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon—but they are not the rule.
A deeper problem celebrities face is that the implicit theory of politics that guides their activism does not necessarily apply to all facets of international relations. The goal of most social activism is to bring greater attention to a problem. The assumption is that once people become aware of the problem, there will be a groundswell of support for direct action. This is not how politics necessarily works, particularly in the global realm. Any solution to a problem like global warming, for example, involves significant costs. As people become more aware of the policy problem, it is far from guaranteed that a consensus will emerge about the best way to solve it. It is therefore not surprising that celebs have had their greatest successes in touting humanitarian causes and almost no effect on ending militarized conflicts.
THIS INCREASE in influence comes with a warning, however: With great power comes the great potential for blowback. A September CBS/New York Times poll revealed that 49 percent of Americans think celebrities should stay out of politics. Since 2003, the polling data suggests increasing public hostility towards celebrity activism.
Both elites and ordinary citizens have their reasons to resent star power. Celebrity activism rubs many policymakers and pundits the wrong way. To some, star power upsets their sense of fair play. Christopher Caldwell complained recently, “Philanthropy is a route through which celebrity can be laundered into political power.” He makes an interesting point. Why should the leads of Mr. & Mrs. Smith be listened to on weightier affairs of state? Who appointed Bono the global secretary of development? Does Pamela Anderson merit attention for her causes ahead of learned policy experts? To other aspirants of the foreign-policy community, the offense is more personal. Power is a zero-sum commodity, and if celebrities are rising in influence, that means others are falling. This will not sit well with those who feel pushed aside, especially if they have toiled for years in graduate school and low-paying policy jobs.
Among “ordinary” citizens, celebrities are all too aware that the ingredients for a fall from grace are interwoven with the sources of star power. At its core, star activism hints that the famous are somehow better than you or me. Some Americans view celebrities who pontificate on politics and policy as taking advantage of a bully pulpit that they did not earn. There’s a fine line between principled activism and righteous indignation, and the celebrity who crosses that line risks incurring the wrath of the common man or woman. Americans are addicted to celebrities because we like to see them on top—but we also enjoy their fall.
Daniel W. Drezner is an associate professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and the author of All Politics Is Global (Princeton University Press, 2007).
1 For a very amusing skit that satirizes this point, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ia__1d_rM.
2 See Richard Price, “Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines”, International Organization Vol. 52, No. 3 (Summer 1998).
3 See Joshua Busby, “Bono Made Jesse Helms Cry: Jubilee 2000, Debt Relief, and Moral Action in International Politics”, International Studies Quarterly, No. 51 (June 2007).
Increasingly, celebrities are taking an active interest in world politics. When media maven Tina Brown attends a Council on Foreign Relations session, you know something fundamental has changed in the relationship between the world of celebrity and world politics. What’s even stranger is that these efforts to glamorize foreign policy are actually affecting what governments do and say. The power of soft news has given star entertainers additional leverage to advance their causes. Their ability to raise issues to the top of the global agenda is growing. This does not mean that celebrities can solve the problems that bedevil the world. And not all celebrity activists are equal in their effectiveness. Nevertheless, politically-engaged stars cannot be dismissed as merely an amusing curiosity in foreign policy.
Consider the most notable example of a celebrity attempting to move the global agenda: Angelina Jolie. Her image has come a long way since her marriage to Billy Bob Thornton. In February of this year she published an op-ed in The Washington Post about the crisis in Darfur, referencing her work as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. During the summer, her press junket to promote A Mighty Heart included interviews with Foreign Policy’s website and a glowing profile in Newsweek, modestly titled “Angelina Jolie Wants to Save the World.” In that story, former Secretary of State Colin Powell describes Jolie as “absolutely serious, absolutely informed. . . .She studies the issues.” Esquire’s July 2007 cover featured a sultry picture of Jolie—but the attached story suggested something even more provocative: “In post-9/11 America, Angelina Jolie is the best woman in the world because she is the most famous woman in the world—because she is not like you or me.”
What in the name of Walter Scott’s Personality Parade is going on? Why has international relations gone glam? Have stars like Jolie, Madonna, Bono, Sean Penn, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney and Sheryl Crow carved out a new way to become foreign-policy heavyweights? Policy cognoscenti might laugh off this question as absurd, but the career arc of Al Gore should give them pause. As a conventional politician, Gore made little headway in addressing the problem of global warming beyond negotiating a treaty that the United States never ratified. As a post–White House celebrity, Gore starred in An Inconvenient Truth, won an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize, promoted this past summer’s Live Earth concert and reframed the American debate about global warming. Gore has been far more successful as a celebrity activist than he ever was as vice president. This is the kind of parable that could lead aspiring policy wonks to wonder if the best way to command policy influence is to attend Julliard instead of the Fletcher School.
