40 Chances

by Howard G. Buffett

  As many as forty armed militias may be active today in the DRC. Photo: Howard G. Buffett

  He contacted us, and we were able to help by providing emergency funding within twenty-four hours. Emmanuel bought four new generators to reactivate pumping, and his staff and other local people worked thirty-six hours straight to return power and clean water to Goma. One of my most satisfying activities as a philanthropist is to support and encourage motivated individuals like Emmanuel, who find a way to work between the lines of their job descriptions in times of crisis or opportunity.

  M23 withdrew from the city, and there is a regional peace effort under way as I write. I have spent a great deal of my time in the region in recent years, visiting projects in the field and meeting with heads of state to support Emmanuel’s vision for a “Marshall Plan” for eastern DRC. This area remains volatile, and we stay in close touch with Emmanuel as he balances protecting the park, navigating unpredictable conflict in the region, and making sure that the local people see an opportunity to improve their lives and feed their children by joining him in his big-picture economic vision. With the park he oversees under the control of rebel forces, Emmanuel’s dream of high-end ecotourism is on hold for now, but he keeps pushing forward.

  Our foundation has committed significant financial resources to several elements that we hope will be key to success: We’ve helped Emmanuel double the size of his ranger force and create the equivalent of an “army corps of engineers” to help rebuild critical infrastructure. We are optimistic, based on the success of a small pilot project, that we can help him move ahead on two hydroelectric power plants to harness the potential of local rivers. It’s hard to overestimate what access to electricity could mean to the people of this part of DRC: it can enable light industry around local agriculture, and we are supporting initiatives to create businesses making soap from palm nut oil and extracting enzymes from papaya for pharmaceuticals. Collectively, these projects could bring as many as thirty thousand jobs to eastern Congo—jobs not involving guns or fighting.

  PART 3

  * * *

  Hard-Learned Lessons

  Philanthropists, NGOs, and nations investing in development face a fundamental dilemma: if we’re invested in a situation that is not improving, are we doing something wrong, or would conditions be twice as bad if we hadn’t gotten involved? For example, the economist Dambisa Moyo noted in 2009 that the developed world had sent more than a trillion dollars in aid to Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century, yet per capita income in Africa was lower than it was in the 1970s.1 So: Did the aid make conditions worse, or would an even higher percentage of the continent be living below the poverty line without that aid?

  That is a difficult question. But often—frankly, too often—we reward ourselves for good intentions and answer with the second option. There are many inspiring and committed people working on global hunger, and you’ve just met a few. But even terrific people can’t make plans work that are fundamentally flawed or no longer make the best use of resources. People such as Joe DeVries and Emmanuel get that, and they change course as they go. That’s not the case for some philanthropists and NGOs. And too many special interests in nations battling chronic poverty are exploiting the drawbacks of the status quo. In part 3, we’ll look at some of the unsound approaches, misconceptions, and good intentions gone bad that I’ve seen firsthand in the last decade.

  Story 19

  Can This Village Be Saved?

  “Is that an axe sticking out of her head?”

  I was in the backseat of an SUV traveling down a rural dirt road in Angola, which is in southwestern Africa along the Atlantic Coast. At the time, in 2006, Angola was still rarely mentioned in the media without an accompanying adjective such as war-torn or war-ravaged. The nation had been the scene of conflict for decades.

  The Portuguese had been in Angola since the sixteenth century, and because of its Atlantic ports, the country served as a supplier to the slave trade that sent thousands of Angolans to work on plantations in Brazil. But Portugal pulled out of Angola abruptly in 1975, and after only a few months of independence, civil war broke out between the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (known as MPLA, the acronym for its Portuguese name). Cold War politics dictated that Cuba and Russia back the MPLA, while the United States and South Africa supported UNITA. Not surprisingly, there was more at stake than ideology. Angola has vast oil and mineral reserves, including diamonds. Fighting went on for years, but as the Cold War ran down, foreign factions pulled out. Since 2002, the MPLA has been in power.

  Millions of land mines, many laid by the Angolan army to keep rebels away from villages, crop fields, military camps, dams, and roads, are a horrible reminder of those years of civil disputes.1 Civilians have always suffered the most land mine casualties. The vicious devices so prevalent in Angola are designed to mutilate and disable, not kill, and they’ve created tens of thousands of amputees. Ever since the end of active conflict, deminers in plastic head shields and armored jackets, and carrying metal detectors, have carried out the slow, excruciating work of identifying the mines for disarming or detonation. The late Princess Diana of Great Britain visited Angola in 1997, and she was famously photographed in a demining outfit walking along an Angolan road where mines were marked with red flags. She worked with the Red Cross as an advocate for children who had been maimed.

  I was in Angola to understand the country’s widespread food insecurity. Fields that had been mined were only slowly being reclaimed, and in 2005 and 2006, weather disruptions had ruined crop yields. I was reviewing some proposed agricultural assistance and irrigation projects that World Vision was developing and trying to raise money for.

