This mission did not come to me quickly or easily. To understand how I ended up making a warlord a sandwich, however, we have to leave the jungle and travel back in time to a much quieter spot in America’s breadbasket.
PART 1
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The Roots of “40 Chances”
Story 1
The Day I Heard the Clock Tick
I farm 1,500 acres in central Illinois, and I buy a lot of farm equipment from Sloan Implement Company in Assumption, a town of about 1,200 people that is south of Decatur, where I live. Outside Sloan’s, John Deere tractors, combines, planters, wagons, and trailers line up like a big green machine army, begging to be walked around, climbed on, and imagined at work in your fields to make some chore go faster or better. Inside, there is every kind of part, oil, and tool, and then a cavernous building in the back where they repair equipment. During spring planting and harvests in summer and fall, the place jumps with activity. But it takes on a little different character in the winter. As snowdrifts pile up on fallow fields, a lot of farmers come trooping in to ask questions, complain about the price of corn or soybeans, and talk about new ideas and equipment. Good farmers love to learn and swap experiences. Some time ago, Sloan’s started hosting an event called “Planter’s School.”
My first Planter’s School was in the winter of 2001. In addition to farming, I was still a partner at nearby GSI, a global manufacturer of grain bins, and I also served on the board of Lindsay Corporation, which makes center pivots: the irrigation machines responsible for those big, circular planted areas that air travelers can see when flying over the Midwest. Deere & Company had some interesting new equipment, and Sloan’s advertised that it was bringing in some outside speakers. One Saturday I made my way to the back shed, where they’d set up twenty or thirty folding chairs. The first speaker started his talk by saying something that changed my outlook on life. I didn’t write it down at the time, but as I remember, it went like this:
Most of you think of farming as this continual process of buying seed, planting, fertilizing, harvesting, then starting all over again. But think about the period between the first time your dad had you climb up with him on the tractor to plant and the day you will turn your acreage over to your son or daughter. If you’re pretty healthy, and you’re like most farmers, you’re probably only going to do this about forty times. You’ll get forty chances to plant your crop, adjust to what nature throws at you, and hope for the best. It’s enough time to learn to do it well. But it’s not forever.
Some of you are well into your forty chances already. You’ve learned from your mistakes, but I’d guess that none of you feel you can afford to take a single year left on your string for granted. What we’re trying to do here is make sure we’re giving you the best possible tools and the best possible advice on how to use them. That way you can make the most of those forty chances.
This idea hit me. I had never thought of farming like that before. In some ways, farming is predictable: cycles of planting and harvesting, rewarding but consuming work day after day, year after year. As a farmer, you’re always in catch-up mode, trying to get the next task done but looking around the farm and seeing another twenty projects you wish you had time to do. It sometimes feels as if the work will never end. He was reminding us that it does. When I thought about it, forty didn’t seem like all that many chances, and I had used up a bunch already. I thought, “There is no time to waste!”
I spend about half the year working as a farmer; here, I’m loading a bag of seed corn into a planter at our Illinois farm. Photo: Howard W. Buffett
I started thinking a little differently about farming, but I also realized that this idea applied to a lot more than farming. It’s easy to slip into a rhythm in life and just plod forward. Whether you love or hate what you’re doing, whether you’re good at it or struggling, life is not a treadmill—it’s a moving walkway. There are no do-overs. We get a limited number of chances to do what we do, whatever we do, right.
I started asking myself, “Am I making the most of my chances? Am I trying to improve and perfect my methods every single year? Am I listening to people with new ideas? Am I learning the right lessons from my mistakes?”
Beyond farming, I was trying to align some other important developments in my life. I had been blessed and honored by my parents, Warren and Susan Buffett, with the gift of significant funds that established the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. Through the foundation, I had been able to support causes that were important to me and to my wife and children, primarily in the area of wildlife conservation. I had traveled extensively in Africa, Asia, and Latin America on business, and also to pursue my other passion, wildlife photography—particularly of endangered animals such as mountain gorillas and cheetahs.
But during these travels, the more I viewed threatened habitats, the more I could see the truth of what Dennis Avery, an expert in global food issues, had once put to me succinctly: “No one will starve to save a tree.” As I saw the larger context of these situations, I realized why so many animals were endangered and why rain forests were disappearing. From a distance, it was easy to blame greedy poachers and corrupt government officers for the decimation of important ecosystems. But I also saw that the people who shared these ecosystems with the endangered species were endangered themselves. Many were starving. If I thought I had no other way to feed my hungry child than poaching an endangered animal, what would I do? If the land on which I was trying to grow the food that was all my children had to eat stopped producing because it was worn out, would I worry about preserving the adjacent rain forest, or would I slash and burn it down to use the soil beneath it? The answers seemed obvious.
If I cared about endangered species, if I cared about habitat preservation and biodiversity, I realized I had to shift my efforts to a more fundamental issue. I had to work on the hunger side of the equation. Pretty soon the size of those numbers began to haunt me.