Joking aside, celebrity involvement in politics and policy is hardly new: Shirley Temple and Jane Fonda became known as much for their politics as their films. The template for Live Earth was the 1985 Live Aid concert, which in turn echoed the 1974 all-star concert for Bangladesh. Actors ranging from Ronald Reagan to Fred Thompson have taken the more traditional star route to power: running for political office.
Not everything old is new again, however. There is something different about the recent batch of celebrity activists. Current entertainers have greater incentives to adopt global causes than their precursors. Furthermore, they are more likely to be successful in pushing their policy agenda to the front of the queue. These facts have less to do with the celebrities themselves than with how citizens in the developed world consume information. Whether the rise of the celebrity activist will lead to policy improvements, however, is a more debatable proposition. Promoting a policy agenda is one thing; implementing it is another thing entirely. Regardless of what Vanity Fair or Vogue might want you to believe, celebrities really are just like everyone else. Some are competent in their activism, and some are…something else.
The Supply of Celebrity Activism
ONE REASON for the newfound global agendas of celebrities is simply that today’s stars have more autonomy than previous generations, and many of them recognize the benefits of being a popular saint. Stars may have always cared about politics, but they have not always been able to act on these impulses. Entertainers likely feared speaking out in the past, but the entertainment industry is not as authoritarian as it once was. The studio systems of yesteryear exerted much greater control over their movie stars. Mostly, the studios used this leverage to hush up scandals before the press found out about them. In the decades since, celebrities have acquired more leverage in Hollywood. In some cases—see Winfrey, Oprah—they have become moguls themselves. This gives them the autonomy to adopt pet causes, policy initiatives and make their own publicity missteps. It also affords them the opportunity to manage their own “brand”, as it were. Just as Nike or Pepsi recognize the benefits of developing a positive brand image, so do George Clooney and Sheryl Crow.
This leads to another, somewhat more selfish reason for celebrities to embrace policy activism: It distinguishes them from their tawdrier brethren. We now live in a world where the path to fame can be as fast as a 15-second YouTube clip. Paris Hilton became one of the world’s most well-known faces on the strength of a famous name and a poorly lit home video. In such a world, marquee celebrities need to take steps to differentiate themselves from the lesser stars of stage and screen—or distance themselves from past scandals.1 So when Angelina Jolie attends the Davos Economic Forum or sponsors a Millennium Village in Cambodia, she’s not only trying to do good, she’s trying to create a brand image that lets Americans forget about her role in breaking up Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.
The final reason more celebrities are interested in making the world a better place is that it is simply easier for anyone to become a policy activist today. An effective policy entrepreneur requires a few simple commodities: expertise, money and the ability to command the media’s attention. Celebrities already have the latter two; the Internet has enabled them to catch up on information-gathering. Several celebrities even have “philanthropic advisors” to facilitate their activism. This does not mean that celebrities will become authentic experts on a country or issue. They can, however, acquire enough knowledge to pen an op-ed or sound competent on a talk show. And when they look sexy doing it, all bets are off.
The Power of Soft News
EVEN AS star activists aspire to appear on hard-news outlets, they dominate soft-news programs—a different but no less influential media format. Celebrity activism matters more now because Americans get their information about the world in different ways from a generation ago. Way back in the twentieth century, the available news outlets were well-defined: the major television networks, the weekly news magazines, The New York Times and the local newspaper. By relying on the same “general interest intermediaries”, the best and the brightest editorial gatekeepers forced most Americans to consume the same information. Clearly, the gates have been crashed. Cable television, talk radio and weblogs have radically diversified the sources of news available to ordinary Americans. The market for news and entertainment has shifted from an oligopoly to a more competitive environment.
This shift in the information ecosystem profoundly affects how public opinion on foreign policy is formed. Matthew Baum has argued in Soft News Goes to War that a large share of Americans get their information about world politics from “soft-news” outlets like Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, SportsCenter, The View, People, US Weekly, Vanity Fair, Vogue, The Daily Show, The Tonight Show, or Gawker, TMZ and PerezHilton. Although viewers might not watch these shows or read these magazines to learn about the world, any reporting of current events aired on these programs reaches an audience unattainable to The New York Times or Nightline.
In the current media environment, a symbiotic relationship between celebrities and cause célèbres has developed. Celebrities have a comparative advantage over policy wonks because they have access to a wider array of media outlets, which translates into a wider audience of citizens. Superstars can go on The Today Show or The Late Show to plug their latest movie and their latest global cause. Because of their celebrity cachet, even hard-news programs will cover them—stories about celebrities can goose Nielsen ratings. With a few exceptions, like Barack Obama or John McCain, most politicians cannot make the reverse leap to soft-news outlets. Non-celebrity policy activists are virtually guaranteed to be shut out of these programs.
