40 Chances

by Howard G. Buffett

  Around the same time that Madonna drew attention to Malawi, I was watching a television news show that said many of Malawi’s people were starving. The reporter claimed they were so hungry that they were eating termites. There was even a video showing people with sticks plucking the bugs, half a thumb length long, out of dirt mounds.

  I am not afraid to do unusual things. But when it comes to food, I am a meat-and-potatoes guy. If the local food isn’t something I recognize, I don’t eat it. The thought of eating bugs pulled out of the ground was horrifying to me—talk about desperation!—and I figured I needed to do something. I booked a trip to investigate.

  We made arrangements to meet up with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), which was working in the country. A friendly, capable country director named Dom and a driver named Douglas met me at the airport in Lilongwe, Malawi’s main city and capital. Malawi is an especially friendly place. Its tourism bureau promotes the country as “the warm heart of Africa,” and many people I know who have traveled there remark on that warmth and hospitality, even in the face of the country’s extreme poverty.

  The agricultural areas we were scheduled to visit were near the larger city of Blantyre, four hours south. Blantyre is named for the hometown of Dr. David Livingstone, the Scottish adventurer and missionary who explored all over Africa in the midnineteenth century, and was famously found in Malawi by explorer-journalist Sir Henry Stanley.

  The poverty was obvious. One striking image was lots and lots of people walking at a steady pace along the road, often barefoot, or women carrying water buckets or sacks of grain or bundles of charcoal on their heads. This sight is common in rural Africa, but no matter how many times I visit, it always takes me some time to readjust to seeing small children who appear to be alone, or a child who looks to be four or five with a baby strapped to his or her back, walking along a two-lane road where cars zoom by at fifty or sixty miles per hour. Thanks in part to the high population density, I recall peering into what looked like an empty forest and realizing there were people resting and walking among the trees.

  Douglas had the steady nerves needed to drive these roads. The main route to Blantyre was paved and not bad, but the road was chaotic. Bicyclists and oxcarts and children and goats would veer onto the road or head straight toward you like waves of attackers in a video game, and drivers always seemed to react by dodging rather than slowing down.

  It is common in rural Africa to see children walking together carrying heavy loads on their heads. Photo: Howard G. Buffett

  We headed south through rolling hills and the landscape became more savanna-like, with more low brush and grasses, eucalyptus and acacia trees, and the occasional baobab trees. Baobabs are odd looking, with huge trunks and small leaves and branches. They have nicknames that reflect that, such as the “upside-down tree,” and, because of their unusual fruit, the “dead rat tree.” The trunks have a bulgy, almost skin-like texture, making them resemble giant elephant legs.

  There are only a few places to stop on the road. Various vendors gather around the gas stations, where it’s also common to find grain traders paying cash for individual bags of maize or the root vegetable cassava, which poor farmers bring in during harvest. Where there is cash, you’ll also see men drinking beer, prostitutes, bicycle rentals, and sometimes tires for sale. And then there are guys leaning into the road offering those driving by what look like shish kebabs. I’ll get back to that.

  FRESH OR FRIED?

  As we happened to be passing one of these truck stop market areas, I asked Douglas about the termites and mentioned that I had been shocked to see the CNN report. He smiled and pulled over. He pointed to a roadside stand with pans heating on a low grill. “Try some yourself,” he said, going on to explain that termites were a seasonal food considered a great delicacy all over Malawi. The poorest (and probably hungriest) people could not afford to eat them fried from vendors, but they happily grabbed them right out of the ground when they emerged from the termite mounds.

  Alongside the roads in Malawi are an abundance of small shops and individuals grilling food. It’s a good idea to ask exactly what kind of meat is on a shish kebab. Photo: Howard G. Buffett

  I had come a long way to investigate a local delicacy that had nothing to do with poverty. I could not bring myself to try them but am told they taste like nutty carrots.

  As we went back to the car, I took a closer look at the men selling the skewers and noticed what looked like black strings hanging off the sides. Douglas grinned again. “Boiled mice,” he said. It turned out that boiled mice are a regional delicacy savored by the Chewa tribe in the southern and central areas of Malawi. They are consumed whole: fur, tails, and all.

  I am not trying to ruin your appetite. Time and again I’ve learned that you have to be on the ground to understand the fundamental dynamics of agriculture and food. What seems like a great solution to you may fail for reasons you could never have anticipated. As I learned more about Malawi, for example, I came to appreciate the role that the “mouse hunters” play in the rural communities. They are part of a unique ecosystem. As you travel the countryside, you will see puffs of smoke rising from the savanna or near villages. Many are small fires set by mouse hunters. Mice burrow holes in the ground underneath brush and crop residues, often near cornfields. The mouse hunters clear brush and plant residues—or what the locals call “trash”—with the fire, which prompts some mice to run into their grasp. And then they dig down into the holes to collect the mice hiding there, all the while on guard for the snakes that have outsourced their home building to the mice and also set up camp in mice tunnels.