The United Nations estimates that roughly 870 million people suffer persistent, chronic hunger today.1 Everywhere in the world, malnutrition and hunger create lifelong physical and developmental burdens for children; they interfere with learning, and they are linked to other threats such as terrorism and human trafficking. Hunger is a factor in every war. Occupying military or rebels take the locals’ food, and starving people fight for the side that feeds them; isolating villages and withholding food is a slow but effective way to render enemies impotent, or even kill them. Food is power.
One-sixth of the people in my own country, or almost 50 million Americans—16 million of them children—qualify as food insecure.2 And for all these current challenges, realize that there are just over 7 billion of us on Earth today, and the world’s population is projected to top 9 billion people by 2050. That’s less than forty years away. During most of our lifetimes, the challenges of hunger are going to intensify.
Within just a few years of having my eyes opened by that speaker at Sloan’s, and in the middle of this transition in my thinking about conservation, fate delivered another jolt. In 2004 the death of my mother, Susan, triggered some new directions in my father’s views about philanthropy. My mother was an inspiration not only to my family but also to everyone who knew her. She had a warm and generous heart and a deep commitment to making the world better. My father had planned to turn over the bulk of his assets to my mother to distribute through her foundation. Instead, her death resulted in my brother, sister, and me each receiving a significant commitment from him to fund our foundations on a much larger scale. I now had before me an exciting challenge that most people can only imagine being posed hypothetically at a cocktail party, or maybe as the plot of a movie: If you had a billion dollars to do something important, what would you choose?
I knew what I wanted to work on: feeding hungry people. I was already heading down the path that many other philanthropists had taken. I gave grants to the people already working in areas plagued by hunger and poverty. I supported nongovernmental organiz
ations (NGOs) with a list of interesting projects that needed funding, from drilling wells to trying to improve the livelihoods of former child soldiers by teaching them how to farm. I traveled to countries experiencing severe food insecurity, determined to understand their agricultural capabilities. I asked a lot of questions. Often it seemed that no one had tried certain techniques specifically designed for Africa or experiments at scale. So, our foundation bought a large farm in South Africa in order to conduct our own research. We’ve subsequently invested in many more acres of research fields in both Illinois and Arizona. I do not have what businesspeople sometimes call “paralysis by analysis.” I jump in and try things.
Over the last decade, our foundation has made more than $200 million in grants to agriculture-based projects that we hoped would help farmers on the ground in the developing world. I’ve visited over 120 countries, and I’d estimate that I’ve spoken with thousands of farmers, in addition to just about everybody else working in this arena—from presidents to rock stars to priests to professors.
A NEW INTENSITY
I’m out of antiblunt pills, so I’ll give it to you straight: we have to hit the reset button. Chronic hunger has declined in Asia and Latin America over the last twenty years, but it is rising in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population is exploding.3 To feed the world on a daily basis by 2050, the FAO forecasts that farmers all over the globe will have to increase food production by 70 percent.4
Achieving that will demand a new intensity and more productivity from farmers at every level: from the farmers with sophisticated, highly mechanized operations who gather at Sloan’s, to the poor, rural farmers of the developing world armed with only a hoe. What’s more, we will have to reorganize and redeploy the efforts of all the other participants involved in setting the world’s table: governments, NGOs, researchers, philanthropists, and agribusinesses, to name just the main ones. We’ll need to come up with solutions to conflicts that embrace the true challenges people face in trying to grow and harvest their own food under these conditions. And we need to rethink our own farming techniques in the developed world as our traditional methods are destroying the topsoil that will be crucial to ensuring agricultural productivity in the future.
I believe we can do it. The global community has stepped in effectively to halt hunger before. In the early 1960s, the so-called Green Revolution saved an estimated billion people from starvation in India and Southeast Asia. Led by some heroic efforts by the late Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, it was based on large-scale production of a limited number of grains such as wheat and rice. Scientists, governments, farmers, and NGOs all pulled together—and pulled off something of a miracle.
However, that model is not going to work in Africa, which is currently home to pervasive and widespread food insecurity. The continent’s diverse geography, its inadequate infrastructure, and the reality that Africa is fifty-four countries and not a single, centrally governed state are not going to allow a Green Revolution recipe to work on the scale of what succeeded in India. Fortunately, there are models and new ideas out there that give me hope, and there are committed individuals who are thinking in new ways and already making a difference. The experience of Brazil, which we’ll go into in some detail, is remarkable evidence that a country with the will to change can develop both an improved form of sustainable, environmentally responsible agriculture and a system to ensure that smallholder farmers are included in addressing the nation’s larger food-security needs.
Can we convince the global community and governments of nations with huge numbers of food-insecure people to adopt the mindset of the speaker in the back room at Sloan’s?