  I was with a small team on my way to meet farmers in several villages. We were driving down a dry, dusty road lined with sorghum fields when I spotted a woman with one leg. She was wearing a white blouse and a brown skirt, and she was moving along the road’s shoulder at a steady pace, swinging her one leg forward between a pair of metal crutches. As we got closer, however, I saw a wooden handle about two or three feet long protruding from the front of her head. The visual effect was jarring.

  “My God, is that an axe sticking out of her head?” I asked. But as we passed her, I could see the object more clearly: it was a farming hoe. She had made a furrow in her head scarf so that she could rest the handle on it, and the blade cradled the back of her head. The handle was shortened enough so that it was balanced as she swung along on her crutches.

  “Let’s pull over,” I said.

  An Angolan who worked for World Vision got out of the car with me. We did not want to startle the woman, so we waited until she caught up with us. My Angolan host asked if we could speak with her, and she nodded—all the while with the hoe balanced on her head and the rough handle protruding forward. She projected so much strength and grace that the effect was almost as if she were wearing a tribal battle helmet. She said her name was Augusta. She was thirty-six. She had lost her leg in a land mine accident in Cuando Cubango Province in 2001. Her husband had been killed in the civil war, and she had six children to feed. She was a farmer, on her way to her field.

  The legacy of conflict can be permanent. Augusta demonstrates the courage and resiliency that farmers need to feed their families. Photo: Howard G. Buffett

  Augusta demonstrated the farming technique she used, propping her missing-leg side on a crutch while bending and striking the ground with the hoe in her left hand. It seemed like backbreaking work, yet I did not sense the slightest self-pity in the woman’s outlook. Her only way to feed her children was to farm, so farm she did. I asked her if I could take a few photographs of her because I was trying to show the rest of the world the difficulties of life here. She agreed.

  After I took some photographs and we said good-bye, I thought of the tractors, combines, GPS systems, and computer-generated planting and fertilizing I used back home in Illinois. I
thought of the weather fluctuations and equipment breakdowns that cause farmers some inconvenience and might temporarily disrupt our plans. How trivial that now seemed. My dad’s notion of the ovarian lottery means this impressive, determined, hardworking landmine victim in Angola will achieve only a fraction of what she might have in the developed world, simply because of the conditions of her birth.

  Augusta’s story was the kind that inspires philanthropy. And yet a few days later, I would leave Angola convinced that I had to stop funding a lot of what might be called traditional agricultural and food aid projects in Africa.

  ONCE A BREADBASKET

  Back in the SUV, we continued our five-hour journey from the city of Huambo to a series of villages in the remote areas of Huambo Province in Angola’s central highlands region. This area has the most fertile soil and abundant water resources. Ironically, my hosts said that during the colonial era, this one region provided food for the entire country and surplus for export. Angola was once a major grower and exporter of coffee, for example, but the years of conflict decimated that sector. The region we were visiting was home to about 5 million people, or roughly one-third of the total population, and World Vision thought it had the greatest potential to contribute to pulling Angola out of poverty.

  Clearly, the NGOs here were working against daunting odds. The baseline poverty was profound. The city of Huambo, where we’d started our trip in the region, was home to 450,000 people—and yet the municipality had no electricity. Angola had and still has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world (overall child mortality from birth to age five was 66 percent at the time), and it has one of the lowest life expectancies. These days many point to Angola’s economic growth thanks to oil revenues driving several years of double-digit GDP. But that has mainly raised the standard of living for its elites and politicians. When I was there, World Vision staffers estimated that at least two-thirds of the people made their living from agriculture.

  The government was working closely with World Vision and provided about 70 percent of its budget for seed and the production of seed through cultivation. World Vision was trying to link credit programs with agricultural projects for rural farmers. These were all worthwhile goals. Among other challenges, however, Angola was a prime example of a country where the lack of land tenure posed a huge problem to agricultural development.

  Rural farmers in Angola occupy land owned by the state but have no titles or documents formalizing their rights. Local government and tribal leaders have records of who is entitled and who uses the land, but these rights are vulnerable. Poor farmers can be displaced by people with more money or power. All sustainable agriculture, high or low tech, demands a long-term investment in the soil. How much will any given farmer invest in land that can be yanked out from under her or him at any time for any reason?

  As we drove, the World Vision team explained that the current situation was dire. A combination of off-season rains and then drought had decimated crop yields for two years. What’s more, malaria, diarrhea, and cholera were contributing to a high rate of child mortality. These largely pathogen-borne diseases were often lethal in children weakened already from chronic hunger and poor nutrition.

  Before long, more signs of the famine appeared: as we moved deeper into rural areas, I began to see numerous newly dug graves, many of them just three or four feet long—the size of young children. I stopped to photograph a group of grave diggers. Then we traveled the short distance to a village called Iuvo, where about seven hundred people from that village and surrounding ones waited for us. We learned that the wetter valley regions, or nacas, where they planted crops during the dry season, had flooded and been washed out. Then a drought destroyed their usual wet-season crops in the highlands. The people were barely surviving on small amounts of sorghum and unripe bananas, and they were suffering.