The growth of soft news gives celebrity activists enormous leverage. The famous and the fabulous are the bread and butter of entertainment programs. Covering celebrity do-gooders provides content that balances out, say, tabloid coverage of Nicole Richie’s personal and legal troubles. ESPN can cover both Michael Vick’s travails and Dikembe Mutombo’s efforts to improve health care in sub-Saharan Africa. MTV will cover Amy Winehouse’s on-stage meltdowns, but they will also follow Angelina Jolie in her trips to Africa. They covered Live Earth for both the music and the message.
The power of soft news is not limited to television. Vanity Fair let Bono guest-edit a special issue about Africa, knowing that cover photos of Madonna and George Clooney would attract readers and buzz. Without intending to, those perusing the pages might form opinions about sending aid to sub-Saharan Africa in the process. Similarly, celebrity blogs can garner higher amounts of traffic. We may only speculate why Internet users flock to Pamela Anderson’s website—but we know that while they are there, they can learn about Anderson’s stance against animal testing.
Indeed, celebrities actually have an advantage over other policy activists and experts because hard-news outlets have an incentive to cover them too. Celebrities mean greater attention, and hard-news outlets are not above stunts designed to attract readers or ratings. Consider this question: If The Washington Post is deciding between running an op-ed by Angelina Jolie and an op-ed by a lesser-known expert on Sudan, which author do you think they are most likely to choose?
Do Celebrity Do-Gooders Do Any Good?
THERE IS no doubt that celebrities have the ability to raise the profile of issues near and dear to their hearts. Highlighting a problem is not the same thing as solving it, however—and the celebrity track record at affecting policy outcomes could best be characterized as mixed. Star activism has been reasonably successful at forcing powerful states to pledge action to assist the least-developed countries. It has been less successful at getting states to honor these pledges and not successful at all in affecting other global policy problems.
There have been some significant achievements, though. In the 1990s, Princess Diana embraced a ban on the use of land mines. Her death became a rallying point that led to Great Britain’s ratification of the 1997 Ottawa Convention to ban the devices.2 The Jubilee 2000 campaign, which Bono championed, should also count as a success.3 According to the Center for Global Development, the movement to assist highly indebted poor countries resulted in “the most successful industrial-country movement aimed at combating world poverty for many years, perhaps in all recorded history.” Celebrity activism also helped fuel the pledge at the 2005 Gleneagles G-8 summit to double aid to developing countries. Bob Geldof, who organized Live Aid a generation ago, arranged the Live 8 concerts to coincide with the summit. Bono, George Clooney, Claudia Schiffer and Nelson Mandela all appeared on stage.
To be clear, celebrities were not the only reason that the Ottawa Convention was signed or the G-7 launched the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative. In each of these cases, celebrities were buttressing organized, grassroots campaigns to change the status quo. At a minimum, however, star activists raised the media profile, spurring politicians to act sooner than they otherwise might have.
But there have been failures, too. While Bono provided an invaluable assist in promoting debt relief, he has not been as successful in his (Product) Red campaign. The idea was for consumers to do good through consumption—by buying iconic products colored red, a portion of the price would go to the UN Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The campaign was launched in January 2006 to great fanfare at Davos. According to Advertising Age, however, it has been a bust: After an estimated $100 million in marketing expenditures, the campaign netted only $18 million. (Product) Red has challenged the validity of these numbers, but the story invited media critiques of the campaign’s strategy, denting its momentum and cachet.
Celebrity campaigns are also not always considered a greater good. Development expert William Easterly has argued that the celebrity focus on Africa’s problems has been misguided. By focusing exclusively on the diseases of sub-Saharan Africa, celebrities have unwittingly tarnished an entire continent: “[Africans are] not helpless wards waiting for actors and rock stars to rescue them.” Many African officials and activists share this sentiment, even heckling Bono at a development conference.
Though celebrities have a mixed record in promoting development aid to Africa, the record on other issues is even worse. The Live Earth concerts generated mixed reviews because of their disorganization. Promoters had to cancel the Istanbul venue because of a lack of local sponsorship, and the other concerts were less than sellouts. More significantly, some celebrity activists questioned whether the extravaganza even had a clear purpose. Bob Geldof told an interviewer, “Live Earth doesn’t have a final goal. . . .So it’s just an enormous pop concert or the umpteenth time that, say, Madonna or Coldplay get up on stage.” Roger Daltrey of The Who concurred: “The last thing the planet needs is a rock concert.”
