Unfortunately, there are governments and investors and well-intentioned philanthropists who have been advocating systems well suited to the high-output farmers of America’s breadbasket, to areas of the world where there are millions of farmers like Adanech. Subsistence farmers cannot benefit from these approaches. To put the conditions in place so that large-scale systems allowing for modern mechanized agriculture could take hold would demand trillions of dollars of investment in infrastructure and decades of training and capacity development. In Africa, just creating a functional system of roads and water management to fuel large-scale farming across the continent would require the support of fifty-four different governments, most of which to date have not seen fit to invest even 10 percent of their annual expenditures in agriculture, even though it is the primary support of their populations.
At our foundation, we conducted an analysis of African farmers in which we divided them into three groups. We realized the situation was well represented by a pyramid. At its peak, representing less than 5 percent of all African farmers, were the elites: commercial farmers who have enough land and production to hire laborers and who can afford high-quality seeds, herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. Some have irrigation, they can obtain credit, and they have some kind of path to market so that they can sell what they grow. They also have a unique designation in Africa: they eat three meals a day, but grow little of what they eat.
The second tier, only slightly larger, is made up of what we call “stable” farmers. They mostly eat what they grow, although in most years, they sell some to supplement their income. They may have some small storage system so they can withhold some crop to sell when prices are higher than at harvest. They usually eat at least twice a day, and some of their children may go to school.
About 90 percent of African farmers (more in some areas) are what we call “fragile.” Adanech would be in this group. The families eat two or fewer meals per day. They tend to bring in more income from off-farm work but still live on less than $2 per day. They have no equipment, no large animals. They reuse seed (which diminishes in productivity over time) and often have no access to inputs such as fertilizer or pesticides. They eat almost everything they grow, and if they do have some food to sell, they don’t have storage, so they have to sell during harvest, when prices are lowest. They rely on rainfall for their crop production. Most of their children don’t go to school and tend to be less healthy, and the primary farmer in the household is often a woman.
Millions of farmers like Adanech are starving to death right now. Their energy is low. They have never been trained to use effective and efficient farming techniques. They do not have access to a farm extension agent to teach them how to use new methods. They usually do not own their own land. The gulf between their capabilities and the resources and infrastructure needed to implement large-scale, high-tech farming renders the whole idea unworkable. Technology on the scale that increases yields on rich, irrigated fields that are serviced by smooth roads, logical rail connections, and giant grain elevators cannot solve food security for fragile farmers. Millions of people live in isolated regions with dirt paths for roads and limited commercial options beyond carrying one bag of food at a time to a trader to sell, or one bag of seed or fertilizer back to their farms.
People are farmers for various reasons. Some farmers are sixth or seventh generation, and they have been doing things a certain way in a particular place for a very long time. A few others, like me, take a circuitous path to agriculture. But the vast majority of farmers in the world farm because it is their only option. In many cases, it is a failing option. The global food ecosystem is complex; we need to develop a deeper understanding of where food comes from and what the people who grow it have to endure. I approach it like a farmer, because that’s what I am. My pant knees can vouch for that.
There is an old saying that the difference between men and boys is the size of their toys. My days in the sandbox never left me, but today I use my tractor for serious work. Photo: Doug Oller
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I. The northern farming belt includes the American Midwest, the Black Sea region of Russia and Ukraine, and the North China Plain. Farms in the southern fertility belt, including those in Chile, Argentina, and southern Australia, are also highly productive, but there is a lot more ocean than land at those latitudes. Very little of Africa is in either fertility belt.
Story 4
Devon’s Gift
The moment that I realized the situation had turned life threatening is burned in my memory as a white streak, intense and slashing, like a teacher underlining a key word on a chalkboard with a harsh swipe.
I was in Senegal. The air outside was stifling hot and still. I was sitting in the backseat of a Toyota Land Cruiser with the motor running and the air-conditioning vents all blasting at me. I had not expected any of the events of the last half hour, and I was having trouble believing that they had happened. People from this village were milling around outside the gates of a compound I had just left, their conversations growing louder and more hostile. The two people who had been with me inside were trying to back their way to our vehicle as well. The local people surrounded them, glaring at them, gesturing at me. The reason was sitting in my lap: my camera.
A half hour earlier, this had been a calm, quiet scene. It was a scene so unremarkable that I had been focused mostly on taking portrait shots of a beautiful little girl in a vibrant green and purple scarf. I was on a trip that had been organized by the international NGO World Vision. We were exploring agricultural conditions. This part of Senegal was mostly desert, so we had taken a break in this town for water and to stretch our legs. World Vision’s local staff person had made a point of going over to speak with a man standing by a brand-new Mercedes-Benz. He was a powerful figure in this town. There were children milling around him, and when this little girl in the scarf saw me holding my camera, she came over and started posing, her eyes locked on the lens. The other children would swarm around as I took photographs, and then she would slip out of the back of the pack and materialize somewhere else. She wanted to be the star and be photographed alone. Like so many people around the world, she wanted to be seen, remembered, and validated.