  I was sure many of the children I saw were not likely to survive. Many young babies and toddlers in their mothers’ laps seemed listless, vacant eyed. Everyone was thin, with prominent and knobby joints—particularly the children. Cholera and malaria were ravaging many of these immune-suppressed children, and the World Vision team said that around one in ten people here were positive for HIV/AIDS. A woman named Magdalena told me she had five children, and three had already died from the famine. Her son Julio was thirty months old, and I could see that he was ill and unlikely to survive without medical intervention. It seemed like a village of death.

  A woman approached me clutching a baby. She told us that she had recently buried her three-year-old daughter. She motioned to her surviving baby, and her voice became stronger. “My body is broken,” she said. Her milk had dried up, and the baby was starving. She pleaded with me to take her baby and she thrust the tiny child toward me, trying to force it into my arms. “It is the only chance for life,” she said, eyes pleading.

  This child would die. I could not take the baby. I felt an overwhelming urgency: these people could not wait for the next harvest. They were out of time. There must be something we could do now. I started thinking out loud with the World Vision team, including Jonathan White, its director of operations in Angola. If we moved and made a significant investment here, could we intervene and save most of the people in this village?

  The chief arrived and addressed us. The tribal chiefs in rural Africa play a complex and powerful role. They are the arbiters, the decision makers, the enforcers. They can banish an individual from the village for an array of transgressions, from stealing to witchcraft. This particular chief explained that there were a total of eighteen villages under his authority, with a total population of around 1,600. What we did for any one village we would have to do for all to secure his support. With that, I realized the need I was starting to calculate had more than doubled.

  I asked Jon to take this challenge seriously: What would saving these villages entail? What would we need?

  TRYING TO MAKE THE MATH ADD UP

  Jon explained that the first step was for a qualified medical professional to carry out an assessment of who in the villages needed general feeding support versus how many needed therapeutic feeding support. Nutritionists would need to be on hand to ensure the correct use of the fortified preparations for those suffering from severe malnutrition. Ready-to-use therapeutic foods were not yet readily available, and feeding even a bland “normal” diet to people in an advanced state of malnutrition can overwhelm their damaged metabolisms and trigger deadly consequences such as cardiac arrhythmias. Therapeutic feeding would demand intravenous tubes and monitoring vital signs during treatments. That meant more staff, equipment, and money.

  Next, we would need to look at the larger issue of the failed crop, and we’d have to provide new seeds. They didn’t have any to plant and no way to get any more. In a twist I hadn’t considered, Jon explained that these two activities would need to be coordinated and timed carefully. If the seeds arrived before the food, the people were so stressed and starving that they would eat the seeds, not plant them. Also, people would need to eat and get their strength back before they could plant a full crop. Yet we would have to plant in the right seasonal window.

  I asked the World Vision staffers if they could provide information on the financial requirements. They spent the rest of our five-hour trip back to Huambo on their cell phones trying to get me answers. By dinner that night, we were close to an estimate.

  The good news was that they located a doctor working on a malaria project who could perform the assessment quickly. It would take $10,000 to $12,000 to cover the cost. I asked them to make the arrangements. However, the logistics of transporting in the equipment, food, seed, and staff to carry out a general and therapeutic feeding operation would be $580,000. The nutritional packs for the therapeutic feeding itself, which might continue for months, could cost as much as $1 million. Enough general food to get through to the next harvest for those in relatively better shape would require another $1.8 million. The seeds to restart the village’s agricultural sy
stem would cost approximately $1.5 million.

  On a mostly back-of-the-envelope basis, we figured that it would cost almost $5 million to “save” these 1,600 people. But a list of logistical challenges grew longer and longer. WFP did not have emergency funds or food on hand to send. And WFP could not commit to exactly when it could obtain and deliver the food even if we provided the funds. Jon felt he could get the government to supply the seeds, but perhaps the greatest challenge was the complexity of arranging the logistics. Without the vehicles, fuel, and trained staff to organize these relief efforts, nothing would take place. And the only person in the country who, realistically, could coordinate an entire emergency mission for World Vision was about to go on a two-week leave.

  There is always a risk in having a bias for action. What loomed larger and larger for me was the realization that I had been touched emotionally by the situation of the people in this village, but they represented one cup in an ocean of hunger. World Vision had picked Iuvo to show me out of hundreds of other communities suffering to the same degree. Perhaps we could spend $5 million, help this village, and do some temporary good. But whether we spent $5 million or $50 million or $500 million, approaching this kind of hunger as an emergency intervention, village by village, was not going to change the underlying issues preventing meaningful development here. The nation had to make investing in the health and welfare of its people a priority. No NGO could change the course of Angola’s agricultural future, or this region’s, or even this village’s food security by going project to project. The government needed to invest in an agricultural system. The farmers needed roads, agricultural extension for training, the right to own their own land, access to credit, and help entering the market in order to generate revenues beyond their own subsistence needs and lift themselves out of this abject poverty and despair. We could deplete our entire endowment by sending in doctors, food, and seeds for starving people just in Angola and prop them up for a few years, but without those other foundational elements, the situation could slip right back into what I saw before me that day.