Steven Spielberg came up for criticism in a Wall Street Journal article co-authored by actress Mia Farrow. The article warned that Spielberg, as an “artistic advisor” to the 2008 Summer Olympics in China, would become “the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games” if he did not speak out. The chastised producer later sent a letter to Chinese Premier Hu Jintao because he felt compelled to “add my voice to those who ask that China change its policy towards Sudan.” Regardless of the reasons, Beijing has begun to pressure Sudan’s government into cooperating with the United Nations on Darfur.
Richard Gere has devoted decades to the cause of Tibetan independence to little avail. Yet with one onstage kiss of Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty, he did manage to get himself burned in effigy across India—the reverse celebrity problem. On the whole, celebrities have made little headway in bringing peace to the world’s trouble spots.
Even if celebrities are judicious and focused in promoting their causes, there are diminishing marginal returns to activism. A celebrity who repeatedly harps on a particular cause risks generating compassion fatigue with the general public. As Bono recently told CNN, “Look, I’m Bono and I’m sick of Bono. And I fully understand. . . .I look forward to a time when I’m not such a pest and a self-righteous rock-star. Who needs one?” Clearly, there is a fine line to walk between sustained focus and righteous indignation.
Hindered Hollywood
IT IS TRUE that star activism can influence the global policy agenda. But as we’ve seen, when it comes to concrete achievements, celebrities have a spotty track record. They face a number of constraints on their ability to affect policy. Most obviously, celebrities might not be the most grounded community of individuals. While some celebrities have mastered the activist game, others seem out of their depth. Hip-hop singer and Live Earth performer Akon admitted to reporters that he didn’t know what it meant to be “green” until the day of the concert. Sean Penn’s recent fact-finding trip to visit Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez served little purpose beyond a story in The New York Times that gently mocked both men. Then there’s Peter Gabriel’s idea for “The Elders”, a group which includes Nobel Laureates Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu that tries to “use their unique collective skills to catalyze peaceful resolutions to long-standing conflicts”—something that seems more at home in a Matrix sequel than in the here and now. For every Bono or Angelina Jolie, there are other celebrities who are less well-versed in their cause du jour. The problem for the savvy stars is that when other entertainers act foolishly, it becomes easier to summarily dismiss all celebrity activism.
Another problem is that some celebrity causes are more controversial than others—and controversy can still threaten a star’s bankability. Tom Cruise’s sofa pitch for Scientology (and against psychiatry) likely played a role in Paramount’s 2006 decision to sever its business relationship with him. When the Dixie Chicks blasted George W. Bush on stage at a 2004 London concert, radio stations pulled their chart-topping single from playlists, affecting the record’s sales.
None of these episodes ended a career, but they did sting. These cautionary tales reveal a clear constraint on celebrity activism: Most stars will be reluctant to risk their professional careers to take a controversial political stance. When Michael Jordan was asked to endorse a Democratic senatorial candidate during his playing career, he demurred with a famous reply: “Republicans buy sneakers too.” There are certainly those who present exceptions to this rule, such as Robert Redford, Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon—but they are not the rule.
A deeper problem celebrities face is that the implicit theory of politics that guides their activism does not necessarily apply to all facets of international relations. The goal of most social activism is to bring greater attention to a problem. The assumption is that once people become aware of the problem, there will be a groundswell of support for direct action. This is not how politics necessarily works, particularly in the global realm. Any solution to a problem like global warming, for example, involves significant costs. As people become more aware of the policy problem, it is far from guaranteed that a consensus will emerge about the best way to solve it. It is therefore not surprising that celebs have had their greatest successes in touting humanitarian causes and almost no effect on ending militarized conflicts.
THIS INCREASE in influence comes with a warning, however: With great power comes the great potential for blowback. A September CBS/New York Times poll revealed that 49 percent of Americans think celebrities should stay out of politics. Since 2003, the polling data suggests increasing public hostility towards celebrity activism.
Both elites and ordinary citizens have their reasons to resent star power. Celebrity activism rubs many policymakers and pundits the wrong way. To some, star power upsets their sense of fair play. Christopher Caldwell complained recently, “Philanthropy is a route through which celebrity can be laundered into political power.” He makes an interesting point. Why should the leads of Mr. & Mrs. Smith be listened to on weightier affairs of state? Who appointed Bono the global secretary of development? Does Pamela Anderson merit attention for her causes ahead of learned policy experts? To other aspirants of the foreign-policy community, the offense is more personal. Power is a zero-sum commodity, and if celebrities are rising in influence, that means others are falling. This will not sit well with those who feel pushed aside, especially if they have toiled for years in graduate school and low-paying policy jobs.