  Mouse hunters are part of the fabric of agriculture in areas of Malawi. Members of my team visited a seed development project sponsored by the Clinton Foundation in 2012, and they discussed this element with farm manager Brave Simpuki. He runs the Mpherero Anchor Farm Project, and he explained that in the region are so-called customary lands, or property owned by the tribes, not by individuals. According to local tribal practices, mouse hunters have the right to go into planted fields that they do not own and burn the crop residue on the ground. The tribe not only considers mouse hunting a legitimate use of the land, but the entire community has an interest in keeping the mouse population under control so that the vermin do not overrun the village and eat all the stored food saved for home consumption.

  Understanding this is important, because Brave is trying to promote soil improvement practices in these rural communities. One component of that is leaving crop residues on the ground after harvest to improve the soil’s organic matter and retain moisture. Brave explained that part of his job involves talking to mouse hunters and villagers about accommodations. His team was trying to convince chiefs to ask mouse hunters to replace the crop residues they might burn in a given field. This can be done by bringing in residues from another area when the hunters finish harvesting mice.

  The unique situation involving the mouse hunters illustrates a common thread in development projects. A “recipe” developed in one country or context may not work in another. You may give clear information to farmers about the importance of leaving crop residues, and you may have a stack of papers and material to back it up, but if you are in southern or central Malawi and don’t factor in the mouse hunters, you’re going to have trouble. You will have created conflict not easily resolved. That will prompt the tribal chiefs to get involved, and you don’t know how they will view the situation. This is not something that will be apparent from geography books or economic models developed in an American think tank.

  It’s not even a situation that some people from northern Malawi can fathom. “If you tried to give a boiled mouse to a member of my tribe to eat,” says a Malawian friend of ours who works with a prominent NGO in Lilongwe, “we would vomit.”

  I confess I felt a little better when I heard that.

  Every year I think about cutting back on some of my travel, but I have to see situations for myself before I understa
nd the value of these initiatives. And sometimes it takes more than one trip to absorb it all. I’ve gone back to Malawi several times. The need is great. The people are poor but have great dignity and warmth. The availability of good land is limited, and the extraordinary population density increases all the time. I no longer pay much attention to the termites, but I never underestimate the tenacity of the mouse hunters.

  Story 8

  Where Hunger Hides

  It was an October evening, brisk but not yet cold by Midwestern standards. Shortly before midnight, we pulled up in front of a small wooden house on an otherwise quiet Decatur street. I called in the 10-60 code that we had arrived in the area. The Macon County sheriff and I both were in uniform. His weapon was holstered, as was mine. I had been trained that it’s best not to treat any dispatch as a “routine” call, but we were not expecting trouble. We had a warrant, and we were meeting a deputy sheriff there to arrest a woman in her mid-forties. She was accused of stealing clothing and then returning the same items for cash.

  We rang the bell, and the suspect opened the door. She looked exhausted and began crying as the deputy explained that she was to be arrested and would have to be handcuffed. The scene inside was not violent or dangerous, but it was grim. A girl who looked about fourteen was sitting on a stained couch; a boy around twelve was lying in bed in a nearby room, his leg in a cast. The deputy took a statement from the young girl while we waited for her aunt to come get her and her brother. I spoke to the boy for a few minutes. He seemed despondent and said his father didn’t care about him. He was upset that he would have to leave his home.

  As we prepared to transport the mother, she told the deputy she had heroin in the house that she was holding for someone else. She wanted to “cut a deal.” I heard the young girl tell the deputy, “I am never going to do this to my kids.” Clearly, this mother’s decisions were creating terrible consequences for her children. I happened to look over at the kitchen table. On it sat a box of food from a local food pantry. I thought, “What would these kids have been doing for food without that resource?”

  About twenty hours a month, I work shifts as an auxiliary deputy sheriff in Macon County, where I live. This position is voluntary and unpaid, but it is not honorary or ceremonial. I completed forty hours of state qualifications and passed my weapons proficiency test. I carry a firearm while on duty, and I am a sworn law enforcement officer with full powers when I’m with a full-time officer. There are a dozen such positions in the county. As in many places in the United States, sheriffs typically ride alone in Macon County, and the program is designed to provide backup for its officers in an age of strained budgets and resources. It’s also giving me new perspectives on hunger and food insecurity in my own hometown.

  THE SMELL OF MONEY

  Macon County is in the center of the state of Illinois, the heart of the American Midwest. Unlike many areas of the developing world where our foundation supports food-security projects, the surrounding farmland has excellent soil. There are no civil wars raging in Decatur. We have good roads and extensive rail coverage, storage capacity, and plenty of huge grain elevators to take in corn and soybeans year-round. Farmers control what and when they sell. We don’t have corrupt agricultural ministers or tribal uprisings that displace landowners.