It was the most extreme contrast I could have imagined, a beautiful young girl in a barren street of sand. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
For purposes of this story, I will call the World Vision staffer Charles. If I were to identify him more precisely, even today his life could be endangered for the risk he took on my behalf. Charles finished speaking to the man with the Mercedes and herded us back to the Land Cruiser, and we took off. As he drove, Charles explained that the man was a marabout, or a powerful religious leader. The designation “marabout” refers to Sufi Muslim teachers who run schools that teach the Quran. My NGO contacts in the area told me that these marabouts had very extreme practices that were rejected by mainstream Muslims; communities like theirs could be found only in small, isolated areas of North Africa.
I could see that Charles was distracted and a little upset. Suddenly he could not hold back his frustration and anger anymore. He shook his head and said that inside the compound where we had been parked, there were children in chains.
There was a US colleague from the NGO with me, and we both snapped to attention. We insisted that Charles turn around. As we drove back, he explained that one aspect of this sect was that men had many wives and created large families, but often they did not have the resources to feed them. Therefore, they would send some of their children to the marabout’s compound to be indoctrinated into the religion—and fed. To support his operation, meanwhile, the marabout would send them out to beg for money. Often the children hated doing that and tried to run away. So the marabout ordered that they be shackled or chained to each other or to trees so that they could not escape.1
Charles pulled up and parked near the wall around the compound. The Mercedes was gone, so he got out and walked up to a man standing by a gate. Charles came
back, looking nervous: the man was the marabout’s son. We could go in for a few minutes, but I could take only one camera and no extra film. (I was not yet using digital cameras.) We drove through the first set of gates and then got out and walked through the second. We were shocked to see at least fifty young boys in shackles, some chained to trees, some to each other. I’m not sure how Charles pulled this off, but the marabout’s son said that I could take a few photographs. I tried to make a show of focusing on the grounds and the structures, but I was trying to get as many photos of the children as I could. There were adults inside. They watched me with some concern, and then they began to gather. Their voices got louder, their looks more menacing. Charles sensed we’d crossed some tipping point. He told me to back out of the compound while he and my other colleague distracted the crowd. I made my way to our vehicle and climbed inside. One other man from the NGO who was traveling with us was sitting in the far backseat of the car waiting.
It was a lot to process, and I was drained from the heat. When you are looking through a camera lens and see children in chains, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is the twenty-first century, and the scene is not some surreal nightmare. Their faces were haunting: mostly sad and tired, and yet intrigued that someone was paying attention to them. Sometimes these schools claim that they are giving children the “experience” of living like poor beggars to reinforce the importance of giving back later in life. It was hard for me to imagine any such positive outcome that day. How could this be? How could parents turn over their children to such a situation?
Then I saw the white streak dash by the front of our vehicle: a young man, probably in his late teens, dressed all in white, with a wild look on his face, yanked open the front door. He jumped into the driver’s seat and reached for the gearshift. I hooked his arm from behind so he could not shift from neutral into gear. Meanwhile, the other member of our party sitting in the far back jumped out, yanked open the driver’s side door, pulled the boy in white out, and pushed him away from the car. Charles and the US World Vision person had reached our SUV by now and got in. The mob surrounded us, and Charles began driving forward slowly—but not braking, even as they yelled and approached, some slapping at and pounding on the car as we finally pulled away and drove off.
According to Charles, based on what he had heard from the crowd and knew about this group, he believed that the boy in white intended to drive the vehicle head-on into a wall. If he crashed our vehicle and injured or killed us—and even himself in the process—he would be treated as a martyr by extremists in this angry group.
Our time in that compound was short, and I got to take only one film roll of 36 photos. The most poignant one to me is that of a sad boy with a shaved head sitting on the ground in shackles, reading a religious text. He had old socks pulled around his ankle bones so that the crude apparatus did not rub them raw. I sent hard copies of the photographs back into Senegal, and my contact took the photo of this boy and some other photographs and brought them to a local government official to report how children were being mistreated in this facility. At first the official denied it, but the photos didn’t lie. We were told it led to doctors being allowed in to examine the children.