Among “ordinary” citizens, celebrities are all too aware that the ingredients for a fall from grace are interwoven with the sources of star power. At its core, star activism hints that the famous are somehow better than you or me. Some Americans view celebrities who pontificate on politics and policy as taking advantage of a bully pulpit that they did not earn. There’s a fine line between principled activism and righteous indignation, and the celebrity who crosses that line risks incurring the wrath of the common man or woman. Americans are addicted to celebrities because we like to see them on top—but we also enjoy their fall.
Daniel W. Drezner is an associate professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and the author of All Politics Is Global (Princeton University Press, 2007).
1 For a very amusing skit that satirizes this point, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ia__1d_rM.
2 See Richard Price, “Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines”, International Organization Vol. 52, No. 3 (Summer 1998).
3 See Joshua Busby, “Bono Made Jesse Helms Cry: Jubilee 2000, Debt Relief, and Moral Action in International Politics”, International Studies Quarterly, No. 51 (June 2007).
Green Revolutionary
January/February 2008
Four decades ago, Norman E. Borlaug developed a wheat variety that fed the world. Now he's battling a pathogen whose spread could cause starvation.
By John Pollock
In 1798, the English economist Thomas Malthus argued that population increases geometrically, outstripping the arithmetic growth of the food supply. He promised "famine ... the last, the most dreadful resource of nature." It took another 125 years for world population to double, but only 50 more for it to redouble. By the 1940s, Mexico, China, India, Russia, and Europe were hungry. Franklin D. Roosevelt's farsighted vice president-elect, former secretary of agriculture Henry A. Wallace, believed the solution lay with technology. He was right: the Malthusian tragedy never happened, chiefly because Norman E. Borlaug transformed the breeding of wheat, which feeds more people than any other crop.
From 1939 to 1942, Mexico's harvest was halved by stem rust, a fungus whose airborne spores infect stems and leaves, shriveling grains. Anxieties about wartime food shortages led the American philanthropic organization the Rockefeller Foundation to create the country's first foreign agricultural program: the Coöperative Wheat Research and Production Program, which was based in Mexico and which Borlaug joined, as its plant pathologist, in 1944. The program was prescient: rust hit the North American breadbasket in 1954, wiping out 75 percent of the durum wheat crop used for pasta.
"There was panic in the U.S. and Canadian departments of agriculture," Borlaug tells me. "We had to accelerate the program to develop rust-resistant wheat varieties." Borlaug struggled with a lack of machinery, equipment, and trained scientists. Yet by 1948, he tells Leon Hesser in The Man Who Fed the World, a recent biography, "research results, the bits and pieces of the wheat production puzzle, began to emerge, and the fog of gloom and despair began to lift."
Before Borlaug, plant breeders sought new traits in plants by creating perhaps a few dozen "crosses" of varieties each year. For Borlaug, this would have meant "at least 10 years developing resistant varieties," he recalls, "and there would be another epidemic in that time. I wanted to speed things up." Collecting wheat varieties from around the world, he began a massive cross-breeding program. Such work is "mind-warpingly tedious," he tells Hesser. "There's only one chance in thousands of ever finding what you want, and actually no guarantee of success at all."
To improve those odds, Borlaug tried something unusual: doing two successive plantings of his experimental crosses each year, effectively doubling his rate of research. He was almost stymied by what he calls "the dogma of plant breeding everywhere at the time: plant in the same season and place as local farmers." But soon he was planting in summer in low-quality, rain-fed soils at high altitude near Mexico City, and then taking any promising varieties hundreds of miles north to sow a winter crop in the warmer, drier, lower-lying Yaqui Valley. This "shuttle breeding" helped Borlaug achieve rust resistance in under five years. It also produced exceptionally adaptable varieties, suited for use across climates.
Having achieved rust resistance and plant adaptability, Borlaug now addressed the problem of structure. When Mexican wheat was heavily fertilized, it grew too tall, collapsing when irrigated or rained on--thus limiting yields. After 20,000 fruitless crosses, Borlaug heard about a Japanese dwarf variety that might confer its strength and stockiness. He started thousands more crosses, until "by 1964, we got the really beautiful short wheat varieties." The yields were spectacular, and the variety was quickly adopted around world. In 1968, his approach, which stimulated advances in other staple foods, was dubbed the "Green Revolution" by William Gaud, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Two years later, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Paradoxically, 1968 also saw the genesis of an environmentalist dogma that was pessimistic about humanity's capacity to feed itself. In that year--when the global population growth rate peaked, at 2 percent per year--Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, intoning, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. ... Hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs." The madding crowd of "stinking hot" Delhi was odious to Ehrlich: "My wife and daughter and I ... entered a crowded slum area. ... People, people, people, people. ... [We] were, frankly, frightened." It was a "fantasy," he said, that India would ever feed itself. Yet Borlaug's program delivered such stunning results that India issued a 1968 stamp commemorating the "wheat revolution," and by 1974 it was self-sufficient in all cereals.