Billions in aid delivered in recent decades have sometimes made food insecurity worse, not better. I’ve stopped funding the most common type of NGO projects, and I’ve stopped putting any money into certain countries that do not seem willing to make the structural changes and land reforms needed to lift their populations out of hunger and poverty. We can’t use Western thinking to solve African challenges. We need to harvest the right lessons from our past efforts and mistakes, and we have to deploy both new models and cutting-edge technology to make the most of the chances that remain. We can’t just fund activities and good intentions; we have to fund self-sustaining solutions.
This book is about how I came to this conclusion and what I think we need to do going forward. It is a collection of stories—forty in all—about how I got involved in trying to attack global hunger, and what my team at the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and I discovered, attempted, unleashed, fouled up, achieved, and learned on our journey so far. In some cases, it’s about good intentions but bad execution—our own as well as other people’s. It’s about ignorance and culture clashes and bankrupt ideas. It’s about people we admire, people working in the fields and among those suffering every day, people with innovative ideas, and people determined to stop repeating the mistakes of the past.
It’s also about celebrating what it means to be human. I have been to some of the poorest, most difficult places in the world, and, invariably, there will be children smiling and playing, delighting themselves with a little game they’ve invented or turning a bag stuffed with straw into a soccer ball. In the poorest village, I have seen the pride and kindness in the eyes of women who welcome me with a bit of food or a cup of tea, even though they have so little themselves.
For every sad story I will relate, there are twice as many that I hope will make you grateful to be alive and sharing a world with fine people trying to make a difference, whether in a refugee camp in Africa or a soup kitchen in Decatur. In the pages ahead, you’ll meet a twenty-year-old former child soldier named “Little Cromite” who was ripped from his family at age six and who now finds himself without skills, education, or resources to feed himself. You’ll see the passion and commitment of one of the world’s best-known recording artists, and you’ll see how former British prime minister Tony Blair is helping a new generation of African leaders learn management and governance principles. And I will introduce you to a kindred spirit of mine: a Ghanaian scientist and devoted University of Nebraska Cornhuskers football fan who teaches subsistence farmers how to improve their yields, feed their families, and protect their greatest asset—the soil beneath their feet.
My son, Howard W. Buffett (going forward, I’ll call him HWB, to avoid confusion), has come along with me on many of my explorations around the developing world, and that has been a rewarding aspect of this journey. I’ve seen him grow from a shy, typical twelve-year-old when he first started traveling with me. He was a curious boy but sometimes overwhelmed by witnessing shocking hardships and poverty that few of his peers ever saw. He became a man with a unique understanding of the challenges that millions of people face. HWB has had some of his own novel adventures in Asia, Afghanistan, and other areas. He also served a two-year term as the foundation’s executive director. Today he is a trustee of our foundation, and he developed some insights and new ideas that he will share as well. He is particularly excited about finding new ways for organizations to work together, utilizing better management techniques and technologies to improve their programs and measure their impact.
One theme that resonates throughout the stories you will read in this book is our conviction that we need to act with urgency. People are dying and suffering today. I did not start this endeavor with the idea of building an endowed legacy. I decided not to just go through the motions, pick small, solvable problems to work on, and be content with making a big difference for very few while millions of children starved. I credit my dad with a piece of advice that has carried me through some challenging times: “Concentrate your resources on needs that would not be met without your efforts. . . . Expect to make some mistakes; nothing important will be accomplished if you make only ‘safe’ decisions.”
In the spirit of forty chances, our foundation will disperse all of our funds by 2045. It will effectively go “out of business.” HWB has embraced that idea, and when he writ
es and speaks about the challenges of development today, he urges NGOs to think about reinventing their approaches, even asking, “Do you have a strategy that can put yourself out of business?” As I write, we have about thirty more chances to get this right.
Story 2
Prague, 1968: The Soviet Army Eats First—“We Just Get What Is Left”
I have never personally known hunger as more than an inconvenience, even in some pretty extreme situations. I’ve gone many hours without food bouncing on dirt roads through the African savanna and then been offered goat eyes and fried rats when I arrived at my destination. I’ve had to fake swigging high-octane alcoholic home brews so as not to offend my tribal hosts as I waited for food. But I can only imagine the pain that I once saw in the eyes of a woman in an Angolan village decimated by famine. Her three-year-old child had starved to death the week before I arrived. Spindly, eyes yellowed from likely liver failure, teeth crumbling against her swollen gums, and probably not long for the world herself, she thrust her infant at my chest. “Please, please, you must take my child,” she begged. “My body is broken.”
I cannot imagine the depth of that woman’s pain, but I have seen similar examples when I travel to areas of the world suffering extreme poverty and food insecurity. However, the first time I realized how vulnerable people feel when there is not enough to eat—and also how quickly conflict can undermine food security—it blindsided me. I was a naïve teenager from Omaha, Nebraska, and I thought I was just going on a sightseeing trip overseas to visit a friend of the family.
40 Chances Page 2