  I always look forward to coming home to Decatur. It’s a low-key, unpretentious city with a small-town feel. My foundation is headquartered in a three-story brick building downtown. For a long time, we didn’t even have our name on the door. One time an electrician came to fix some wiring, and the only identifying decorations we had in the lobby where he was working were framed food aid sacks, including one made to carry rice for Liberia imprinted with the words “World Food Programme.” The next week, we received a bill from the electrician made out to the World Food Programme. We broke down and put up a small sign.

  I live in a comfortable house in a quiet neighborhood. I like walking into my own kitchen and checking the door of our refrigerator when I grab a Coke. It’s sort of Devon’s and my own low-tech Facebook page. There’s barely an inch of surface showing. Devon keeps it covered and updated with snapshots, school photos, team pictures, vacation images of our children and now nine grandchildren, cousins, and close family friends. Unlike those in many of the photographs I bring back from my trips, the faces in these pictures are almost always happy and healthy.

  Decatur recharges my batteries in part because it’s near where I farm; most of my fields are about twenty-five miles south. As planting or harvest gets closer I always feel a familiar nervous anticipation. There is so much to do on a farm, so much you’d like to do, so much you’ll never get to finish. There is always a grain bin to improve or some low-yield spot in a field you’re trying to figure out how to fix with drainage or fertilizer. There is the weather report to check almost hourly during key planting or harvesting periods. Compared to working on global food insecurity, focusing on farming here feels doable and immediate.

  Decatur is also the headquarters of Archer Daniels Midland and the world’s largest corn processing plant. The ADM plant is Decatur’s most dominant feature. Its big, white, blocky buildings loom large on the eastern side of town, with giant chimneys spewing steam. ADM’s total of nine corn processing plants here and globally can process 2.6 million bushels of corn per day. ADM also owns 26,000 railcars to ship grains, 1,500 trucks, 1,700 barges, and even 8 oceangoing vessels.1 The plant perfumes the air with a tangy smell that some people describe as “corn cooking.” Others describe it less politely. ADM executives I worked with used to call it “the smell of money.” And yet each day, the smell of corn processing wafts over approximately 18,500 people in Macon County who cannot count on where their next meal is coming from.2

  I wasn’t oblivious to the fact that Decatur’s fortunes have been sliding since we moved here in 1992. It had a population of about 85,000 then, and that’s shrunk to about 76,000.3 Like a lot of small and medium-sized cities in the Midwest, it prospered as a manufacturing town but suffered when companies such as Firestone closed down old plants and moved jobs to other regions of the country or the world. Decatur has had a harder time than some of our neighboring cities. It never developed a significant white-collar component to its job base. Nearby Springfield, for example, is the Illinois state capital. Bloomington-Normal has Illinois State University and State Farm insurance, in addition to a Mitsubishi Motors assembly plant. Champaign has the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, plus a number of high-tech companies.

  ADM, where I worked previously, is the dominant employer in Decatur. Another food processor, Tate & Lyle, and Caterpillar have significant operations in town as well. Those companies have done well, but others have moved on. As people lose jobs and leave town, it pushes down property values, which yield fewer taxes to support local services and at the same time draw in people from other regions trying to make ends meet. My friends in community organizations tell me that the only population segment now growing is those over sixty-five. Once this kind of dynamic takes over a region without a diversified economy, it’s hard to reverse.

  Yet for a long time, as I was focused on global issues, I drove past some of the small rural communities near my farmland where it was obvious that whoever was living there had slim resources. We did invest in community projects, but I realize now that I used to think of Decatur as my refuge from food-insecurity issues. That was an illusion.

  In 2008 I happened to be in our foundation office downtown the day after Christmas, and so was one of our staff members, Molly Wilson. Molly and her husband, Mike, have lived in Decatur for quite some time and found it to be a great place to raise a family. For years Molly had volunteered at a local soup kitchen called the Good Samaritan Inn. She was seeing the growing numbers of people coming into the soup kitchen, especially children. I had been hearing from local folks that Good Sam was trying to do good work out of a run-down facility. It had just announced a capital drive to finance a new building to expand its servic
es, and it seemed like a good day for us to check it out.

  There were people of all ages lined up outside in the cold. Molly and I went in, and even though the facility was dark and cramped, there was a great spirit in the room among the people serving lunch.

  Molly introduced me to a woman named Kathleen Taylor, who was directing the soup kitchen, and she was impressive. She had the peripheral vision and ears of a great mother, able to talk to you and give you her full attention, all the while aware of somebody carrying too heavy a load or putting something in the wrong place twenty feet away. She would look up and bark a quick correction without breaking conversational stride.

  I was amazed at the number of individuals seeking a meal that day, and I asked standard questions: How many people do you serve? Where do you get your support? And so on. Clearly, it was a high-value service being run on a small budget and on the backs and sweat of the volunteers. Kathleen explained some of the dynamics that affected how many clients would be there on any given day. For example, attendance fell off on days when buses didn’t run, but it shot up once a month when a bus from the state prison dropped off newly released inmates.

  Hunger has been on the rise in Decatur, as in the rest of the US. It’s become more common to see individuals on the street asking for help. Photo: Howard G. Buffett