Nonetheless, a neo-Malthusian fear of overpopulation became endemic to environmentalist thinking. Science philosopher and Arts and Letters Daily founder Denis Dutton says, "Well-fed Greens flaunt their concern for the planet but are indifferent, even hostile, to the world's poor with whom they share it. Some Greens I knew acted for all the world as though they relished the idea of a coming worldwide famine, much as fundamentalists ghoulishly looked forward to Armageddon." Dutton, who served in the Peace Corps, personally saw the Green Revolution benefit India. "For the catastrophist, India becoming a food exporter was disturbing," he says. "This wasn't supposed to happen. They blame Borlaug for spoiling the fun."
Not all Borlaug's critics were catastrophists: some opposed the intensity of his agriculture, especially its use of inorganic fertilizer. Borlaug acknowledges the need for care, but he says the "natural" alternative, cow manure, "would require us to increase the world's cattle population from around 1.5 billion to some 10 billion." As he dryly observed in a 2003 TV interview, "Producing food for 6.2 billion people ... is not simple." He added, "[Organic approaches] can only feed four billion--I don't see two billion volunteers to disappear."
Raised on a farm, Borlaug thinks many of his detractors would benefit from a week or two in the fields. He cites Ghanaian farmers who use no-till agriculture (that is, plant waste is left to improve the humus and reduce erosion) and control weeds with herbicides. Their lives are improved by the reduction in weeding. "Less backache, you see," he once said. "You know, it's amazing how often campaigners in rich countries think poor people don't get backache."
A New ScourgeMany thought the work that earned Borlaug his Nobel brought an end to stem rust, but it is back, in the form of a variant called Ug99, which emerged in Uganda and spread to Kenya and Ethiopia. "If it continues unchecked," says Borlaug, "the consequences will be ruinous."
Africa, in fact, presents an especially worrying challenge, for the simple reason that it did not benefit much from the Green Revolution. Borlaug's Nobel largely honored gains in Asia: there, calorie availability per person rose, wheat and rice prices fell, and increased incomes stimulated industrial output. Similar benefits were enjoyed almost everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 200 million people--a third of the population--still go hungry. In the last four decades, Africa's average per capita food production has actually decreased.
Ug99 will be fought, at least initially, with the plant-breeding techniques Borlaug so artfully employed. However, he believes Africa's best hopes rest with biotechnology, even though regulatory problems prevent its immediate use against Ug99. Also needed, he believes, are publicity, political will, funding, and renewed coöperation among international agricultural researchers. The work he is inspiring is nothing less than a new African Green Revolution.
The reasons for failure in Africa are complex. "Irrigation is first," explains Michael Lipton of the University of Sussex's Poverty Research Unit. "In sub-Saharan Africa, 4 percent of cropland is irrigated. In South and East Asia it's nearer 40 percent."
Then there's soil. "Africa's soils ... [are] equivalent--and were once adjacent--to the Cerrado's acid soils," Borlaug says. The Cerrado, an area that extends across central Brazil, historically had some of the least productive soil in the world. But improved crop varieties of the sort that Borlaug created--along with liming, fertilizer, and low- or no-till methods--have led to the single largest increase in arable-land usage in the last 50 years.
Politics, both regional and global, were and are another hindrance. "If the Green Revolution in India was proposed to the World Bank today, it would be turned down," says Rob Paarlberg, an agricultural-policy expert at Wellesley College. By the 1980s, he says, "public investment in roads, research, irrigation, fertilizers, and seeds was politically unacceptable to the Washington consensus on the right--and on the left, among environmentalists opposed to chemical fertilizers, road building, and irrigation projects." Thus, real per capita levels of official development assistance for the agricultural sector in the poorest countries fell by nearly 50 percent between 1982 and 1995.
Finally, Borlaug says, "Africa needs roads. Roads bring know-how and fertilizer to farmers and ideas and business for commerce." Africa, Borlaug argues, also needs concerted international help. Meanwhile, Ug99 has reached Yemen: from there, Borlaug warns, "it can reach Iraq, Iran, India, and Pakistan"--even the breadbaskets of Europe and America. A scramble is on to find resistant varieties, ensure that their yields will encourage farmers to adopt them, and produce sufficient tonnages of seed.