I could barely believe I was looking at children in chains, but I had to concentrate. I had one camera, 36 frames, and I had to get the best proof I could in only a few minutes. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
I can no longer count all the times my camera has put me in dangerous situations, either because I was seeing something people did not want me or anyone else to see, or because I was daring various animals or terrain or the elements to get in my way. But sharing what I learn on my travels is so much a part of me now that I almost can’t separate the photography from my philanthropy. I have produced several photographic books about endangered species and habitats and the experiences of the poor around the world. I use photography to explain what I’m doing and why—to share the nobility and dignity of people I see even in horrifying or neglected situations; people who are defiant against tyrants and resolved to survive against the odds. I try to use photographs to get across not only the unique, detailed, and personal aspects of suffering that I see, but also the vast scale: refugee camps holding tens of thousands of people nobody wants to think about or deal with, or slash-and-burn agriculture encroaching on rain forests. The irony is that my now decades-old passion for photography did not begin as a high-adrenaline hobby. It began as a gift from my wife, Devon. She thought that photographing nature seemed to speak to my patient side.
OUT WEST
In my twenties, during some of my first adventures in big-equipment wrangling and farming, I was briefly married to a woman from Omaha named Marcia Duncan. Despite our good intentions, we discovered that we weren’t compatible. I was young and restless and still trying to figure out how I would spend the rest of my life. I asked my father for advice about a business I could try to learn that was run by individuals that he respected. We discussed several companies Berkshire owned outside Omaha, and he said he would help me find an entry-level job—“You will start at the bottom.” That was fine with me. Eventually, I went to California to work at See’s Candies.
One of my first jobs was to hit the road with a longtime See’s employee who was a trusted maintenance engineer. See’s candy stores had a stylized look, with a black-and-white color scheme, including black-and-white-checkered tile floors. Most of the sales clerks were women in white dresses with black bows. Once a year the maintenance engineer would travel from California to Texas and all the Western states to inspect scores of See’s stores, making sure that everything was in good repair and giving them an extra sharp once-over cleaning. At the time, he seemed to me to be eighty years old, but I’m sure he was much younger. Still, it was a good lesson to be around somebody who took pride in doing a good job. I moved into production and packaging, where I ordered the boxes we needed to fill daily orders.
Ordering boxes sounds simple, but it had to be aligned with production. Mistakes with those boxes could have significant consequences for the business if you couldn’t fill orders properly. Also, there could be a problem if you ordered too many: we had periodic fire marshal inspections, and if the halls were cluttered with piles of unused boxes, that could get the plant shut down.
It was no secret to me that some employees at See’s were not keen on having Warren Buffett’s son working there. Once a coworker ordered two or three times the number of boxes we needed for an order just to create that fire hazard. My supervisor called me in and threatened to fire me for being so incompetent. He showed me the purchase order for the boxes: my signature had been forged, which I immediately pointed out. After they looked into it, they discovered that the guy responsible resented how I’d gotten my job.
My dad wanted me to commit at least two years to learning a new business, and I agreed. I liked the business fine, and over time I made some friends at See’s. But then I met Devon.
Another option for an entry-level job for me had been at the Buffalo Evening News in New York. After I met Devon, I remember thinking, “Thank God I didn’t go to Buffalo!” I have never met anyone like Devon before or since. She already had four children and was a terrific mother. We had a lot of fun my last year at See’s, but I also enrolled at the University of California, Irvine, this time trying to focus on discovering what I might need, what I might use, to shape my life into something rewarding and worthwhile.
But I missed Omaha. And despite enjoying my courses at UCI, I wanted to get married, and I needed a job to support this instant big family. It didn’t make sense for me to try to establish myself in Southern California. So we moved back to Omaha. I still had contacts from when I was learning how to operate heavy equipment, and I picked up a contract mowing miles of levee along the river. Within two months of our getting married, Devon was pregnant with HWB.
Once I moved back to Omaha, I started farming much more seriously. And for the first time in my life, I felt like I was calming
down inside. Farming does that for me, especially planting and combining. Although it can be monotonous or overwhelming for people who aren’t used to it, I feel reassured and recalibrated by spending time driving equipment in the fields, doing the basic work of farming.
When you’re sitting in a tractor or driving a combine, you have to pay attention to what you’re doing, but you simplify your visual world. I started to see things I had never paid attention to: Hawks and coyotes. Sunsets and moonrises. The yellows, oranges, and other colors of the cornstalks, depending on the different times of year or the time of day. Soil after a rain, sparkling when the sun comes out, going from black to brown as it dries. Foxes darting into the cornfield. The bright green geometries of John Deere equipment against golden, windblown grain.
I did not even own a camera at the time, but I wanted to show Devon and the kids what I was seeing out there all day. HWB was still young, but we had four girls in the house who all loved animals and nature shots. Devon’s daughter Erin had a basic 35-millimeter camera—not fancy. I asked her if I could borrow it to try to capture some of these moments I was experiencing in the field so I could show the family all these striking scenes.
40 Chances Page 5