Last year, ABC, CBS, and NBC cameras were absent when Borlaug was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal. And alas, Borlaug's friend and biographer Leon Hesser has now produced a prosaic work that, while good on his hero's early years, fades as Borlaug appears on the international stage. Borlaug deserves better, but when journalist Gregg Easterbrook sought a publisher for a popular biography, "they said he was boring," the self-described "environmental optimist" says. "If he'd killed someone instead of saving hundreds of millions of lives, then they'd have been interested."
Copyright Technology Review 2007.
Four decades ago, Norman E. Borlaug developed a wheat variety that fed the world. Now he's battling a pathogen whose spread could cause starvation.
By John Pollock
In 1798, the English economist Thomas Malthus argued that population increases geometrically, outstripping the arithmetic growth of the food supply. He promised "famine ... the last, the most dreadful resource of nature." It took another 125 years for world population to double, but only 50 more for it to redouble. By the 1940s, Mexico, China, India, Russia, and Europe were hungry. Franklin D. Roosevelt's farsighted vice president-elect, former secretary of agriculture Henry A. Wallace, believed the solution lay with technology. He was right: the Malthusian tragedy never happened, chiefly because Norman E. Borlaug transformed the breeding of wheat, which feeds more people than any other crop.
From 1939 to 1942, Mexico's harvest was halved by stem rust, a fungus whose airborne spores infect stems and leaves, shriveling grains. Anxieties about wartime food shortages led the American philanthropic organization the Rockefeller Foundation to create the country's first foreign agricultural program: the Coöperative Wheat Research and Production Program, which was based in Mexico and which Borlaug joined, as its plant pathologist, in 1944. The program was prescient: rust hit the North American breadbasket in 1954, wiping out 75 percent of the durum wheat crop used for pasta.
"There was panic in the U.S. and Canadian departments of agriculture," Borlaug tells me. "We had to accelerate the program to develop rust-resistant wheat varieties." Borlaug struggled with a lack of machinery, equipment, and trained scientists. Yet by 1948, he tells Leon Hesser in The Man Who Fed the World, a recent biography, "research results, the bits and pieces of the wheat production puzzle, began to emerge, and the fog of gloom and despair began to lift."
Before Borlaug, plant breeders sought new traits in plants by creating perhaps a few dozen "crosses" of varieties each year. For Borlaug, this would have meant "at least 10 years developing resistant varieties," he recalls, "and there would be another epidemic in that time. I wanted to speed things up." Collecting wheat varieties from around the world, he began a massive cross-breeding program. Such work is "mind-warpingly tedious," he tells Hesser. "There's only one chance in thousands of ever finding what you want, and actually no guarantee of success at all."
To improve those odds, Borlaug tried something unusual: doing two successive plantings of his experimental crosses each year, effectively doubling his rate of research. He was almost stymied by what he calls "the dogma of plant breeding everywhere at the time: plant in the same season and place as local farmers." But soon he was planting in summer in low-quality, rain-fed soils at high altitude near Mexico City, and then taking any promising varieties hundreds of miles north to sow a winter crop in the warmer, drier, lower-lying Yaqui Valley. This "shuttle breeding" helped Borlaug achieve rust resistance in under five years. It also produced exceptionally adaptable varieties, suited for use across climates.
Having achieved rust resistance and plant adaptability, Borlaug now addressed the problem of structure. When Mexican wheat was heavily fertilized, it grew too tall, collapsing when irrigated or rained on--thus limiting yields. After 20,000 fruitless crosses, Borlaug heard about a Japanese dwarf variety that might confer its strength and stockiness. He started thousands more crosses, until "by 1964, we got the really beautiful short wheat varieties." The yields were spectacular, and the variety was quickly adopted around world. In 1968, his approach, which stimulated advances in other staple foods, was dubbed the "Green Revolution" by William Gaud, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Two years later, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Paradoxically, 1968 also saw the genesis of an environmentalist dogma that was pessimistic about humanity's capacity to feed itself. In that year--when the global population growth rate peaked, at 2 percent per year--Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, intoning, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. ... Hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs." The madding crowd of "stinking hot" Delhi was odious to Ehrlich: "My wife and daughter and I ... entered a crowded slum area. ... People, people, people, people. ... [We] were, frankly, frightened." It was a "fantasy," he said, that India would ever feed itself. Yet Borlaug's program delivered such stunning results that India issued a 1968 stamp commemorating the "wheat revolution," and by 1974 it was self-sufficient in all cereals.
Nonetheless, a neo-Malthusian fear of overpopulation became endemic to environmentalist thinking. Science philosopher and Arts and Letters Daily founder Denis Dutton says, "Well-fed Greens flaunt their concern for the planet but are indifferent, even hostile, to the world's poor with whom they share it. Some Greens I knew acted for all the world as though they relished the idea of a coming worldwide famine, much as fundamentalists ghoulishly looked forward to Armageddon." Dutton, who served in the Peace Corps, personally saw the Green Revolution benefit India. "For the catastrophist, India becoming a food exporter was disturbing," he says. "This wasn't supposed to happen. They blame Borlaug for spoiling the fun."
Not all Borlaug's critics were catastrophists: some opposed the intensity of his agriculture, especially its use of inorganic fertilizer. Borlaug acknowledges the need for care, but he says the "natural" alternative, cow manure, "would require us to increase the world's cattle population from around 1.5 billion to some 10 billion." As he dryly observed in a 2003 TV interview, "Producing food for 6.2 billion people ... is not simple." He added, "[Organic approaches] can only feed four billion--I don't see two billion volunteers to disappear."
Raised on a farm, Borlaug thinks many of his detractors would benefit from a week or two in the fields. He cites Ghanaian farmers who use no-till agriculture (that is, plant waste is left to improve the humus and reduce erosion) and control weeds with herbicides. Their lives are improved by the reduction in weeding. "Less backache, you see," he once said. "You know, it's amazing how often campaigners in rich countries think poor people don't get backache."
A New ScourgeMany thought the work that earned Borlaug his Nobel brought an end to stem rust, but it is back, in the form of a variant called Ug99, which emerged in Uganda and spread to Kenya and Ethiopia. "If it continues unchecked," says Borlaug, "the consequences will be ruinous."
Africa, in fact, presents an especially worrying challenge, for the simple reason that it did not benefit much from the Green Revolution. Borlaug's Nobel largely honored gains in Asia: there, calorie availability per person rose, wheat and rice prices fell, and increased incomes stimulated industrial output. Similar benefits were enjoyed almost everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 200 million people--a third of the population--still go hungry. In the last four decades, Africa's average per capita food production has actually decreased.
Ug99 will be fought, at least initially, with the plant-breeding techniques Borlaug so artfully employed. However, he believes Africa's best hopes rest with biotechnology, even though regulatory problems prevent its immediate use against Ug99. Also needed, he believes, are publicity, political will, funding, and renewed coöperation among international agricultural researchers. The work he is inspiring is nothing less than a new African Green Revolution.
The reasons for failure in Africa are complex. "Irrigation is first," explains Michael Lipton of the University of Sussex's Poverty Research Unit. "In sub-Saharan Africa, 4 percent of cropland is irrigated. In South and East Asia it's nearer 40 percent."
Then there's soil. "Africa's soils ... [are] equivalent--and were once adjacent--to the Cerrado's acid soils," Borlaug says. The Cerrado, an area that extends across central Brazil, historically had some of the least productive soil in the world. But improved crop varieties of the sort that Borlaug created--along with liming, fertilizer, and low- or no-till methods--have led to the single largest increase in arable-land usage in the last 50 years.
Politics, both regional and global, were and are another hindrance. "If the Green Revolution in India was proposed to the World Bank today, it would be turned down," says Rob Paarlberg, an agricultural-policy expert at Wellesley College. By the 1980s, he says, "public investment in roads, research, irrigation, fertilizers, and seeds was politically unacceptable to the Washington consensus on the right--and on the left, among environmentalists opposed to chemical fertilizers, road building, and irrigation projects." Thus, real per capita levels of official development assistance for the agricultural sector in the poorest countries fell by nearly 50 percent between 1982 and 1995.
Finally, Borlaug says, "Africa needs roads. Roads bring know-how and fertilizer to farmers and ideas and business for commerce." Africa, Borlaug argues, also needs concerted international help. Meanwhile, Ug99 has reached Yemen: from there, Borlaug warns, "it can reach Iraq, Iran, India, and Pakistan"--even the breadbaskets of Europe and America. A scramble is on to find resistant varieties, ensure that their yields will encourage farmers to adopt them, and produce sufficient tonnages of seed.
Last year, ABC, CBS, and NBC cameras were absent when Borlaug was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal. And alas, Borlaug's friend and biographer Leon Hesser has now produced a prosaic work that, while good on his hero's early years, fades as Borlaug appears on the international stage. Borlaug deserves better, but when journalist Gregg Easterbrook sought a publisher for a popular biography, "they said he was boring," the self-described "environmental optimist" says. "If he'd killed someone instead of saving hundreds of millions of lives, then they'd have been interested."
Copyright Technology Review 2007.
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